Critique Wall.com

Buzz Word Vocabulary

i18n

Internationalization. i + 18 letters + n

A List Apart: World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web.

I just styled a CSS box based on Dan Cederholm's Bullet Proof Box. (Bulletproof Web Design : Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS) I appreciate his practical and reasoned approach to explaining best practices in CSS design. The box will grow vertically (to a point) as browser text size is increased. At some point I may try his horizontal fluid box too.

Attached are my my css, html, jpg, psd, and ai files. Feel free to use them how you like.

Captcha

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University coined the term in 2000 to describe codes they created to help Internet giant Yahoo Inc. thwart a spam problem. "Turing" refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician famous for his codebreaking work during World War II and, later, as a pioneer in artificial intelligence."

Hotmail Captcha

The purpose behind these extra steps is to prevent malicious software from filling out forms. But the result of the sometimes unappeasable Captchas is often annoyed users. In my experience, capchas hamper usability.

There's a short story in the Adobe Edge newsletter about the process of merging Adobe.com and Macromedia.com. With all the products available to them, it's interesting they confirmed the industry standard products, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash were their choices for their own production. I wonder if this is the writing on the wall for products like GoLive.

I love the Honda Element Crab. While visiting the island is fun for awhile, the best part is watching the crab commercial (in the bottom left hand corner of the front page).
The Honda Element and Friends Web Site

RPA: Rubin Postaer and Associates, the creators of the Honda Element and Friends campaign have quite an interesting Web site themselves. Once it loads, it welcomes you out loud and explains how the unconventional navigation works.

As described by Communication Arts, linkdup.com "gathers and categorizes the best new design, content and technology related sites". It is a non-commercial site run by Preloaded, out of London. If you can get past the ocean of blue, the links are reliably inspiring and interesting.

The video profiles on Apple's updated Pro site have a very nice production value even if they are just long commercials for Apple. They make a strong case for any serious design office to be working on the Mac platform. In the 2x4 video they even say "the Macintosh is the platform for the whole [design] industry". The resources section has several downloads that could be useful for aiding in-depth product research or justifying a purchase decision such as a super large display.

After Apple released FrontRow everyone has been using the “wet floor look” in their designs. Now thanks to Thomas Fuchs, the creator and scripting wizard behind the wonderful effects of script.aculo.us, we can all do the “reflector” with little more then some JavaScript. Thomas announced it on his blog a few days ago and there are demo's of this great effect also. This really opens up some new options, though they do say: “ I’ve cleaned up the demo page/code and added some usage hints.