Critique Wall.com

While browsing through the Webby Awards nominee's for 2007, I found a site call My Moleskine by Fabio Iaschi that is a look inside an artist Moleskine book. It is a nominee for the “Blog - Culture/Personal” section and is a neat way to look through someone's drawings.

Take a look though the other nominee's for this year as it's a great way to see what is happening in the web design world and how other designer's are pushing the medium.

A month or so ago, I was working on a Friday afternoon from home via iChat with the video producer from my work in California. We were trying to get the video podcast up for the weekend and he was having a hard time converting it to 320px by 240px for the ipod. We are currently only using Apple's Quicktime export to iPod but it kept coming up wrong. Time after time he would try it and it was coming out as 640px x 480px. We fought with it for a while trying different options but never did get it correct. Only was the pixel size twice as bit, but the file size was much bigger then we needed.

Over at What Do I Know, designer and developer Todd Dominey recently posted about his search for 'cool' office space in the Atlanta area and his visit to a house that had been featured on the cover of Dwell magazine. Yes DWELL magazine. While he was at first excited at the opportunity, once inside he quickly realized that there was much about the house that impractical and cheap.

I'll let you read the whole article but it really underscores a very important point for designers of all flavors, especially web design. If you are going to build something, the cool factor may get you some temporary points and publicity, but the lasting value comes in durability, function, and usability.

Want to deploy Flash 9 SWFs on your site? On our site, Google Analytics statistics show Flash 9 at only 59% of visitors.

That's not quite the 80% we like to see before deploying new technology. But don't worry, Disney's much talked about new Disney.com will help. The 995 pixel wide, media (video) heavy site requires Flash Player 9 to view any content. Users without the latest Flash Player are greeted with this graphic:

Icons, like cars and refrigerators, have planned obsolescence.

It is interesting that the need to create visual stimulus for new product desire outweighs the value of the existing user knowledge and recognition of previous icons.

In the short-run, the change from one icon set to another for the same activities hampers usability because users cannot quickly transition to associating new icons with the products they use in their everyday workflow.

Do you remember the transition to Adobe's CS icons? It was a radical departure from the previously learned icon system. Where did Venus go? Quick, switch to Illustrator! Is Illustrator the conch shell, flower, or butterfly?

I read a post this morning by David Hyatt, who works for Apple as the lead developer of Safari. He was commenting on a Digg post about a hidden setting to change in Safari that will “speed up Safari” by reducing the “page load delay”. The funny thing is, says Hyatt, “the preference in question is dead and does absolutely nothing in Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0.”