Create mock floor plans with Home 3D.

A book that might be useful someday.

Interesting perspective on San Francisco from a designer accustomed to living in Sweden.

Does design matter? Punchline: yes, if you're selling good design.

Big screen equals creative thinking? Small screen means focus? Hmm. Maybe.

An extra-thorough reminder that being a coder doesn't necessarily make someone a better designer.

Cogent rebuttal to <a href="http://www.marco.org/441168915">Marco Arment's realism post</a> by Neven Mrgan.

Good advice for any platform.

Looks like a good list to me.

It's incredible how frequently clients mistake wireframes for polished designs. Andy's right, there must be a better way.

More 24 ways. This time, how typeface influences design by Dan Mall.

«For the next time you’re handed a less-than-ideal source image, here are a few of my tricks for isolating the part of the file I want to work with in Photoshop.»

«Use Southwest Airlines as the model. When customers demanded reserved seating, inter-line baggage transfer, and food service, they refused (and only now, are reluctantly providing semi-reserved seating). Why? It is not because they ignore their customers. On the contrary, it is because they understood that their customers had a much more critical need. Southwest realized that what the customers really wanted was low fares and on-time service, and these other things would have interfered with those goals.»

«A couple weeks ago on Twitter I said: “I still maintain the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Has been for years.” A few people agreed, but most didn’t. Some thought it was a joke. I wasn’t kidding.»

«We, the people who design software, must keep in mind that we are not designing for an art gallery. Simply creating beautiful things is just not good enough. We are designing products that will be used by humans who want to reach specific goals. We can’t just make stuff up and hope that it’s good enough. We need to do usability tests, we need to make sure our products are accessible, we need to make sure users can actually reach their goals. Statistical analysis is just one of the tools at our disposal.»

"Ask as many challenging questions as possible, and use those as the basis of your initial proposal and design discoveries. If there isn't a signed contract, you should be teasing out as much information as possible, not providing it in spades. (Unless you're showing relevant case studies.)"

"All of our new research findings support a single conclusion: designing for mobile is hard. Technical accessibility is very far from providing an acceptable user experience. It's not enough that your site will display on a phone. Even touch phones that offer "full-featured" browsers don't offer PC-level usability in terms of users' ability to actually get things done on a website."

"As interaction designers, we strive to eliminate confusion, difficulty, and above all, bad experiences. But you know what? Life is filled with bad experiences. Not only do we survive them, but in our remembrance of events, we often minimize the bad and amplify the good."

"For many people in the web design industry, design projects have a specific start and end date. The end date specifies when the design (the mockups, code, or custom CMS) will be delivered. After the end date, the engagement is over and both parties move on. This way of working grew out of the print industry and as creative folks migrated over to doing more business on the Web they’ve brought this methodology with them. And it makes sense for print…once the print version is printed there isn’t much left to do except work on something else."

What I’m insinuating, is that the details are the embodiment of quality. The details make something special. If you aren’t thinking about the details, you aren’t designing.

"We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM."

"The licensing aspect of using images from The Commons is particularly important, at least for me. I'm aware that often my clients does not own the copyright of the images that they supply to me (whether they know that or not)."

"Lately I’ve been questioning if it isn’t time to move beyond 960 for websites, and if so, what the ideal width may be."

"The purpose of the site is to tell a story or to generate some sort of action. And if the user notices the site, not the story, you've lost."

"As we've long known, what people say they want is one thing. How they actually behave when they're on websites is another."

"You have to make your site memorable. Your site has to speak clearly. Otherwise it may just end up as a web monument awaiting for another beautiful site to take its place."

Another perspective on the Google design process

"Data in isolation makes no guarantees about whether the correct thing is being measured, or whether the measuring itself is skewing the results."

Don't shoot the messenger. "Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” These three words contain a powerful magic, under the cover of which we churn out fixed-width layout after fixed-width layout, perhaps revisiting a design every few years to “bump up” the width once it’s judged safe enough to do so. “Minimum screen resolution” lets us design for a contrived subset of users who see our design as god and Photoshop intended. These users always browse with a maximized 1024×768 window, and are never running, say, an OLPC laptop, or looking at the web with a monitor that’s more than four years old. If a user doesn’t meet the requirements of “minimum screen resolution,” well, then, it’s the scrollbar for them, isn’t it?"

Cut all unnecessary elements.

With the OneNote experimental interface, the topic of ZUIs seems relevant.

Every project has unique requirements. Those requirements must drive the product. Don't make cookie-cutter websites.

"Users have a mental model of how individual applications work. This mental model describes the internal logic the user assumes and expects from your application." Unless your app is revolutionary, you should be matching your users' mental models not upending them.

"Stop treating your clients like children and start treating them as peers. That means listening to their contributions even when it does not sit comfortably with your own views."

"If you rely on the use of patterns, you will never create anything new, and it’s unlikely your solutions will fully address the problems you face."

Sweat the details. It doesn't get any more granular than words on the page.

"The idea of graded browser support is to support all browsers so that your site is usable, accessible and at least reasonably attractive."

Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg discuss the supposed war between designers and developers.

My eyes are numb.

Ah. Clean design, moderately funny satire.

Not unlike the road to expertise in any other field.

Hot, hot infomatics.

See how your text will look in the browser.

Someday I hope to buy these.

No, they shouldn't.