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links for 2010-08-24

  • This guest contribution is from a programmer colleague of mine at Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences. Thanks for this enlightenment. According to Wikipedia there are an estimated 10.5 million American men who are red green color blind. I am one of them. I discovered this many years ago and rarely think about it as to me it is normal. However, I have discovered that those around me are endlessly fascinated with it—especially designers. So, to you I provide this public service message on color blindness. First a little bit of myth busting. Red and green do not appear gray to me, perhaps less bright then you are used to but not gray. Second, color blindness does not give me superpowers. I cannot magically see through red and green objects and describe what is behind them. (It would be nice at times though (-: .) Examples Now for the really fun part. This is a series of images created with Vischeck that appear the same to me. Really they do, at most one is a very tiny shade lig
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    links for 2010-06-26

  • In the Firefox 4 nightly builds, and in Firefox 4 Beta 1, we are changing the default tab position so that tabs are on top. This is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of their toolbars. Moving the default tab position is obviously a significant and to some extent controversial change to the Firefox UI, which is why we made the video above to help explain our rationale.
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    links for 2010-05-25

  • Src: http://www.colorhunter.com/palette/500579
  • Designers often don’t take the time they should to learn about how basic psychological principles can effect the experience their visitors have on the sites they build. Psychological principles are either looked upon as unnecessary, or too complicated. But the truth is that they’re neither. There aren’t that many concepts associated with basic design psychology, and most are relatively straight-forward and easy to learn. They’re also mainly easy to implement, though some take a bit more care and planning than others. Read on to learn more and please leave your feedback and comments at the end of this post.
  • © 2010 Lucasfilm Ltd. and TM. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.
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    links for 2010-01-30

  • It is a little hard to talk hard numbers here since this will vary wildly from agency to agency, firm to firm, freelancer to freelancer. But let’s just throw some out there just for fun. $75 / hour. That’s a fair rate, I think, for a reasonably skillful freelance web designer.
  • Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.
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    links for 2010-01-21

  • A few weeks ago I was reading an article on form UI by Luke Wroblewski of Yahoo!. For those who aren’t familiar with Luke, he (quite literally) wrote the book on good form design. In the article, one certain section about placing labels inside of form fields stood out to me: Because labels within fields need to go away when people are entering their answer into an input field, the context for the answer is gone. So if you suddenly forget what question you’re answering, tough luck—the label is nowhere to be found. As such, labels within inputs aren’t a good solution for long or even medium-length forms. When you’re done filling in the form, all the labels are gone! That makes it a bit hard to go back and check your answers. Luke Wroblewski He brings up a good point. Generally speaking, you can look at a field that says “Tim Wright” and know that it was a field for your (my) name. But for long forms, yea, I do agree that you can forget some of the questions you answered. For best
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    links for 2010-01-09

  • We’re all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy. User Experience Videos The State of User Experience Jesse James Garett, founder of Adaptive Path and author of the book The Elements of User Experience, speaks on what UX and UX design is, what UX looked like before and what are some of the challenges people are encountering now. He cites engagement as the main goal of UX design and, through some fantastic examples, shows that engagement is an universal quality achieved through visuality, sound
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    links for 2010-01-08

  • This is a little trick that you can apply to your forms to enhance user experience. We'll display editable form data (indented to be edited, updated) as regular tabular data intended for reading. We're using pure CSS for this one… Actually we WOULD use pure CSS if it wasn't for IE7's lack of support for :focus pseudo-class. 🙁 Take a look at the demo Overview This trick can be useful when you have, let's say, a profile page where your users can view and edit the data on the same page. When users first open the page they see values for various options. You need to make sure that the data as readable as possible so we want to avoid the usual form elements styling. You'll agree that reading content inside input fields is somewhat difficult. This is what you'd want them to have:
  • Pricing a website design can seem impossible. A good website design can cost anywhere between thousands of dollars and under fifty dollars, depending on the type of site, how you build it and a hundred other numbers. Those numbers can make it difficult to decide where the right price point for your own work is: how do you know what your work is worth when other designers’ prices are all over the place? All prices are not created equal: while it may seem to the lay person that all websites are similar, differences like the framework the site is built upon and the process the website designer uses can require drastically different prices. A website design that doesn’t require you to do much more than design a new theme for WordPress probably shouldn’t be priced the same way that an e-commerce site that expects to see plenty of traffic should be. It comes down to the question of what’s in your price. In this article, we’ll look at how four web designers set their prices — and how you can
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    links for 2009-12-03

  • Writing for the web is a challenge. There are usually word length restrictions, the fact that users scan rather than read every word, and sometimes style guides to adhere to. There are enough writing tips online to keep you reading for longer than you probably desire. Here are 1o tips that have been the most useful to me: Know your audience This sounds obvious but is often taken for granted. The only way you can write relevant copy that is targeted at the right audience in the right tone of voice, is to understand who that audience is. Depending on where your audience are located, you may have to include local expressions or if writing for a wide audience be specific with things such as dollars. If it is US dollars then say so. If it is Cardiff in Wales then say so as there is also a Cardiff in New Zealand and other countries.
  • Colour is a powerful tool when it comes to design. It’s fun to work with and when you get it right it can really make a design. I’m no colour expert so I’m not going to bore you with any theory but having worked with colour for a long time I there are a few really simple tips I’ve picked up along the way. Editor’s note: We’ll be covering topics like Typography, CSS3, HTML5, Microformats and how to work with clients at The Future of Web Design Tour. Tickets are only £59.
  • When you type www.wikipedia.org into your browser's address bar, you expect nothing less than to be taken to Wikipedia. Chances are you're not giving much thought to the work being done in the background by the Domain Name System, or DNS. Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out. Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another. The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading.
  • Well, the latest installment of the Twilight series is breaking box office records all over the place. I contributed to that as I saw it with a packed house on Saturday afternoon. How could I resist, after having so much fun at the first one last year? It was an interesting experience, as my audience had a maniacal cackler who almost provided more entertainment than the movie itself. Before I get to my detailed review (I am educated in film so expect serious criticism), I want to mention the movie's soundtrack. I think a lot of indie rock fans were up in arms over some of the bands on there. I don't know, I don't put much stock in the whole "selling out" concept, and I've been listening to it and there really are a lot of great tracks. Thom Yorke, BRMC, Grizzly Bear, Editors…. um, uh… oh geez.
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