Andy Boyd

Thomas Baekdal wrote a fantastic article about understanding design trends  and knowing how to design/act according to the current trend. This article is a must read…

Thomas also offered the following trends to watch for… very insightful!

• Simple vs. Complex
• Colorful vs. low on color
• Visible vs. hidden technology
• Ordinary text/images vs. Rich Media presentations
• Efficiency vs. Exploration
• Manual vs. Automatic
• Big vs. small
• Rounded vs. edgy
• One-page vs. many pages
• No effects vs. fanciness
• Social vs. isolated
• Work vs. fun
• Long vs. short
• Sporty vs. comfortable
• Strong vs. fragile
• Masculine vs. feminine
• Independent vs. company
• Etc.

http://www.baekdal.com/articles/management/design-secret-unveiled/

iStockPhoto has an API now?  This is intriguing…

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=46006&page=1

Today must be the day for Free stuf… I just found this free 3D modeling tool, Blender. Best of all… it works for Mac OS X! I can’t wait to check it out.
http://www.blender.org/

Thomas Baekdal wrote the following review of the things to consider when designing a website for browsers/monitors of different sizes:
http://www.baekdal.com/articles/usability/browser-size-design/

I think this was a great article. I thought the following points were especially interesting:

Text

Let’s start with text. We know from countless of studies that the optimal width of a block of text is between 65-80 characters (with a line-height of about 1.15). This is the optimal size of text, and it has been proven to be:

• Easier to move from one line to the next
• It is much faster to read in general
• The brain use less mental effort (which increases understanding and learnability)

Designing text on a website is simply about 3 things:

• Make it readable (use a readable font and adequate size)
• Prevent scrolling as much as you can
• Make the width of the text box 65-85 characters per line.

Images

As rule of thumb the best way to present an image is to balance its size between two things:

• To prevent unnecessary eye movements (mental strain)
• Make it big enough to see the details

The correct size of an image depends on the number of details in it. Many details require a larger image - while a few can easily be seen in a smaller area. But you can generally size your images based on a 14:5 ratio. The distance from your eyes should be about 2.8 times further away (14:5) than the width/height of your image.

Communities that bring freelancers and clients together are poping up all over the web. Freelancers no longer need to find their own clients, now they come to you.

Here are a few

• http://www.sologig.com/
• http://freelanceswitch.com/jobs
• http://www.elance.com/
• http://getafreelancer.com/
• http://www.RentACoder/
• http://www.designoutpost.com/
• http://logoworks.com/

These sites are not just web design and graphic design. They also offer writing, programming, marketing, and more…

Check out your email newsletters in a wide range of email clients, and webmail systems.

For every email you send to sitevista, you receive two screen captures. One of the email as it is displayed in the software’s preview pane, and one using their FullPage technology, showing you the entire message once it’s been opened.

http://www.sitevista.com/email.asp

Just when you thought you ran out of reasons to curse the name of Microsoft… another reason rears it’s ugly head

“Well it looks as if Microsoft has screwed up royally with Outlook 2007, at least insofar as the way HTML emails are rendered. Instead of using the not-too-shabby Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine to display HTML emails, Microsoft opted to use a customized version of the Word 2007 rendering engine. That’s right, from now on your beautifully constructed HTML newsletters are going to be rendered by the crime against layout known as Microsoft Word. That fact alone was enough to send shivers down my spine, but when I dug a little deeper I discovered just how dire the situation really is.” - http://f6design.com/journal/2007/01/10/microsoft-drops-the-ball-with-outlook-2007/

When I’m trying to design a site, I often need a little inspiration to get the ball rolling…  I’ve found that a lot of the ‘css’ showcase sites have EXCELLENT designs.  I found this list of ‘css’ showcase sites on http://tanyamerone.com/.  Enjoy….

• Best Web Gallery
• CSS Beauty
• CSS Blast
• CSS Bloom
• CSS Clip
• CSS Drive
• CSS Elite
• CSS Galleries
• CSS Hazard
• CSS Heaven
• CSS Import
• CSS Love
• CSS Mania
• CSS Princess
• CSS Reboot
• CSS Remix
• CSS Thesis
• CSS Tux
• CSS Vault
• CSS Website
• The Daily Slurp
• Dark Eye
• Inspiration King
• Netcocktail
• One Pixel Army
• Perfection
• Refresh
• Screenalicio.us
• Screenfluent
• Styleboost
• Style Crunch
• Submit CSS
• Unmatched Style
• W3C Sites
• Web Creme

I’ve been thinking a lot about the subtle ways User Interface design can ‘tell’ the user how they are supposed to interact with the application.  Isn’t there a better way than just text, or warning dialogs?

This article from vitamin (Robert Hoekman) offers some simple insights into making your web apps more user friendly:

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/communicating-web-20-through-design

This is an interesting article with ‘real-world’ statistics regarding what size the ‘average’ person’s browser is set at when visting/viewing a web site:

http://www.baekdal.com/articles/usability/actual-browser-size-preliminary/