I’m pretty ticked. The Amazon Kindle is out for only a few weeks and Jakob Nielsen of useit.com weighed in on the usability issues pretty quickly. His points were all well-made and valid, and because the Kindle is a popular topic even amongst regular consumers, mainstream media picked up his scathing criticism. What’s got my goat were the comments I saw on the articles.

Why am I so ticked?… Read more »

Whew! That was a lot harder than I thought it would be! On a whim, I decided I wanted to bolster my credentials in the field of User Experience, so I signed up to take Human Factors International's Certified Usability Analyst exam - without taking their courses (and saving $5,320 of their track price). I had about a week to prepare.

I already have a job, so why'd I do it? Well, in the web design world, it's easy to let your work speak for itself. You wanna see websites?? Bam! Here's some websites! If you're good, your work is good, and everybody can see it's good. Good, clean, semantic markup; cutting-edge css3 techniques; slick JQuery - it takes mere minutes to see if someone's got the goods, just by looking at a couple websites.… Read more »

Just got my copy of one of Packt's books, "CMS Design with PHP and JQuery"! Packt always puts out high-quality books at all levels of web design, so when they asked me to review it, I was excited to get my [disclosure: free] copy.

The title is a little misleading to designers - there's little in the way of "design", although from an engineering perspective, they may consider it design. I'd rather it be called "building," or something less open to interpretation.… Read more »

Small achievements may be hurting your success

I first heard the phrase while on a job interview. The owner of the company had very non-discreetly parked his fancy Audi R8 by the entrance to the building, and his license plate read, "BHAGS." When inside, the interviewer asked me if I knew what it stood for, and proceeded to explain the meaning: Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Some time later, I was reading Fast Company magazine which mentioned BHAG and referenced it to the original source in Jim Collins' book, "Built to Last." So, I finally knew where it was from, and added it to my reading list. (And you should read it, too!)… Read more »

I've seen some very interesting experimentation with illustrating with CSS3 which reminds me of the good old days of ASCII art. It's fun and interesting and takes an incredible amount of time and attention to detail. It's not practical, but it's fun. I've seen it on some production sites, even. To me, this is as bad as designing with Tables. Don't do it!

Illustrating with CSS3 is certainly creative, and a fun way to push the limits of what CSS3 can accomplish. It starts with creating sometimes dozens and dozens of divs and spans, creating any number of rounded corners, rotating the divs/spans, adding drop shadows, and presto! Scalable image that can't be seen on Internet Explorer. Here are some interesting examples: http://ping.fm/5coll http://ping.fm/ouEPW http://ping.fm/UGMwn… Read more »

Drupal is awesome. I've been a big fan for a couple years, now, and I'm convinced that there's nothing it can't do. It's biggest problem, however, has been the learning curve. With the latest version of Drupal 7 out on the horizon, I think we finally have a WordPress-killer, since getting a website design up and running is now just as easy as the famed blogging platform. Don't get me wrong, WordPress is great, but it has a very narrow use-case. I think with Drupal 7, we'll see many more web designers venturing into what was once Programmerland to create stunning, beautiful and versatile websites.… Read more »

I'm a huge fan of doing pro bono web design jobs. I do tons of work for local Chicago non-profits and charities I believe in as a way to boost their design quality and website functionality where they would otherwise have gone with something inadequate. It's also a great way to flex my brain muscles and sharpen my skillset and do some good. For example, when I decided to learn Drupal, I took on a number of Drupal projects as a way to learn the system. That said, there are a number of challenges faced by designers when attempting to start a pro bono project. Here are some guidelines to make sure you and the client get the most out of the pro bono project:… Read more »

My good friend, Aaron Friedman of Digital Highrise made me aware of Google's search story generator. I decided to see what I could come up with! For some reason, search results I got from Google directly differed from the results presented in the story generator. Regardless, my own website made it to the top of the results.… Read more »

With Drupal being used for social networks more and more, there's a strong need to have Drupal displaying user content in their own profiles. You can use views to display a tab in a user's profile which will show their content. I'm going to show you how to make a tab to a user's images, "My Images" show up in their profile. We're going to take this a step further by using ImageCache to have thumbnails of the user's images created specifically for this View.

… Read more »