I’ll be in attendance at An Event Apart Chicago with the AG UI team. Not sure if I’ll have any time to post about the conference while there, but I’m not planning on it. I have some friends in town I’d like to visit, and I want to hit up some Chicago staples like Reckless, […]

20 blogs with a monochromatic palette. In art school they’d make us do just about any design project in black and white first. If it doesn’t work in black and white, it’s certainly not going to work in color. Sometimes taking the color out, just temporarily even, allows us to focus on basic elements of […]

Reading my feeds in style since I’m now sporting Hicks’ Google Reader theme.

A great tutorial from Veerle on styling semantic and accessible tables.

When Twitter is down, you are given a message that it’s taking a nap accompanied by a photo of…a napping cat. I love it.

Common shopping cart mistakes. “Requiring a user to register before adding an item to the cart” This will send me fleeing from a site.

In the past few months the web community in Cleveland has really begun to flourish. Tonight the Cleveland Web Standards Meetup Group gets together. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to make it yet, and I’m ill today so I still won’t be in attendance. On the agenda tonight is non-profit work as well as the […]

Last night I installed Simplify Media on my home computer, and this morning I installed it at work. If you’re not already familiar, it’s a free application for sharing your iTunes library over the internet. So far I really like it.
But it has a couple quirks, it doesn’t actually share your library, it shares […]

Spam is a big problem these days, it’s gone from my inbox to my blog, to my MySpace, to my Twitter, my stats, and now even my Mint stats. Luckily, we’ve been given a lot of options for combating it, albeit with caveats.

There’s been a little extra dirt the past few days because I’ve been doing some major revamping of both the Wordpress back end of my site, and the visual layout of different categories of posts. You may have even seen the site down a few times, thanks to my mad PHP skills. I hope my sarcasm isn’t lost over the internet. I’ve introduced a friendly way of displaying reviews, tweets, and remaindered links.

I read a post today that pretty succinctly sums up my feelings about MySpace. It got me to thinking, why do I even still use this awful, bloated tool? Mostly it’s because they got my friends before a better site did. If Virb had come out within 6 months of MySpace, everyone would be using it instead. Now MySpace has become this substitute for email and IM and everyone’s too invested to leave.

Microsoft has always had two big strikes against them:

1. Microsoft builds everything in their own crippled formats.
2. It’s appearing that Microsoft will never really embrace web standards, which means approximately 90% of web users must suffer as a result.

At my first job I worked in-house in an enterprise level environment where we were forced to rely on Microsoft’s mostly unreliable junk. IIS would always inexplicably serve users the wrong image. As a designer, trying to build a website in the Visual Studio IDE is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics. We were slowed down by the constant MSDN and licensing issues.

At my previous job we had a partnership with a web hosting company using Windows servers. It was a huge, crippling burden. We were constantly developing solutions that were already available in the open source community. Essentially we were passing this cost on to our clients in more expensive hosting, and longer development times with more bugs in a language that simply didn’t offer as much documentation. And let me tell you, .Net is practically inapproachable if you don’t come from a development background, it’s like building in the dark.

The Sartiorialist has become one of my new favorite daily reads:

I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.
Thoughtful critiques of Racist and classist advertising. Good to know I wasn’t the only one a […]

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. is an Errol Morris film about a man who bumbles his way into becoming an execution technician and then similarly bumbles his way out.
An article on commuting from the New Yorker by way of Kottke. The several hour commute is becoming less and less […]

In catching up with some old haunts yesterday, I found 9rules has realigned again. Every time I look at 9rules there’s something different going on, I have to say it’s a bit disorienting but maybe that’s because my visits have become more and more sporadic. Don’t get me wrong, I have a soft spot for […]

Jeffrey Zeldman is attempting to understand the disproportionate number of women in the web design.
In my own professional experience I’ve found a few constants, both on the part of employers and clients, prior to joining my present employer.

Men and and women with identical or similar experience will not be paid the same, the […]

With Adobe dumping the Macromedia brand altogether soon, I’m left wondering the future of two of my favorite Macromedia products; Fireworks, and Dreamweaver. Adobe’s already explained they have immediate plans to merge the Flash Player and Adobe Reader (see Designorati for my more complete article about the acquisition) but haven’t formally announced plans to […]

There’s not a whole lot I can say about this site that isn’t obvious. They’ve got one of the best favicons I’ve seen, great use of white space, contact information prominently displayed, and everything you need readily accessible above the fold. The color is handled carefully, as are the subtle reflective effects that on […]

I had some extra money this week and I thought I’d finally pick up some much needed furniture items, before the in-laws are here for the holidays. I decided to drive up to Ikea to soothe my insatiable need for immediacy, and avoid their shoddy website. It occurred to me a two-hour drive […]

I’m proud to announce my first article as the newest team member of Designorati. The article is a continuation of my post about Microsoft ClearType. If you want to learn more about ClearType, or how to fine tune it, check it out.

Ugh.

Most Mac based designers will tell you about the disparity between Mac and Windows type rendering. I was suprised to find this afternoon (while browsing Maratz.com), that Windows actually offers a solution, ClearType!
ClearType is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), […]

Last week I posted about how Diesel’s website sucks. There wasn’t any contact information available on the page, so I rummaged around some of their other sites, and found a generic form on a Diesel children’s page. Diesel makes stuff for kids? Anyway, I explained I was having difficulty using their main […]

The past few weeks the web has been full of falling pixels, with reboots, redesigns, and realigns. So to jump on the bandwagon, here’s a sneak peek of my upcoming redesign.

Actually the design in place has always been a place holder. I put the whole site and blog together over a sleepless weekend, […]

If you haven’t heard, today is reboot day. I was a little disappointed, I’d expected to see a lot more sites. I also expected to see more original sites. A few of the rebooters might have taken emulation to the next step, blatant rip off. I even saw one snag Mint’s […]

Vonster.com is one of the best illustration sites I’ve seen. It’s treated in much the same way as Von’s illustrations, colorful, concise, and fun. The use of Flash is subtle and well executed.
The most important information is presented above the fold; the purpose of the site, information about the creator, and […]

Diesel makes the best shoes I’ve ever owned. I bought my second pair this weekend, because my white pair went grey the way white shoes are prone to. I’ve never put anything more comfortable on my feet, and they’re surprisingly durable. I put my old pair through all kinds of weather, and […]

What goes around comes around, but what if it never came around to begin with? I realize my blog has a bit of a negative spin to it. I guess I just feel more empassioned to vent rather than praise. However, I’ve never offered criticism where criticism wasn’t due. One might […]

1. Last week Google launched it’s own feed reader. The reader is integrated with gmail, so I was really excited to be able to check all my feeds from any computer, in Google’s no-clutter format. Unfortunately, I can’t get the damn thing to work. I’ve tried adding feeds several different ways, […]

Someone please make a plugin that takes whatever I’m currently listening to in iTunes (or even Audioscrobbler), and displays an album thumbnail with my Amazon Affiliate link, without me having to go to Amazon and generate the URL myself. I know this must be possible, however I don’t have enough PHP under my belt […]