The most crucial things in web design are:
Whitespace: Stuff needs room to breathe. Don’t pack things too tight.
Font size: Reading on a screen hurts. Make the smallest fonts big enough to read.
Contrast: Don’t make small fonts worse with gray on white or vice-versa.
Contrast 2: Visited vs. Unvisited links, and headlines vs. not headlines all need [...]
Like “the boy who cried wolf” modals demand that you stop what you’re doing right now to figure out what the hell they want.
They should only be used when software needs to stop the show for an emergency, but lately they’re being used for basic forms and messages. Like Flash sites that reinvent browser scrollbars [...]
Many organizations worry that if they put their clout behind an individual, he or she will gain notoriety and power and eventually double-cross the organization. So, instead, they go for bland.
— Seth Godin on How (not to) pick a company spokesman
Those organizations are right to worry. Scoble was happy at Microsoft, but he built so [...]
Turn off WiFi and 3G when you’re not using the internet.
It seems like the new 3G iPhone’s battery life sucks, but this is not technically true.
What’s happening is that we’re A) using our phones more and B) using them like computers.
With an unlimited data plan and an a pocket of full of internet applications, your [...]
It’s too bad that the search engine optimization field is so shady. Most practitioners are ethical consultants providing a valuable service, but the noisy ones are bad apples who promise that if you’ll follow their 247 step plan, and fork over hundreds of dollars a month, they’ll initiate you into their SEO mystery cult.
In other [...]
Good search engine optimization (SEO) usually involves making it easier for both Google’s computers and humans to understand your content. Pretty Permalinks are an example of this:
Bad permalink: http://nathanbowers.com/?p=502 It doesn’t tell Googlebots (or humans) anything about the content of the page. Also, search engines penalize URLs with “?” in them because they indicate the [...]
My last post was about the iPhone buying experience. Seth Godin blogged about the marketing/economics behind the “scarcity” of “event” launches and described the solution more succinctly than I did: “Use the internet to form a queue.”
Preordering and prequalifying to minimize waiting and maximize satisfaction is such an obvious solution I just can’t believe that [...]
My epic 5 hour iPhone buying experience, and how it could have been MUCH better.
Two abstract 3×5 index card drawings both before and after coloring.
7.5.08.D
First time I’ve used the color markers to fill in fine lines. Scanning hurts this one, it looks better on paper.
See also: previous large scale color piece.
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