Tucked away as part of the new Open Social initiative launched last week, Google engineers offered an interesting best practices document of social design dos and don’ts.
A List Apart has published the findings of their web design survey. Yours truly took the survey back in April when it was first announced as I found it to be a very interesting idea — and because I had a few minutes to spare. I recommended flipping through it. The survey asked questions about gender, education, location, salary etc. Take a looksie and see if you make as much as everyone else, and if not, ask Michael for a raise!
A wonderfully dry interview with Mike and I for the Horizon Interactive Awards. Read it or you’re fired.
As many of know, Outlook 2007 has taken great leaps backward in its CSS support for HTML emails. Anti-trust issue? Nope. Enhanced security? Nah. It’s actually an attempt to try and get the emails to look consistent between Word and Outlook. Since so many designers use Word to lay out HTML comps, this is very useful. Oh wait.
So,is there anything that can be done? Well, leaders of the Microsoft/WaSP Task Force encourage you to chime in to this discussion with links to previously working emails that now look like the morning after prom in Outlook 2007. Hopefully, things will change and change fast. But that’s not the nature of MicroSoft. They have still yet to follow several standard conventions as laid down by the W3C for JavaScript - but that’s an entirely different, equally boring, blog post all together.
I am not bashing MS per se, but it’s a shame that business reasons are the basis for technological decisions at times. Oh well. My web mail doesn’t even allow HTML anyway.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the book, The Web Design Business Kit, 2.0. If only it were as easy as the author makes it sound:
Tips & Tricks: Avoiding Pesky Clients
You’ll pick up pesky clients here and there as you grow your client numbers. Pesky clients will drain your energy, money, focus, creativity, morale, and more. So, how can you avoid them?
These are the characteristics of previous clients who have turned out to be less than fun for my business:
Once we’ve identified a client as potentially pesky using these criteria, we perform a risk assessment in order to ascertain what benefit our business will receive for the amount of resources we’ll need to invest in them. Our risk assessment involves four factors:
By reviewing the red flags I mentioned above, and undertaking this simple four-step risk assessment, you’ll have a clear picture of whether a client will be a dream or a nightmare.
Don’t hesitate to reject the person or company you identify as a potential pesky client. You know exactly what a pesky client can do to your business!
They’re Beautiful!™ is a lovingly detailed virtual flower delivery service. As with online greeting card services, users are encouraged to send greetings to their loved ones. However, instead of sending a card, the person sends a one-of-a-kind bouquet of flowers that the recipient can keep “alive” through attentive care.
Moo is on to something. They dream up new tools that help people turn their virtual content into beautiful print products. Their printing service allows users to pull info and images from social networks like Flickr and Myspace to create highly customizable bcard and note designs.
