10 User Centered Design blogs you ought to read December 6, 2007

Just thought I’d share my favorite UCD blogs with you. These are sites I read to keep in touch with the research on usability. They also make for very interesting reading.

Experience Dynamics: Frank spiller’s blog is something that every User experience professional should read. Frank has the happy knack to hitting the nail on the head with every post. Very practical info out there.

Boxes and Arrows:  In the words of David Moore, Boxes and Arrows is an “Intelligent peer-written journal on information architecture and user-centered design. Lots of practical information as well as conceptual back-up”.

Seven87: With a unique outlook on usability, marketing and customer experience, Charlie Nichols presents usability in a business environment.

Webword: John S. Rhodes operates the WebWord Blog, providing

Information Architecture simplified November 17, 2007

Our user experience team in office decided to form a small group that promotes the awareness and usage of usability. With this focus, we got to work brainstorming on the best way to put usability, interaction design and information architecture, in laymen’s terms.

We decided the best way to do this would be to start a newsletter. For the articles, we came up with the theme of “Weave a story”,

Free icon sets, fonts for the designer October 29, 2007

Take a look at these resources of free icon and font sets.  Its the designer’s proverbial pot of gold. Whats more… there are pointers to places where you can find even more.

Iconsets

Silk Icons: “Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons. There are a large variety of icons, you’re sure to find something that tickles your fancy. The USP of this iconset is that they are too neat to ignore.

Sweetie Icons: Another adorable set of pixel icons with the relevant photoshop files included. 

CSS styled tables October 26, 2007

Tables can be a nightmare to deal with, especially because they have become the mainstay of many a developer who throws the standards to the winds. Of course if tables are used to do what they are meant to do, displaying tabular data, they can make life a lot easier.

 Enter TABLECLOTH. Table cloth takes good well formed code and applies styling and behavior to it and voila!!! You have a styled and active table.

Other css styled tables

 The ever enterprising Veerle has a css styled table of her own. http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/a_css_styled_table/

An excellent example of a striped table is available at Validweb http://validweb.nl/artikelen/javascript/better-zebra-tables/

Fresh color schemes at your fingertips September 29, 2007

Have you ever hit a dead end when it came to choosing a color scheme for your website or logo? No worries. There’s this nifty little site called Daily Color Scheme, that is purely dedicated to color.