Category: Design

  • Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor

    Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor

    CSS Sculptor includes 30 of the most common web page layouts—fixed-width, liquid, elastic, and combinations thereof—coded the way Eric Meyer would code them.

  • San Francisco, here you come

    San Francisco, here you come

    I last left San Francisco on September 10th, 2001. It was a good day for flying….

  • What is Art Direction (No. 9)

    What is Art Direction (No. 9)

    A provocative poster deconstructed. How art direction communicates wordlessly, and how it differs from design. Disabled veterans, Gap ads, and James Gandolfini.

  • Don’t design on spec

    Don’t design on spec

    Happy Cog receives its share of RFPs, and sometimes these requests stipulate that our proposal include design work. Even if the project looks promising, we just say no.

  • Staying creative

    Staying creative

    Everyone is creative. But some stay that way longer. How can you designers, writers, and the like, stay motivated and productive? (Plus: When the client says, “Make it like eBay,” what exactly does that mean?)

  • A Sale of Two Cities

    A Sale of Two Cities

    Join an amazing line-up of talented designers, developers, and thinkers for An Event Apart San Francisco — the final Event Apart show of 2007.

  • The King of Web Standards

    The King of Web Standards

    A new article in Business Week might help designers who aren’t named Jeffrey Zeldman sell web standards to their bosses or clients.

  • Words, words, words

    Words, words, words

    Writing has always been the beating heart of online user experience. It is also the part that designers and developers are least likely to study, discuss, or consider. The exceptions to this rule are almost…

  • For web developers and iPhone users

    For web developers and iPhone users

    Tools for web developers. Tricks for iPhone and iPod users.

  • What Apple copied from Microsoft

    What Apple copied from Microsoft

    Apple has learned the marketing psychology lesson that Microsoft got first. For many consumers, convenience is of greater value than choice. A platform built of parts that work together seamlessly beats a self-curated collection of…

  • Link ‘n Park

    Link ‘n Park

    A lifetime’s worth of comic book covers, deep thoughts on ubiquitous digitization, Spool on lessons learned when new features tank, and much more.

  • ALA 241: better UI, scriptless trick ponies, and the deathly hallows

    ALA 241: better UI, scriptless trick ponies, and the deathly hallows

    Unlearn a web interface design convention that causes users grief, and learn how to create a scrolling, fixed/liquid hybrid layout without using JavaScript (not that there’s anything wrong with it).

  • Better know a speaker: Dan Cederholm

    Better know a speaker: Dan Cederholm

    What’s up with Dan Cederholm these days?

  • My Ding-a-Links

    My Ding-a-Links

    Fight for your right to publish. Ponder a Google-Wikipedia mashup, recycle old ipods and cell phones, generate diagonal backgrounds (with or without gradients), study Hitchcock’s visual storytelling techniques, and more.

  • Let there be web divisions

    Let there be web divisions

    Almost no one who makes websites works in their company or organization’s web division—because almost no company or organization has a web division. That void on the org chart is one reason we have so…