Web design is comparative — since you’re one click away from the competition, comparison between your design and theirs is easy — and people do it, whether consciously or not. So what the competition is doing should matter to you. But just as important is what’s happening with Amazon, CNN, Yahoo and Google.
For a long […]

Try this: visit a Web page or two (ones you don’t regularly visit) and pay attention to the first thing you see on the page. I’ll bet it’s just above the center of the screen. ‘Course, if you’re on a slow modem, you’ll be looking at whatever loads first — unless you’re like me, and […]

Like everything else in our keep-up-with-the-Joneses culture, design follows a herd mentality. So, someone created the first Flash splash page back in about 1999 — and suddenly everybody had to have one. Some companies spent a bundle on them, only to find out that most users immediately looked for the “Skip Intro” button. (Remember when […]

So, I’m a teensie bit jealous of designers/artists that get free reign to be as creative and original as they want to be. Me, I’m trapped in a very small box.
I’m redesigning our alumni site, and at best it’s an exercise in limitation; the afore-mentioned Alumni community Web product is rigidly designed with a […]

Let’s talk about Web design and color. Thank goodness the heady days of “just because you can” are fading, but I still see sites with the “box ‘o Crayolas” color scheme. You know, where every element has a different color (or worse, every letter in a headline is a different color)? At a glance, you […]

“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. ” - Robert Wilensky, author and professor, UC Berkeley
“If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.” - Susan Dray, Dray & Associates, Inc.
More: […]

I was speaking with my boss yesterday about a redesign we’re planning. I was pointing out the need to survey our key users, so that we could set and validate our design goals. “Art is very subjective,” sez I. “Some people like one thing, others like another. With this redesign, I need to be able […]

Lately, I’ve been seeing a downward trend in information delivery, both literally and figuratively. The text on Web pages is getting smaller and smaller, and it’s gotten pretty annoying. I’ve got pretty good eyes, thanks to the wonders of contacts, but even I’m having to squint to see what’s on the page anymore.
It’s especially bad […]