You might consider yourself knowledgeable, but you’ve probably never heard of this powerful communication and design technique that I’m about to share. I’m sure you’ve seen it in practice but never knew it was working on you — that’s how good it is. I’m here to shed light on this technique so that you can use it as an approach to your design or writing.

See what I did there? I introduced you to dissonance by using the technique itself. If used correctly, it can enhance your approach to design and copywriting in certain projects. Welcome to designing with dissonance!

UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don't hold true. And you don't have to take our word for it, we'll show you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.

This page used to contain a list of links to various CSS-related resources. Because of many changes to basic CSS techniques and methods since it was first built in 2003, the former list has been retired. Instead, here are other resources that offer a wide variety of modern tips and inspiration.

For a while now, I’ve had a dream. My work in the last 8 or 9 years has been heavily focused around education, whether I’ve been commissioning and editing technical books to help people create cool stuff with technology, training new employees at the various companies I’ve worked for, or editing and writing tutorial articles to help people use Opera’s software. I am passionate about the Web too, and a big believer in open web standards. I wanted to do my bit to help make the Web a better place, and I think this comes back to education, whether that’s teaching people how to collaborate and have more respect for one another, or teaching them how to make their web sites work across platforms and devices, and be accessible to people with disabilities. Web standards are key to the latter, so I decided to try putting my time and energy into something that would help increase the adoption of web standards on the Web today and in the future. It has been floating around my head for a while now, but it has finally come to fruition at Opera—many thanks to my wonderful employers for paying me to do this! One of my dreams has finally been realised.

So in this article I introduce to you the product of a lot of hard work over the last several months (by myself and a lot of other people)—the Web Standards Curriculum, a course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are—it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge. I am mainly aiming this at universities, as I believe the standards of education in web standards to be somewhat lacking at many universities. I’ve heard tales of students being marked down for using web standards in their coursework, because the marking schemes are so outdated; I’ve also heard tales of employers despairing because when they interview university graduates for web–related positions, they find out that the graduates really don’t have a clue about real world web development. If you’re at a progressive university that does teach web standards in a reasonable fashion, then I tip my hat to you—get in touch!

Are you looking for a basic understanding of how UIs are created on the web or who wants to brush up outdated UI development knowledge? Or maybe you'd like to learn more about the medium you're designing for and gain basic tools for prototyping designs? Do you want a better understanding of the web and how Google makes the pages that are its face to the world? If so, "HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the Ground Up" is for you.

Welcome to HTML Dog, the web designer's resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages.

Welcome to our Complete CSS Guide.

This Guide is a reference to all of CSS 2.1, the W3C recommended standard for web page appearance, as of July 2008. We will also cover some aspects of CSS 3, currently a work in progress.

I made Fillerati because I grew tired of reading "Lorem ipsum..." on every new design I was working on. It's built with HTML5 and CSS2/CSS3, and consequently is best viewed in a modern browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. Interactivity is thanks to the jQuery JavaScript library, served via the Google Ajax Libraries API. Custom fonts for the logo and author/title (Tangerine & IM Fell Great Primer respectively) are rendered with the Google Font API. Server side the app is coded in Python and deployed on Google App Engine. Domain management, email, etc. provided by Google Apps. The source for the public domain filler text is provided by Project Gutenburg (not sanitized—use at your own risk!). The background tile is from Tileables; getting stuff onto your clipboard from Zero Clipboard. Designed, built and deployed in 48 hours. If you have any questions, comments, or you'd like to suggest an author or title, you can reach me at michael@fillerati.com.

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.