“some tenets of simplicity have emerged: 1. Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music. 2. Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work. 3. Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples. 4. Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.”

“A style guide helps you quickly and cost-effectively publish content that is of a consistent quality. It is particularly important when there are lots of editors and authors involved in the publishing process. A good style guide takes a lot of time and effort to create. Unless its implementation is policed, it will not achieve its objectives.”

“Conversions and information about file formats.”

Lou Rosenfeld: “I was poking around, Googling ‘information discovery,’ and stumbled on a simple but really useful diagram created by someone named Keith Stanger. Who happens to be a librarian (same background as me). Who works at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti (same county as me). Who lists Bloug on his blogroll. Very cool. Gotta love the serendipity of the Internet.”

“Interface stands on the shoulders of infrastructure. User experience relies on the foundation systems of information architecture. And, the biggest problem on today’s web sites and intranets is findability… findability.org is a collection of links related to findability and the design of findable objects.” By Peter Morville

“Iíve seen umpteen diagrams showing CSS beginners how padding, border and margin work together, but not the order in which elements such as background colour and image are stacked. To try and fill this hole, Iíve drawn a diagram. Iím not sure if this is of any use at all, but here it is anyway ó the 3D CSS Box Model.”

“Until now, there was no way to create simple underlined text in Illustrator, other than the method I quoted above. Again, thatís until now. Full credit for discovering a handy trick for creating underlined text in Illustrator (or at least for discovering it, reading about my frustration, then letting me know about it) goes to Phil Oye. He documented his discovery just a little over a month ago. Iíll expand on his explanation here.”

Updates will be infrequent for a few more days…

“Tim [Wu] runs down the history of cable versus broadcasters, and other copyfights down through the ages. He does so clearly and engagingly, in ways that non-lawyers and non-historians can readily grasp… If you want to understand the P2P fight, read this ó it is the most concise, thorough and engaging text on the subject to date.”

“A designerís ëstyleí is made up of a number of different factors, though colour plays a large role. Everyone has their own method of coming up with a good colour scheme, which will inevitably affect the results.”

“After eight years of success, the editors of Digital Web Magazine discuss the past, present, and future of the web magazine… today [13 May 2004] marks the eight[h] anniversary of our digital-web.com domain. To celebrate we thought we would dress up in a nice new look for the years ahead. That’s right, the long awaited and long over-due redesign has finally launched.”

“The purpose of this article is to introduce our readers to the principles and techniques of the art director ó which relate closely to web design ó and show how these can influence the overall effect of a website.”

“If you’ve ever done design work for any type of software or web-centric company, you have undoubtedly come across the need to capture screenshots for print purposes. This is usually for demonstrative reasons, and it’s a graphic technique employed where just showing the reader a screenshot (usually with a few callouts) can do more than several pages of explanatory text. The trickier part for designers often comes with saving the images. Since the screen captures are by nature low resolution (72 dpi, screen resolution), converting them for print takes a bit of software trickery.”

“For those of us involved in the project, weíve been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, Iím proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Bloggerís first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and itís a biggie.” (More)

“I expected the depth of field in digital cameras to be significantly greater than that in 35 mm models. Everybody and his mother knows that. What I didn’t expect, is how large the difference is. More, the relationship turns out to be quite simple. It can be summarized as the N-times-F Rule: The depth of field of a digital camera with a lens of the 1:N focal length equivalence ratio at a given F-setting is the same as that of a 35 mm camera with a lens closed down to the aperture number of F multiplied by N.”