“Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons is an article that I meant to link to ages ago, and is presented here for the sake of completeness. ‘Crunch mode’ — working extra hours each day for extended periods in order to meet a (usually arbitrary and unrealistic) deadline — is a term that’s familiar to programmers, especially any who’ve worked at a small firm or start-up over the past 10 years.”

“It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.”

“You get the call, someone wants to hire a photographer. What do you do? Well, the one thing you can count on is that your client has no idea what they really want beyond the desire to have a photographer take great images. What is also probably pretty clear two or three calls later is that you have no idea how to sell your work either.”

“While there is much good in design thinking, I think we have to not get carried away about designers’ power. In my experience, I’ve seen many negative qualities of design thinking, qualities that have proven a detriment on projects and to the profession as a whole. Dirk Knemeyer exposes the dark essence of design thinking when stating, in the comments section of an article he wrote, ‘we need to begin controlling the environments that our work is being experienced in.’”

“‘Verbatim memory is often a property of being a novice,’ said Sloutsky, who is also associate dean of research at the university’s College of Human Ecology . ‘As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences.’”

“James Melzer has developed an impressive roadmap (268Kb PDF) for Enterprise Content Management in Context. After your initial review you may be overwhelmed, as I was, but don’t worry: take a deeper look and you’ll find it quite useful.”

“When you have been working with CSS for so long it becomes difficult to tell people the best methods for learning it because your methods aren’t always what works best for everyone. I definitely encountered my bumps and bruises and still seem to be going through some growing pains in my learning process (although I know a hell of a whole lot). The thing with me and CSS is that no matter how much I seem to know, I always feel like there is a better way to code it, which is probably true.”

“The role of metaphor in interaction design has oft been maligned and usually misunderstood. Metaphor has been called ‘not only unhelpful, but harmful’ (Cooper, 1995) in design, and is typically thought of as being limiting, scaling poorly, and leading to faulty thinking about how products work.”

“The Internet is a nice place for font wonks to hang out. They can laugh at other people’s typographic blunders, swap alphabets, snipe at famous designers and ban fonts they hate. Why should you care? Because everything you read, every sign, book and logo, is in a font. Fonts are like the air: you don’t notice them when they are fine, only when they are mucked up or obscure.”

“Have you ever wanted to make a resizable box with rounded (or any shape) corners, custom borders, and a transparent shadow? Did you also want to do that without cluttering your markup with a bunch of non-semantic div elements? Now you can.”

“Imagine what it would be like to work with 29 other people on the same CSS file. Now you get the chance to help me with a little teamwork experiment.”

“Invoices are a critical component of every business. They serve as a bill of services, closure for projects, a legal paper trail, and an opportunity to strengthen the rapport between you and your customer. Invoices that obfuscate information, incorrectly state terms or arrive incomplete can be a massive headache for all parties.”

“This 50-pages document was created for the Multimedia Bootcamp 2005 in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It contains a brief introduction to infographics, its history and rules, and a discussion of several real cases of elmundo.es online special and breaking-news presentations. The 1.1 version will be released by the end of 2005.”

“The Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 has been a favorite among artists, designers and writers for many years… What is so special about this pencil that its devotees will accept no substitute and make them willing to spend $250.00 for a box of them?”

“There’s not much that really gets me excited about technology. To me, technology is a tool that allows me to express a concept or organize information. But I recently saw something that has me fired up and imagining the possibilities. Rich media PDF files created with Adobe InDesign. This may be old news to some of you. But this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”