“Chris Ware is the author of the award-winning book, Jimmy Corrigan — The Smartest Kid on Earth. He talks about the difficulty of drawing cartoons, and why Tintin never caught on in America.”

“There are loads of different types of clients out there and chances are at some point you’ll get to meet all of them. So let’s take a look through some typical clients and see if you recognise a few of your own in there!”

:A famous designer’s touch to an everyday object often results in unique but expensive products. Here we have put together 50 affordable products ($5-$100) designed by famous names and/or reached a cult status. A design feels always better if you have it at home. This list composed by Ali Vatansever for Designophy will be a design buying guide for you.”

“Have you ever watched your status bar while you wait for a page to load and wondered why several files seem to be downloaded before you see anything at all on your screen? Eventually the page content displays, and then the images are slotted in. The files that keep you waiting are generally the CSS and Javascript files linked to from the ‘head’ section of the HTML document. Because these files determine how the page will be displayed, rendering is delayed until they are completely downloaded.”

“Thanks to CSS selectors it’s possible to attach icons to anything you want just by adding an attribute of your choosing to your HTML. Want a popup icon? try <a href=’#’ icon=’popup’> how about a magnifier? <a href=’#’ icon=’mag’>. You can even add them automatically for file types. Here’s how.”

Pantone Post-Its! “We took the PANTONE SOLID CHIPS coated book and added new features that make using chips more convenient than ever. Simplified, neat chip removal: Peel off an adhesive-backed chip and place where you want without using staples, glue or tape. Each chip has smooth edges and, when removed, leaves the host page neat and intact.” (Thanks HOW Blog!)

“About a month ago I received some email with questions about how Airbag got started as a for-profit company. Here are the questions and answers for the benefit of others. ‘What factored you into quitting your day job and going solo? I’m assuming you built up enough of a name through your blog.’”

“The odd thing is that no one sets out to design something that’s mediocre. So why does design go wrong so often? Let’s set aside the rational reasons why projects can fail — like budgetary constraints, deadline pressure and lack of talent — to concentrate on the scenarios that should be easily avoidable, but crop up again and again, with predictably dire results.”

A great Flickr collection of “random findings of consistent interfaces and design across the web.” In other words, lots of screenshots of login forms, 404s, footer designs, tag clouds, upload interfaces and more. Nice.

“It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style. Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking.”

Matt: “This is wicked cool: Someone from the big state newspaper The Oregonian is posting all the photos that go with stories in the paper to Flickr…”

Derek: “Yah! If only it wasn’t a violation of Flickr’s TOS.”

“So, I spurred something of a shitstorm in my post where I commented on information architecture is sleeping. Most people focused on the wrong thing, the cancellation of a workshop, when what I was hoping to expose was the tendency towards isolation and insularity that the community seemed to be falling into. So, I’ve now returned from the 8th IA Summit, and I’m thinking of revising my statement.”

“I’m currently working on something that involves sorting out lots of information into graphs and charts. I’m not going to mention what that is right now, in case it doesn’t transpire; but while doing it, I started thinking about how elements of my own life can be viewed as pie charts. So I explored that theme.”

“Apollo is a new cross-platform desktop runtime being developed by Adobe that allows web developers to use web technologies to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications and web applications to the desktop. Why would anyone want to do this? Well, we work with a lot of sales reps who are out in the field and don’t have a reliable internet connection. Building an application that can easily sync with internet content has been tricky to do in the past, but Apollo is promising an API for synchronizing data whenever you are actually online. This could be the actual build once, run anywhere desktop solution that Java never really delivered on.”

“I believe that myself and anyone else who can produce these results simply has a more effective strategy for learning new material. With my system of learning, you only have to hear or read something once to learn it. Best of all I believe it is a system that can be learned… One of the best ways to begin practicing holistic learning is to start drawing a diagram that associates the information you have learned. Better than taking notes during a lecture is drawing a picture for how what you are learning relates to anything else you have already learned. Once you get good at this you will be able to visualize the diagram before it is drawn, but start drawing to get practice.”