Oldie but goodie!

The biggest challenge for web designers is the unthinkably huge number of possible ways to solve any given problem. We usually don't think of this because we have our habits and traditions to fall back on, but there are literally billions of possible pixel combinations for each page we make.

An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design from 37signals

If you have ever designed a beautiful interface only to find it ugly five months later because gaudy graphics, unpleasant colors, and distasteful fonts appeared over time, then you understand how maddening design disintegration can be. Similarly, if you have ever developed a clean, web standard, and accessible interface but later found the site littered with invalid, inaccessible, and presentational markup, then you understand this frustration as well.

Writing an Interface Style Guide from A List Apart

Ideas. They’re at the heart of every creative process. However, almost no really good ideas are flashes of inspiration. They may start that way—a single glimmer of something special—but in order to work, they need to be honed. Like a really good cheese, they need to mature. Indeed, the “flash of inspiration” idea—the Eureka moment—is only part of a longer process that, if ignored, will see most ideas simply fizzle out.

Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas from A List Apart

Following up on last year’s post on web design research, here’s a new collection of research results, this time featuring further reading as well. It happens that I still watch the work of Association for Computing Machinery, Human Factors International, and the like.

Web Design: 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know from Jens Meiert

This is really awesome but sorry, Mac only :(

Posting your email address on a website is a sure-fire way to get an inbox full of Spam. The Enkoder helps protect email addresses by converting them into encrypted JavaScript code, hiding them from email-harvesting robots while revealing them to real people.

The Enkoder from Hivelogic

If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.

8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement from Freelance Switch

In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat­ive self.

How to Unleash Your Creativity from Scientific American

Tripoli is a generic CSS standard for HTML rendering. By resetting and rebuilding browser standards, Tripoli forms a stable, cross-browser rendering foundation for your web projects.

Tripoli from DevKick

So, how do you “have” ideas? Sit about and wait for them to pop into your head? If only most of us had the luxury to do so. No, for most of us, ideas have to be squeezed out of us every day. To stand up to this challenge, you need to arm yourself with some good tools.

Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas from A List Apart

If you have ever designed a beautiful interface only to find it ugly five months later because gaudy graphics, unpleasant colors, and distasteful fonts appeared over time, then you understand how maddening design disintegration can be. Similarly, if you have ever developed a clean, web standard, and accessible interface but later found the site littered with invalid, inaccessible, and presentational markup, then you understand this frustration as well. Documentation can help avoid these issues—it provides guidance on how to maintain and update the interface, and keep it beautiful at the same time.

Writing an Interface Style Guide from A List Apart

If you could detect which social bookmarking sites your reader uses, on a per-reader basis, you could display only the badges they care about. But you can’t know that because the browser secures the user’s history, right? Wrong.

Vote! How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use from Aza's Thoughts

If your website doesn’t stand out and do a heck of lot of things right, then chances are it’s going to crash and burn. Take our “Successful Website Checklist Challenge” (below) and see what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you’re forgetting to do. We’ve even included notes and resources for nearly every item on the checklist (just to make your life easier).

The Official "Successful Website Checklist Challenge" from Chromatic Sites

In the vast majority of website projects that I have managed during my ten years in the industry, content is often the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications—but content? It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: “final content delivered.” It’s the perennial cause of delay and the stuff of myth (I once shelved a project for three years while the client “wrote” his content.) It’s a malaise that needs fixing and needs fixing fast.

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome from A List Apart

Learn how web standards can help make any project more findable for your users and accessible to search engines. Findability bliss is even attainable with Ajax and Flash interfaces with some web standards wisdom.

Findability Bliss Through Web Standards by Aarron Walter

I think this is what we should strive for.

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

Google User Experience from Google

Zebra striping—also known as candy striping or half-shadow—is the application of faint shading to alternate lines or rows in data tables or forms. Examples of websites that use zebra striping include the currency site XE, the CIA World Factbook, and Monster.com. Zebra striping on the web is actually a carryover from print days: one of the first mentions of the technique appeared in 1961 [1].

Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help? from A List Apart

Thanks for the reminder Jens~

How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client implementations, and finally send mails that aren’t read at all, and, at the end of the day, harm the sender.

Less Is Still More by Jens Meiert

Not sure how design could fit into your business? Want to find out how other people do it? Read our in-depth articles on how design is managed, with practical ideas and real-life examples of design being used for business success.

Managing Design from Design Council

By now, nearly everyone knows that an effective Web site must be speedy. Users have short attention spans and are generally not willing to wait for a bloated Web site to load. Take advantage of these tips, tools and resources, and you'll have a much better time capturing visitors' attention.

The Webmaster's Turbo Kit: 50-Plus Tips and Resources to Improve Your Site's Speed and Performance from Inside CRM

Khoi Vinh is the guy that keeps telling you to use grids :p

As design director, Mr. Vinh leads a group of 11 visual designers, information architects and design technologists in continually improving and extending the user experience at NYTimes.com. Mr. Vinh also writes and lectures extensively about design and technology, and serves on the national board of directors for AIGA, the professional association for design.

Talk to the Newsroom: Khoi Vinh, Design Director from NYTimes