“Some time ago, I read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column When Bad Design Elements Become the Standard. The premise of the column stuck with me—that is, that there are certain design practices that are so ubiquitous on the web that they are de facto standards. I became curious—just what are the design practices on the web that have the highest frequency? And are there design practices that all (or nearly all) sites employ?”

“Designing web-based enterprise software involves creating complex artifacts like architecture wireframes, object models, screen flows, and clickable prototypes in order to articulate aspects of the online experience for product stakeholders. As an interaction designer at Oracle, this is quite the norm for me. This routine, however, was recently disrupted when I was assigned the task of creating icons for some of our products.”

“So, what do we need to know if we want to design usable and enjoyable Websites and portals? In this article, I take a look at some of the usability issues involved with Web applications and portals - maybe this is a starting point for such a thing as portal usability, whatever its final name will be.”

“The Cybershot DSC-F828 was announced on 15th August, this new camera is very obviously a development of the DSC-F717 design. Just under since the F717 and Sony’s flagship prosumer digital camera has certainly undergone a large number of changes, not least of which is the switch from the electronically zoomed five times lens of the F707/F717 to an all new mechanical zoom seven times lens with Carl Zeiss T* coating and a wide angle 28 mm equiv. capability. Sony has also chosen to go with their latest sensor, the all new eight megapixel four-color (RGBE) 2/3” type (8.8 x 6.6 mm) CCD. Ignoring all other changes this makes a formidable combination, a high quality mechanically linked zoom lens combined with the resolution of an eight megapixel CCD. This camera is arguably the most important prosumer digital camera this year.”

“This camera is probably the most fundamentally important step for digital SLR’s since the introduction of the Nikon D1. It will place digital SLR’s into the hands of consumers (with a moderate budget) and will probably also have a very strong negative effect on the $1,000 prosumer digital camera market. Especially considering that the Kit price which includes the new EF-S 18 - 55 mm (3x) lens costs just $100 / €100 more.”

“It’s Scary Books Month here, and there are plenty of things to be scared about: a Bible masquerading as a girl’s fashion magazine; a picture book author so taken with herself that she neglects to mention who did the pictures; and the horrors of stroking text.”

“How do you choose color? One methodology we recently employed aimed at collecting naturally occurring color combinations. Yep, we took images of all of our eyes. Those images were then exported out of Fireworks as a gif which reduced the color palette to a manageable 16 colors. We eliminated repetitive colors like grays, and, using a sharp eye, arrived at one harmonious color palette. Fresh, I tell you.”