This year's HOW Design Conference was (also) 16 hours a day of design and creative inspiration.

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Allan Haley, type guru and prolific typography author (see More About Allan Haley below), spoke to the Orlando AIGA chapter. Haley appears to know more about type than I know about most other subjects combined. But the focus of his presentation was on the power of non-font typography or words created without the use of digital fonts.

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This is an amazing ad for a French energy company, Areva. In only 45 seconds, it does a wonderful job of explaining a very complicated process. You can also see what went on in making the ad too.

Hat tip to information aesthetics.

I was reading on nytimes.com and absentmindedly double-clicked a word in the article body. Up popped a window with the definition of the word I clicked on. Turners out that every word in the article body has that feature. It's a great way to be able to expand your vocabulary when you are reading online.

While I am typically quite hesitant to link YouTube videos on lots of posts, I found this one to be exceptional. Not only are the screenshots done well, but they convey an interesting and important message about the way that the web has changed over the years and continues to change with the advent of services like Flickr, YouTube, WikiPedia and other user generated content sources.

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I read a recent article by Joel Spolsky at his blog Joel On Software, where he discusses the many options that users of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, will have to log off, shut down, sleep, etc. The article, Choices = Headaches, argues that Windows Vista has too many options to “leave”. How many is too many, you ask? Nine to be exact! How do you explain that to your Mom? Let me quote Joel:

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

He goes on to argue that the options should be reduced to one, maybe two options and states why each one should be eliminated/combined. In response to Joel's article, Moishe Lettvin, a software engineer who used to work for Microsoft on the “Windows Shutdown” team (yes, 8 people to design that feature/menu) gives us some insight into how this was written.

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