“For years we have seen statistics telling us the size of people’s screens. We know that 1024×768 is the dominant screen size, and that large resolution screens are coming strong. But, this is useless information. We do not want to know the size of a person’s screen. We want to know the size of the browser’s content area. A person might not use the browser maximized, and other elements — taskbar, toolbars and extensions — takes up valuable screen space.”

“Experience Dynamics has made this diagram available as a poster-size print, perfect for hanging in your office, cube or team-area. This was a fun diagram to work on. Frank Spillers, of Experience Dynamics saw my earlier Flickr diagrams and wanted to commission something similar with some general usability and user experience concepts. The idea was to emphasize the readability and approachability of the subject matter (keep it fun!) and not overload the map with too many concepts.”

“AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google’s semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names.”

From Erik Spiekermann: “What is the ONE thing you think every student of typography should know?” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“Revealing more about himself than he ever has, Garry Trudeau gives us tantalizing clues about what’s behind his venerable comic strip’s recent burst of genius, and pain.”

“Casino mogul Steve Wynn ripped a hole through his $139 million Picasso painting while gesticulating at a cocktail party, reports the New York Post. Nora Ephron gave her own first-person account of the damage: It was ‘a black hole the size of a silver dollar … with two three-inch long rips coming off it in either direction.’ Wynn had just agreed to sell the painting; now, the deal is off. Is there any way to fix the ripped Picasso?”

“You can’t bottle up inspiration. You can’t put it in a ziplock, toss it in the freezer, and fish it out later. It’s instantly perishable if you don’t eat it while it’s fresh. On Friday I was inspired by a few things. I swore off the weekend and dove into it. And I got about 2 weeks of work done in 24 hours. Inspiration is a time machine.”

“The rise of Flash video from relative obscurity to a web standard is a fascinating tale. There is no one date we can point to and say, ‘This is when it happened.’ Some would point to Flash MX and the inclusion of the Sorenson Spark codec. Others will claim it was Flash Professional MX 2004 that really got things started, and a valid case can be made for the current iteration of Flash (Flash Professional 8) and the improved FLV Playback component which seems to be so ubiquitous in today’s video experience. For me, Flash Video became ‘real’ in 2000.”

“The purpose of this project is to document experiences — both good and bad — presented by the millions of EULAs (End User Licensing Agreements) as they are both designed and encountered, knowingly or otherwise. This project will only last 8 weeks or so as an academic endeavor, however, this site is designed with the hopes of fostering discussion, suggestion, exposition and implementation of EULAs (electronic and otherwise) in an effort to help define, describe and mediate the nature of agreements in the digital age.”

“Only geeks use RSS feeds. Is this true? Unfortunately yes. Why? well because like most things in web technology and computers only geeks can understand that nothing is one hun”

“Comic Art is the only beautifully produced, full-color art magazine focusing on the comic medium. The material covered is wide-ranging: newspaper strip, magazine panel, and comic book art, both historical and contemporary, and we consistently feature the most well-respected writers from both within and outside the field. Comic Art emphasizes outstanding print quality and lush production values: illustrations are shot directly–and in color–from both original art and obscure, rarely reproduced printed material.”

“Juan Enriquez had a nice idea for rebalancing the priorities in the voting booth: proxy votes for parents of children under 18. That is, if my wife and I have two kids, the family gets four votes, not two. Juan’s rationale for this plan is that the voting public is currently made up of a lot of baby boomers, who are going to begin to vote for things that benefit their age group…”

“Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one. And I’m not talking about the outside of the building. Many companies have buildings that are sleek, modern, architectural glass-steel-and-cement sculptures on the outside — and cubicle wastelands on the inside. These companies need to remember that most employees tend to work inside the building. With that in mind, here’s some eye candy from 10 different innovative, well-designed workplaces.”

“Waiting for a flight Thursday evening, I opened up my Powerbook to see if the Gods of Wireless Networking had yet talked some sense into the folks who run Washington’s National Airport. Alas, there weren’t any legit wifi signals available — I specify ‘legit’, though, because there were quite a few ad-hoc networks set up that looked to be trying to phish and scam their way into information from unsuspecting or naive flyers.”

“Note that the conversions in this color codes chart are best described as ‘nominal’. They will produce an invertible conversion between the RGB code and a subset of CMYK; that is, one can take an RGB color code and convert to certain CMYK colors, and from these CMYK colors obtain the matching, original RGB codes. However, conversion of CMYK colors to RGB cannot be reversed; this means, given a CMYK color code which is converted to RGB, performing the former conversion may not give the original CMYK color.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)