monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

I’m working on designing my first ecommerce check-out page, and I’m looking for samples of well-designed pages. Any suggestions?

(I know, I’ve been doing web design and production for 10 years, and I’m working on my first ecommerce site. Some of us are just lucky. )

Oh, man, this does my designer’s heart good. Elements OF Typographic Style Applied to the Web. When I was first starting out in Graphic Design I was studying print design, as there was no Intarweb yet to speak of. Typography was near and dear to my heart, and I could spend an afternoon looking at type samples. Web typography gets us back somewhat to those days when there were rules on how you used type, because they worked.

Welie.com: patterns in Interaction Design. Also, time-tripper.com: UI Patterns and Techniques

A new implementation of tabs in CSS using standard semantic markup: Tabtastic [via SimpleBits]

To Read - A List Apart: What’s The Problem and Uses Cases Part II: Taming Scope.

When web projects go wrong, the cause can often be traced to misunderstanding and miscommunication about scope: what you thought your client wanted and what they thought they were getting doesn’t match. The later in a project this is discovered, the costlier for someone it can become…

Ok, now that I’ve gotten the hysterical hyperbole out of the way, this is what I mean: reading well-designed web sites in an RSS read does nothing to stimulate my creative juices. I realized this today after opening a post from StopDesign in Firefox and going “sooooo beautiful! I should look at Doug’s site more often!” It was then that I realized that reading all my sites in |NetNewsWire|, efficient as it is, is robbing me of the creative kick in the pants I get from browsing and reading gorgeous, beautifully-crafted, web-standards-based websites.

So, I started working on an applescript that will take any unread headlines in my “Design” group in NetNewsWire, open them in the browser, then mark them as read. This will keep me from perusing them in NNW, and force me to go check them out in the browser, hopfully giving myself the shot in the arm my design sense needs. Once I manage to get it working, I’ll post it here.

Update: Open Unread In Group applescript. Change “Design” at the top to the name of whatever group you want to check for unread headlines to open.

A couple of us are going to Edward Tufte’s one-day course at the end of this month - I am seriously excited about this. Part of the swag is three of Tufte’s books. W00t!