“If unsure as to which of these causes is slowing down your machine, ask a technician to help you isolate it before attempting to use any software to fix the issue. Many of the softwares recommended below have multipurpose functions, which may do other things you don’t want to do to your system. Only use the software to solve the known issue you are having.”

“Below is a sample image map that’s built entirely using CSS and XHTML. While I’ve added support for Javascript (item titles are simply displayed beneath the image), I’ve disabled it in this example — I’ve run into a bit of a problem when JS is enabled and CSS is disabled…”

“Sometimes rules should be thrown out the window. Often the most valuable lesson in art and design schools is ignored. For a visual communicator to grow and improve, you must be prepared to throw everything you just learned out the window.”

“Catalyst’s proprietary test of the usability of blogs, conducted in late June and early July of 2005, can be downloaded immediately here. Our analysis sheds light on a variety of heretofore neglected, user-experience related design challenges associated with blogs’ potential to become a mainstream medium for Internet users.”

“You know that feeling at the grocery store express lane when you find out that the person in front of you actually has 74 items, a book of coupons, a checkbook and arthritis? That’s the feeling I get after clicking on an innocent looking link that goes to a PDF unexpectedly.”

“I don’t think I’m really all that intelligent, but I have a talent for amplifying my intelligence.” — R. D. G., 1975

“Photographers set their exposure using a combination of shutter speeds and f/stops to get the correct amount of light on the film. The shutter speed regulates how long the film is exposed to light coming through the lens. The f/stop regulates how much light is allowed through the lens by varying the area of the hole the light comes through.”

“Creativity and innovation thinking are topics that I have been searching recently. Below are those couple of sites’ resource links + some related recommended books that related to creativity and innovation. Techniques (163 of them!) by Mycoted should help you with creative thinking - those are the toolbox for you when you get stuck on developing your ideas.”

“Who designed this poster? Well, I did, of course. Basically. More or less. Design is essentially a collaborative enterprise. That makes assigning credit for the products of our work a complicated issue. Take the poster above. When it’s published, it’s often credited just to me. But its genesis is a little more complicated.”

“Over many years, the leaders of SAS Institute have distilled a set of principles for getting peak performance from creative people. Among them: Value the work over the tools, reward excellence with challenges, and minimize hassles.”

“People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. They ‘draw’ the letters. A finger-writer puts the full weight of his/her hand on the paper, his fingers form the letters, and he picks his hand up repeatedly to move it across the paper as he writes.”

“Take the Speakeasy Speed Test and test your connection speed! By measuring the download and upload rate from the following locations you are able to accurately judge your current line throughput or internet connection speed.”

“Mixing vector and photo is one of the hottest trends in the illustration industry today. We’ve seen this effect used in national ad campaigns from Anheuser-Busch to Hawaiian Tropic. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to create this effect in Illustrator.” (Thanks a.wholelottanothing.org!)

“I just realized that in my recent chaos I’d missed this old blogs birthday! It was 3 years ago this month that I launched this blog. At the time I’m not sure if I even knew it was a blog, I just wanted an easier way to publish my infrequent writings. I felt that an easier process would help me want to write more — little did I know how much more!”

“When designer Jason Santa Maria put his portfolio online he wasn’t expecting to get a Cease and Desist letter from a former employer citing clauses from his contract and demanding that he remove any references to them, including all images, from his site. Jason had fallen foul of his old Work for Hire contract which transferred ownership of all rights in his designs to the company he worked for. It meant that the only legal way he could use his designs in his portfolio was to obtain express permission from the rights owner, his former employer, or challenge the restriction in court.”