With proper documentation for clients and content editors fellow developers to follow, you have a better chance at seeing your interface stay beautiful. Future designers and developers who work on the interface will have an easier time adapting, thus making their lives easier and potentially saving time and money.

Looks to be an interesting read from A List Apart on the type of documentation I’ve been trying to write for some time.

Thanks to the publishing power of Jadu’s Web Content Management System for Government, Manchester City Council has been able to provide advanced Web 2.0 features and enhanced public services to the community, such as advanced Google Maps, social book-marking of content and dynamic A-Z services.

In the local government category, Manchester comes ahead of the other favourites Camden, Glasgow, Hounslow and Blackburn. Winners in other categories include the BBC, Amazon, Google and Tesco.

Matt Walton, head of online channel development at BT, said: “With the BT Online Excellence Awards, we’ve given consumers the opportunity to recognise the websites they regularly use – whether that’s for shopping, entertaining the kids or getting information from their local authority.

“That’s where they’re different: we weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the sites – just why users like them. As we suspected, the range of products or information available was the most important factor, followed by how easy it was to use.”

Leader of Manchester City Council Councillor Richard Leese said:”Our website combines a good mix of news and information with a range of services that people can access and order online. We use our website as one of the vital channels to make contact with and to hear from our communities, so we are delighted to receive this award.

“However we don’t want to stand still; we want to carry on improving so please do log on to let us know your views.”

“manchester.gov.uk is a milestone in Local Government websites. The website provides a great service to the people of Manchester – and to be recognised alongside Google, Amazon and the BBC for excellence is one of the highest accolades for Manchester and Jadu.” – Suraj Kika, CEO, Jadu

Lancashire County Council’s Children’s Services website – whatnow.co.uk also received fourth place in the ‘Best Kids Website’ category, just behind other winners including the BBC and Disney.

For more details about the BT Online Excellence Awards and the results, go to www.bt.com/onlineexcellence

This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.

This solution is known to work in:

• IE 5.5+
• Firefox 1.5+
• Safari 2+

Shaun Inman, we salute you.

This myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

Jacob was saying pretty much the same thing way back in 1997.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the initial direct contact with clients during the discovery meeting is likely the most important moment in the life of a project. While most of my previous reference in this regard has been toward the establishment of designer competence and development of fellowship with the client, there is another vital aspect to this initial meeting: the specific questions asked.

It’s all about discovery.

It works in all the major browsers – Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, IE6+ and Safari. On older browsers, it’ll degrade and your visitors won’t notice a thing. Looks lovely.

A successfull bulletproof image-based button should:

• Automatically grow horizontally to fit any amount of text
• Grow horizontally and vertically if text size is increased or if the text wraps to multiple lines
• Retain its appearance within reasonable limits
• Be able to have rounded (or other non-square) corners
• Have no unclickable areas
• Be readable when images are disabled

A bag-full of mark-up required but pretty neat.

More site settings as the British Dyslexia Association see things.

ワンクリックアワード

Stop with the scrappy type and set it down to a baseline, man.

Note to self. Mr Vinh’s image captions hanging there on the left are very sweet. An idea’s an idea.

Among the more counterintuitive characteristics of art and design is the fact that these endeavors are governed by rules. The rules of artistry (and therefore design) are inviolate and unchanging. If you don’t obey the rules, your results will be boring, uninspiring, uncommunicative, and less than compelling. In short: poor art or poor design.

Please read.

An answer to overcoming the ’stuck’ with design dilema can often be simply taking a break or going for a walk (to relax, not to carry on brooding). If this not enough and your muse seems forever departed, kick off your shoes, pump up the text-size, lean back and read.

“O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention” – William Shakespeare

Fighting Off Design Stagnation by Jason Santa Maria and 8 Web Design Tactics to Help You When You’re Stuck by Matthew Inman.

“Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus”

- I Am The Walrus, 1967, Lennon-McCartney

In Andy Clarke’s article ‘Creating Inspired Design Part 1: I Am The Walrus‘, he talks about merging ideas and inspiration in different and unexpected ways to push design for the web.

The man is mad. Which is why his voice is so valuble. Bloody good stuff.

As web design is typography, this should be an interesting read for all interface designers out there.

From the ever brilliant PingMag, please enjoy ‘Iranian Typography Now‘. Wonderful work and great article.

The past few years have been quite exciting for Iranian graphic designers. As Iran’s design gains more international attention, the graphic designers face new challenges and rewards.

The country has a rich history of visual arts and moreover the better part of this heritage consists of calligraphy.

Some of the work highlighted is just beautiful. The work by Mehdi Saeedi, from the “The Blind Owl” typography exhibition is nothing short of eye-opening.

“Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.”

This a wonderful and interesting article from the people over at iA. Read it, it’s very readable.

In the spring of 2006, a group of designers intimately familiar with the organization and development of design pattern resources discussed the current and future role of design patterns in the real world. We talked about defining and documenting patterns, the context required to communicate how patterns should be applied, what it takes to develop a design language, and how disparate lists of patterns could converge. The first question we answered was “What are Design Patterns?” You can find this conversation thread on Luke Wroblewski’s blog.

“I’ve prepared two example documents to show the difference. In Example 1, the layout is fully fluid, so #header and #footer are 100 % wide. In Example 2 the layout is 40 ems wide, and the widths of both #header and #footer are set to that same value.” – Roger

Both examples also demonstrate elastic layout as well as graceful degradation. As maybe expected there are comments regarding IE6 but I think it’s still pretty safe.

“Every art director, copywriter, planner, account person and client should read it. It will make you better at your job.” – Paul Belford, Creative Review.

“This is a book about typography and photography. About the hijacking of European design theory… But mainly this is a book about The Idea. Challis’s book is a parade of huge, timeless ideas, how they came to be and what they meant.” – Marty Cooke, The One Club.

The Book.

“If you really want to be a great art director then this is the one art director you have to study. I really enjoyed it. It’s educational, instructive and most importantly, entertaining. A real tour-de-force.” – John Hegarty, founder partner Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

I must buy.

“Challis has set a standard that will be difficult to match… providing a rich portrait of context and marketing conditions that influenced the strategic directions the campaigns took.” – Anthony Vagnoni, Print magazine.

“Anyone involved in design or advertising should read this.” – David Stuart, co author of ‘A smile in the mind.’ and co-founder of the design group, The Partners.

l’image parfaite

Our goal is to help people locate, remix and republish open and copyleft images. We aren’t just about ‘free stock photos’ for designers, but also about helping educators, bloggers and digital artists find photos they can use without fear of “the man”.

Now stock.xchng is good and until now my main source but…

We (Yotophoto) index various sources of free imagery on the web including Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto.

Go try Yotophoto. It rocks.

The whole site is beautiful, explore more of the work including the Coke advert. Very talented.

Go read the fifty.

The original Kettering website was launched in June 2005 and was, to our knowledge, the very first UK local authority site to completely use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for layout and presentation.

The redesign of www.kettering.gov.uk began in mid April of this year culminating in it going live mid May. The purpose to increase the use of Web Standards and help the site become more accessible as well as breathing some freshness and vitality into the site design, as it’s first incarnation was looking pretty tired.

The CSS World Awards are, to quote the website, to “recognize the work done by developers that build websites using CSS. To heighten the awareness of the companies using Web Standards.”

With ten different categories, Kettering is one of ten sites nominated under ‘Institutions’. For each category there will be one winner and two finalists with the awarded sites being announced at the beginning of July. The awards are truly international, with nominated sites coming from, well, all over the world.

I really am happy the site has been nominated, I am designer whom sometimes lacks belief, so these (very) occasional pats on the back do me good. I can’t see it winning, looking at the other nine in the group but regardless of that, I’m still chuffed to buttons!

Sites are selected for recognition based on content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall experience.

Stuart Harrison, Webmaster at Lichfield DC was, “thrilled that www.lichfielddc.gov.uk has been officially recognised as one of the best in the world by the Webby Awards.”

For a local council to be recognised along with the best of the private sector is an amazing achievement.