“A framework for out-of-banner advertising: With a strong commitment to the online advertising industry, Eyeblaster is working … to bring advertisers the highest return for their investment, and the online ad industry with accelerated revenues.” What this means is that animation and sound will soon be crawling all over web pages everywhere. It will be awful.

“Stop what you are doing. I mean it, stop everything. Take a look at your desk right there in front of you. Do you see it? It is covered with buttons and letters. It might have a cord that snakes out to the computer, and it may have another cord that attaches to the mouse. You see it now. It is your computer’s keyboard. It is the computer’s most frequently used input device, and it holds the keys to making your Flash projects far more usable than anything HTML can offer.”

“Cognitive maps are mental models of the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in spatial environments. Understanding how people form cognitive maps of virtual environments is vital to effective virtual world design. Unfortunately, such an understanding is hampered by the difficulty of cognitive map measurement. The present study tests the validity of using sketch maps to examine aspects of virtual world cognitive maps.”

“Cognitive maps are mental models of the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in spatial environments. Understanding how people form cognitive maps of virtual environments is vital to effective virtual world design. Unfortunately, such an understanding is hampered by the difficulty of cognitive map measurement. The present study tests the validity of using sketch maps to examine aspects of virtual world cognitive maps.”

“One of those rules of thumb we love to repeat to ourselves, especially in the United States, is that sans serif typefaces are inherently less readable in extended text than typefaces that have serifs. Sans serifs, the logic goes, are mechanical and lifeless; they’ve sacrificed the subtle warmth of an old-style serif typeface to the cold, cruel logic of the machine age. Yet this assumption has been challenged over recent decades by a significant number of type designers, most of them in Europe, who seem intent on creating a sort of warm modernism.”

“Stop what you are doing. I mean it, stop everything. Take a look at your desk right there in front of you. Do you see it? It is covered with buttons and letters. It might have a cord that snakes out to the computer, and it may have another cord that attaches to the mouse. You see it now. It is your computer’s keyboard. It is the computer’s most frequently used input device, and it holds the keys to making your Flash projects far more usable than anything HTML can offer.”

“To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.”