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

Web 2.0 Master’s Degree! November 29, 2007

Apparently I have earned myself a master’s degree in Web 2.0! You might wanna try it out yourself… its fun. You get to figure out the trademark features of web 2.0 sites. It will make you think for sure!

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. 

The design curve October 28, 2007

When there is a site to design, there are a lot of people who become information architects at the drop of a hat. Everyone considers himself/herself an expert on the topic. All of a sudden the designer becomes a mere puppet and is reduced to someone who simply executes everyone’s ideas in the form of a web page.

Matthew Inman in an article on http://www.seomoz.org/ calls this the design curve. According to him the more the wrong kinds of people get involved with the process, the worse the design gets.