Journal

Use cases, functional specs, interface specs, site maps, you name it. I have yet to come across any of these documents that are usable. I’m as guilty of this as the next person, but if our job as information architects, interaction designers, or…

It’s often difficult to express my ideas on business practices, but this article from January 2006 about The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart really captures some of the ideas I firmly believe in and support. it’s relatively easy for a business to canibalize…

One of my favorite quotes based on the proliferation of superfluous AJAX and DOM Scripting is simple, but oh so appropriate. It’s from the original Jurassic Park way back in 1993. …your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they…

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve found it useful to include a color glossary at the top of CSS files. Think of it as a key for hex colors. Not only does this makes it easier to quickly find the color you’re looking for, but it inevitably helps…

it’s time for the second installment of Trick Your TextMate. We’re going to explore snippets and learn how you can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts and tab triggers to cut down on those superfluous keystrokes. One of the features of TextMate…

You always hear that you’re supposed to write what you know. Well, I know floating. Spring/Summer is here, and that means one thing to me. It’s time to make some trips down to the river to go floating. We’ve done this religiously pretty much since…

I was recently reminded while working on our panel for SXSW that accessibility isn’t just about screen readers, markup guidelines, or alt tags. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as most of us ever get with accessibility. It’s good that most of us are…

Note: Refresh has taken on a life of its own in the last 10 years. Refreshing Cities is the best source of current information on active groups in cities around the world. I’m shocked every time I turn around that our little Refresh has been organically…

While back-end technology has become more and more abstracted and powerful with frameworks like .Net, Rails, and their Java counterparts, the possibilities with front-end technology have grown increasingly complex. The web needs more front-end…

Things are busy, but it’s finally time to announce something that has been occupying much of my free time for the past week or so. A long time in the making and the brain child of Eris, Refresh Dallas is finally having our first real meeting. The First…

We spend a lot of time designing headers with logos, navigation, search, and more. Why not do the same with footers?

There’s a lot to consider when setting out to be a freelance web developer, so I pulled together some quick thoughts from my experiences over the years.

Heading out on your own to start a solo freelancing business can get complicated. These are some of the things that I’ve found are helpful to think about ahead of time.

The length of your instructional text is almost always inversely proportionate to the usability of your product. Unfortunately, I’ve been saying this for so long that I can’t remember if I stole the idea, modified the idea, or came up with it all on my…

I’m always intrigued by our industry. In particular, I think it’s incredible how web developers and designers are collaborating and sharing in ways that are unimaginable in other industries. We learn something new, a competitive advantage if you will,…

In business, design should enhance and support web site goals rather than be the goal. Design involves so much more than just pretty visuals, and visual design is not the single most important aspect of web development. The same goes for usability,…

As time moves on, it’s almost impossible to purchase a product without reading online reviews. Almost every online store now offers customer reviews of products. These are people who have actually used your products, and care enough to say something. To…

I offered up a subset of my Visio wireframe stencils over at YourTotalSite in the recent past, and there seemed to be some pretty good interest in seeing more. While I don’t have any wireframe examples to show the world just yet, I can do the next best…

After writing about the blending of design and programming the other day, it really got me thinking. I really think web design, and almost everything in the world is just one big balancing act. In politics, for every extreme conservative, there’s…

I’m fascinated by the increasing frequency with which designers are becoming interested in programming. It seems that every day I’ll run across another designer who wants to write code. Now, I’m not talking about hacking a couple spots of code here and…