Category Archives: Best Practices

Enough With the Hyphens

As I spellcheck a project proposal this morning, I’m struck by the number of hyphens in our web words that need to go away. Most of us have gone along with “email” and “online” now, instead of “e-mail” and (the worst) “on-line.” But some others exist, and I think it’s time for a revolution. 
Ok, it’s [...]

PNG Product Images?

A question to the community at large. I’ve been asked to give an opinion on the PNG file format. More specifically, if it would be worth it to include a PNG version of products in the process of creating web photo assets. Note that I’m referring to a large number of product images (in the [...]

An Engadget post discussing the future of Adobe Flash

I found this to be a very interesting read:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/
I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.
I [...]

A Few Insights

The Walker Art Center and AIGA is pairing up again to have their March graphic design lecture series. Insights usually host no surprises for me these days. You’ll have a mix of academia, hip, highly theoretical, and your dull lecturers. Normally I find my self saying, OK, ya, nice work. But it ends up feeling [...]

Interface Design Tells You What To Build

Ben Moore, from Curbly, talks about the need for a project to start with the interface design. All his points are dead on.
In my decade of experience, a website isn’t real to clients until they see some pictures, sketches, something, anything. With this in mind, my goal is to provide initial wireframes (black and [...]

Vita.mn seems to be aging well.

Garrick’s first couple posts and speaking engagement with the editor made me aware of Vita.mn last fall, but in recent months I’ve really gotten into the community they are building over there.
It truly is still a work in progress, but the new features they’ve rolled out over the last few weeks are pretty cool. They’ve [...]

How to Design for Abundance

“That’s what the economics of abundance is really about….Having customers who stay with you because they want to, not because they have to.” - Shane Richmond
(Thanks to Hugh MacLeod for the pointer)
Too often it’s obvious that a website acts like it’s the only website in the world; convoluted registration process, not linking to other websites, [...]

Best Cheap Beer in the Cities

 
 I promise not to make posts that were this far off topic often, but this was really interesting to me and I think others might be interested as well.
My Cousin and her many of her friends over at eightandfive.com got together last weekend and did a Blind Taste Test of Cheap Beers available in the [...]

ThisLife.org much better then it used to be…

I’ve been a Big Fan of the NPR show This American Life for a long time.
I’ve always liked the fact that they let you listen to every show they’ve ever made for free as long as you streamed it off the web. The only problem was you had to use Real Player, which we all [...]

IA 101 - UXP Skill Sharing Series part 1

The first session in our UXP Skill Sharing Series will take place Thursday Sept. 21 at 7:00 pm in room 1-132 at the Carlson School of Management. Our featured speaker will be Larisa Warnke, Sr. User Experience Architect at Carlson Marketing, and the topic will be an overview of UXP process.
The Carlson School is located [...]