Got to keep up with the web
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Packaging design
If you are creating a tangible product, packaging design can be absolutely critical to the selling of the product. Super nice collection here
The golden ratio
Okay - so you know this already. But this is a nice refresher
Not everyone is a designer
The role of the designer has changed recently, but they are professionals at what they do - let them do their job!
NDAs and design concepts
How much interface design work is wrapped up in NDAs and will never see the light? Sharing ideas can lead to great things for everyone
Design for evil
Pobably not even 1% of of your users are evil, but those that are can cause a lot of damage if you do not design and develop for it
Fading dreams
Great ideas often come in dreams, piecing together what the conscious mind cannot. Pen and paper beside the bed helps!
The beauty of Failure
Two things you can take from a failed project - firstly you will not know until you try, and secondly learn from it. There are always positives which come out of a project
Soft-hyphens and inline-block
Ajaxian describes these two specification requirements as "subtleties". I take issue with this as these are certainly not finge cases and have good support across the other browsers. Thank goodness Firefox 3 is joining the party
PersistJS
Storing state on the client side can often be very useful (Design etc) and this is an excellent looking library which integrates with a number of client-side API that overcomes many of the limitations we face with cookies
Firebug 1.2 rc 1
If you are moving over to the Firefox 3 release candidates, you can breath a sigh of release as Firebug is stabilising for v1.2
Opera Core Blog
The Opera Core team are getting in on the blogging act - the first post about the new selectors API - good stuff
Gecko so close to 1.9
Vladimir is reporting that the Gecko 1.9 engine is almost ready for the prime time. Kudos to the Mozilla team for this - Firefox 3 is going to be an excellent browser
SMIL timesheets
SMIL is great for SVG, but can lead to a lot of additional markup. Timesheets sounds like a good way to overcome that
Give content some respect
This has been true for almost every site I have worked on - content is the last thing to be delivered and integrated. A site will live or die on the content - give it some respect
Presenting look and feel
Adaptive Path have a post up with 8 tips for how to present look and feel to a client. Giving presentations is a skill and can work wonders for your sales when done well
Wait for the fat lady to sing
It looks like the Yahoo / Microsoft deal is going the distance. Many roads down which this could go, and which ever one they pick, it will have implications all over the web
Work for Opera
I hear that Opera is an outstanding place to work - and certainly their products reflect that. They have a number of job openings if you fancy furthering your career
A better portfolio
Five solid tips for getting clients from your online portfolio. If this is one of your main methods of attracting clients, you better be sure it is damn good
Flash 10 preview
Flash is an outstanding development environment, and Adobe have done a really good job with it. Looking forward we see more hand off to a GPU and some much wanted additions
Timelapse CSS
Video showing how a page is styled by building up the CSS one rule at a time. Good fun - and shows the power of CSS
Do more with less
How do you crreate a product which is easy to use? Cut the crap basically. Remove what is not needed and the features people simply do not want or understand. The masses will love it
Jobs at YUI
The YUI team have two job openings at the moment (front-end engineer and software engineer). Interested? You bet!
Modaganda
Simple and effective. Deals with a problem that many of us have (organisation of friends!) and show cases how web-forms can be done well
Data visulaisation
Information graphics can often carry so much more than a few words. The first image here, Fitts Law, is an excellent example. Well worth studying these
Marketing
A list of what every good marketing person knows. Do you? And more to the point - do you apply them to your business?
Birth clock
Smash the glass and let the clock run, or keep it intact and have the clock off. What would you do? Very interesting experiment
Dramatic media
How do you sell news? Make it dramatic! It seems that there is always something else to top what has just happened. Got to read between the lines
Processing.js
John Resig has just released a port of the Java Processing language to Javascript. There are some excellent examples of what can be done with the Javascript engines of tomorrow. Kudos to John for some outstanding work
Fantasy Interactive goes HTML/CSS
Fi are one of the biggest (and best) interaction and design companies around. Them dropping all round Flash and instead using it "in the places it needs to be" is big news
Building an online community
George Oates of Flickr has shared his thoughts on how to build up an online community. Start small, be interested and participate. Nice
7 rules for progressive enhancement
If you are building web-sites then you must know how to do progressive enhancement correctly. Here is some ground rules
Making UX tell
UX is fundamental to any customer facing project, although it is applied in many different ways. Adding value to a project can be done at any stage by a UX professional
Next for jQuery?
jQuery is an excellent library, and John Resig talks about the future developments we can expect to see
Create Doom 4
The Doom series is one of the all time heavy weights in the games industry, and id are now looking to develop Doom 4. Hiring is now in-progress. How about a UI designer!?
Visualising music
Wonderful video from the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Imagine diving into the music
CSS styleguide lines
CSS can be absolutely horrible to maintain. Use good code practices, common sense, and Conditional-CSS and all your problems will go away!
Use Flash?
Veerle goes into depth about when to use Flash. Myself, I will use it when appropriate - there is a massive range of uses and applications that Flash can handle no problem but Javascript/CSS etc cannot
Respect yourself
Your time is precious and you must not just give it away. Make sure it counts, either through learning or earning
Qualified selectors
Looks like this will never happen - but it is a nice proposal!
The DragonFly is released
Opera have announced that their long awaited developer tools are now in alpha. Expecting great things from the groundwork they have now done
Outage today
Apologies to all for the outage experienced over the last day or two. Caused by a combination of effects, Design etc will have been unavailable. All is back to normal now!
KDE 4.1 beta 1
No let up for the KDE project after 4.0, 4.1 beta 1 has now arrived with lots of lovely Plasma UI additions