Based on minimalist “headless” theme by Ozan Onay.

The main reason behind this restyling was to make the site easier to read, with dark text on white background, and at the same time to make it standards compliant. I had to tweak a javascript snippet, and modify all the flash objects included on the posts, but with some help it wasn’t a big deal.

From code.flickr via kottke.

Interesting analysis of client-side processing and data transmission…

From typeface’s website:

Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally.

You still a licensed font for this, but there’s tons of open source fonts out there…

From svn:

…remember that performance optimization is never about the optimal, it’s about the good enough. Performance is a problem when it’s a problem, but otherwise it’s just not relevant.

Recently I had to tweak a site to perform a little bit faster… in the end the gain was not that much, but just taking a look and improving a bit is often all it’s needed.

From Slashdot:

Computers and their strange behaviours…

From svn:

Imagine if Information Architects and Designers worked together with Developers to create a working section or feature of a site. Wireframes can be part of that process but don’t have to be presented. The more real it is the better feedback you’ll receive.

Exactly on spot ! Only problem is, IA aren’t abundant in small companies, and designers end up doing that job, what (usually) leads to poorly thought features and interactions. Design is a visual process, and it’s too easy to look at that shiny polished look that’s appearing like magic on Photoshop and forget that what’s on screen is just a still, a frame from a bigger movie where the main character is played by the user.

Or, Developers take a shot at it, and being good faithful geeks they suffer from the reverse problem: everything is interaction, and every possible solution must be taken in to account, regardless of the look and interaction demanded from the user. We (I fit comfortably on the geek squad) end up making forms that present error messages on the wrong places, with non sequential fields and sometimes even loosing all the information the user just entered.

All this leads to frustration, with one (or more) of the following results:

• the developer that likes to have a polished look and feel, sees a nicely designed page that breaks conventions and is not easily expandable
• the designer sees his/her hard work completely trashed by a dumb geek that can’t see the difference from Helvetica to Georgia
• the user sees a waste of his/her time

Of course, we can work hard and try to make something good, designers, developers, and information architects (even the ones that perform this role in good will). But sometimes it’s hard…

From 24 ways:

For all of the advantages the web has with distribution of content, I’ve always lamented the handiness of the WYSIWYG design tools from the print publishing world. When I set out to redesign my personal website, I wanted to have some of the same abilities that those tools have, laying out pages how I saw fit, and that meant a flexible system for dealing with imagery.

Building on some of the CSS that Eric Meyer employed a few years back on the A List Apart design, I created a set of classes to use together to achieve the variety I was after. Employing multiple classes isn’t a new technique, but most examples aren’t coming at this from strictly editorial and visual perspectives; I wanted to have options to vary my layouts depending on content.

Nice article from Jason Santa Maria

Between the Bunny and the Dork, the great team that produced the Suzuki Splash microsite.

Via Bruce Schneier blog, on Entropic Memes:

What you see here is a photo that never should have been allowed to be taken, and one which provides an amazing, one-of-a-kind glimpse into the world of WWII espionage and counter-espionage.

Very interesting to see how the archive of a news magazine contains so much interesting stuff…

From Waxy:

When you experiment with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. You toss 500 questions into the ether, and the answers instantly start rolling in from anonymous workers around the world. It was great for getting work done, but who are these people? I’ve seen the demographics, but that was too abstract for me.

Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?