ALA 186: Triple Issue

In a triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

A Better Image Rotator by Dan Benjamin: The first image rotator made it easy to generate a random image on a web page, even if you had never worked with PHP before. The new, more powerful (but still dead easy) version uses a simple configuration file to create custom links, alt tags, titles, and even CSS styles for each image. Plus it handles differently sized images without a hiccup. Enjoy!

Enhance Usability by Highlighting Search Terms by Brian Suda and Matt Riggott: Google’s cache offers users a copy of your website with their search terms highlighted. You can do the same thing and make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for — whether they're coming from an external search engine or your own site search — by making their search terms easy to spot.

Better Invoices for Better Business by Kevin Potts: Invoices that obfuscate information, incorrectly state terms or arrive incomplete can be a massive headache for all parties. Strategic timing and attractive presentation are also important, as they can help “soften the blow” by making your invoice seem less like a stale demand for money and more like a friendly letter.

Previously in The Daily Report...

Safer than Kabul

Citicorp Center is declared a terror target, and I’m on my way to a meeting a few blocks north of it.

Only defenestrate...

Douglas Bowman’s “Throwing Tables Out the Window” is a compelling crash course and proof of concept on the business benefits of designing with web standards.

The New Samaritans

Robert Andrews summarizes an emerging “good samaritan” phenomenon in which independent web designer/developers, frustrated by a hard-to-use or inaccessible site, voluntarily rework the site in question, “right under embarrassed proprietors’ noses.” The work, typically performed for free, most often focuses on front-end improvements to key top-level pages. Such makeovers form a roadmap for turning a confusing or inaccessible or bloated site into a more usable, accessible, and streamlined one. Yet rarely do potential corporate benefactors take advantage of the free work done on their behalf...

Faces We Love: Heine’s Tribute

This family of eight fonts, legible at even the smallest sizes, is perfect for designs requiring an aged or antique feeling.

Architectural Digest vs. This Old House

How vs. why in web design. (ALA No. 184 and drop-down menus.) When web designers discuss their craft, they almost always focus on how to do a thing, rather than what things should or should not be done. As an industry, we are more like “This Old House” than Architectural Digest.

Production for Use

To understand and evaluate any design, you must consider the use context for which it was created. A case study and lessons therein. The beginnings of a broader approach to understanding web and interface design (including the relative importance of web standards).

Clarendon is the new Helvetica

The quirky slab serif has been quietly undergoing a renaissance similar to that enjoyed by Helvetica in the 1990s.