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I don’t think we’ll see dark gritty-style story lines like DC’s new Batman movie franchise. That was never Marvel’s style anyway.
Read the full article on CNN Money
Thumbing through his local Swedish newspaper, Göteborg resident Mattias Akerberg found himself troubled by a full-page advertisement for Ikea. It wasn’t that the Grevbäck bookcases looked any less sturdy, or that the Bibbi Snur duvet covers were any less colorful, or even that the names given to each of the company’s 9,500 products were any less whimsical. No, what bothered Akerberg was the typeface. “I thought that something had gone terribly wrong, but when I Twittered about it, people at their ad agency told me that this was actually the new Ikea font,” he recalls. “I could hardly believe it was true.
Time’s 50 Best Websites 2009 lists their top 50 websites with an overview (here is a list only view).
Most of them we know and use everyday. Here are some that sparked my interest.
#5 Popurls pulls together up-to-the-moment headlines from the biggest and most popular news and opinion sites, blogs and vlogs onto one giant Web page for you to graze through [Time article]
#13 Wolfram|Alpha a search engine that can actually understand your questions and try to figure out answers [Time article]
#17 CraigLook a remix to Craigslist.org [Time article]
#22 Etsy the go-to site for handmade fashion, furniture, toys and housewares [Time article]
#23 PropertyShark a free service that culls an incredible amount of data for houses in the big, coastal population centers, plus Texas [Time article]
#33 Musicovery a music-streaming site with a mood-ring interface that works like a soundboard for adjusting your robot DJ’s musical taste (a bit clunky and blinking ads) [Time article]
#34 Spotify will stream virtually anything you want and pay the royalties for you (doesn’t work in my area) [Time article]
#35 SuperCook type the ingredients you have into the site’s search bar and get tons of recipes [Time article]
#39 NameVoyager uses data from the Social Security Administration to get you the number of people with a name over time (oldie but goodie) [Time article]
#41 TripIt forward your flight, car and restaurant reservations to your phone [Time article]
We will never come to a time where everyone uses the same version of the same browser (in the same OS? … on the same resolution!). Most browsers render webpages differently from one another, so us developers are always going to run into issues where code looks right in one browser and not in the other. It can be very cumbersome to have many different browsers on your system, and sometimes impossible to have multiple versions of the same browser. Below is a list of handy tools that developers may want to consider using to help test website compatibility in different browsers, operating systems and resolutions.
CrossBrowserTesting.com
A web-based tool that connects you to a remote computer with different configurations where you can run multiple browsers. The free access is limited to five minutes per session and only has IE and FF available. You can buy credits individually or pay for a monthly subscription for access more browsers and a higher time limit.
Operating Systems: Windows, MAC OS
Browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Camino, Shiira, Sea Monkey, Netscape, AOL
IETester
A free Windows application which allows you to test your website and its functionality in different versions of Internet Explorer. IETester acts like a real browser and allows you to view your source code with a de-bugger (requires a plug-in).
Operating Systems: Windows XP, Vista, 7
Browsers: Internet Explorer 5.5 through 8
(left) good ole’ IE 5.5!
Adobe BrowserLab
A Web-based tool that shows screenshots of your website from different browsers. There is also a Dreamweaver CS4 extension that tests functionality. Currently, there are limited testing accounts, but you can follow BrowserLabs on Twitter to see when spots open up.
Operating Systems: Windows XP, Mac OS X
Browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari
Microsoft SuperPreview
An application that checks how your website looks in Internet Explorer. The free download allows you to compare renderings of IE6 with whatever other version of IE you have installed on your machine.
Operating Systems: Windows
Browsers: Internet Explorer 6, 8 running in 7 compatibility mode, 8
BrowserShots
A free web-based tool that takes screenshots of your website from many different browsers. Your request gets put into a queue that you can bookmark to check back on later and download in a zip.
Operating Systems: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BSD
Browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Camino, Sea Monkey, Netscape, Avant, Flock, K-Meleon, Minefield, Dillo, Epiphany, Galeon, Iceweasel, Kazehakase, Konqueror, Minefield
Xenocode Browser Sandbox
A free web-based tool that allows you to test your website in different browsers. Once you download the plug-in, you can access the browsers and other applications.
Operating Systems: Windows
Browsers: Internet Explorer 6 to 8, Firefox 2 to 3, Chrome, Opera, Safari
Other free tools you may want to consider:
Litmus (Free is limited to FF2 & IE7)
CloudTesting (Seven day free trial)
netRednerer (IE only)
ieCapture (IE only)
BrowsrCamp (Mac OS, Safari only)
Multi-Safari (Mac OS, Safari only)
There are business goals for a website and there are audience goals. A truly successful website design considers both equally.
Kayla from Webitect.net posted a great article on the art of user-centered web design.
User-centric web design is a method of web design where the content, design, and usability factors are all placed in accordance to the target audience’s needs and goals — a design that is centered around the user. This article will cover the basics of what user-centric web design is, and how to achieve it.
I love the open credits of movies. I get alot of animation and design inspiration from watching well design credit sequences. Many movies have amazing animation and graphic design. Almost every Pixar movie is a case study in creative title typography and animation, check out the creativity in The Incredibles. The opening for HBO’s Carnivale is friggin amazing, its too bad it was canceled at the end of the second season. Catch me if you can open credits are more memorable than the movie for me. Fight Club?! fantastic movie and amazing credit/animation intro…
Well consider my mind blown when I discovered there was a site that has a large collection of movie title typography from the 1920′s to today. It might not be the full animations, but its fascinating to browse the time line of typography of cinema.
Gene Smith author of Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web offers a very well written excerpt entitled: Return on Investment: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging Systems.
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