I'd also add that some people are attuned to letterforms while many are not. From MyFonts.com, an interview with prolific typographer Nick Curtis. Read his biography and see his fonts here. He also has a huge catalog of free fonts listed at FontFreak, including a wonderful script font, Quiggly Wiggly which is based on type he found on a toothpick wrapper. And I think his website is Nick's Fonts, although in a very contrarian way the site refuses to have any about us or contact information to make sure. But the site does have an excellent list of typography links worth checking out.

This is a fun and enlightening interview with lots of examples and drafts to pick over. And it's a nice life to imagine, especially the ability to spend time researching old type at places like the Smithsonian.

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.
• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

From the Official GMail Blog. I used to create custom email addresses when signing up for email newsletters and other things online to track misuse, until I had to reconfigure my mail to avoid spammers using the same capability to relay spam. So here's another way to use custom email addresses to track misuse, this time with your Google Mail account, which is free and easy to use. Indeed, with Google Docs and a few other of their free tools, you could do most of your computing with a web browser. When Photoshop and Ilustrator are put online, that definitely will be true.

From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox. This should be common sense but you still see right aligned forms (so the form labels are next to the input fields) and navigation links.

We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step."

From A List Apart.

This is a classic debate within web design: how do you make forms as short as possible? Even to the point, as this article argues, that forms disappear.

With forms, what is the minimum data set needed to complete the job the form does? With a Contact Us form, you want enough data to follow up, at the minimum, but you also don't want to waste time calling or emailing tirekickers who will never buy. And you don't want qualified prospects to click away because they're intimidated by too many questions on a form. Where do you strike a balance with these conflicting interests?

A Contact Us form ideally should have at least one or two elements that help pre-qualify the lead. A real estate site might ask if the person is a homeowner (or renter) and when they plan to buy (possible responses might be "Just looking, within 3 months, within 6 months, within a year").

However, the temptation is to dump everything on a form, to make the user answer all sorts of questions. The best approach, in this case, is to design the form so pre-qualify questions are visually separate from the key information needed. Marketing questions might be in their own form CSS fieldset with a friendly headline and short explanatory text. Users can then skip down the form to find the Submit button if they want to do so.

I personally don't think forms should disappear. I do think every element on a form has to have ironclad reasons to be on the form. Otherwise, you should never burden the user. It also helps to put a short note near the Submit button that says, in effect, "We will never sell, trade, or otherwise share your information without your permission" with perhaps a link to your privacy policy. Every form also should have a confirmation page and an automatic email response to let the user know their data was received. Both should include the full list of contact information in the event the user wants to contact you more quickly.

Finally, forms really lend themselves to analysis over time. You should keep track to see if a short version of a Contact Us form results in more leads or if a slightly longer form results in more qualified leads. What you or your client decide works best should be based on actual experience.

From GUUUI.

While I'm a sucker for live and video tape of usability testing, this one may be self-indulgent given my work creating Red Wrangler. Corel seems locked in the classic paradigms of client side software. And ways of thinking about web page and web site publishing. These paradigms don't work, unfortunately.

One solution is what we've done with Red Wrangler, breaking out the web site publishing problems into three parts: content, templates, and navigation links. The latter is sometimes dynamic, sometimes hard-coded in the templates. Typically templates are created by people who know HTML and CSS and we provide support to make it all work easily. Non-technical people typically work only with content using the WYSIWYG editor. When you do create a page, you link to that page either by updating the navigation links and/or linking from other pages. It's not a perfect solution but it avoids the confusion you see in this video.

The only solution I've seen work that is similar to Corel's is Google's publishing product. You can drag and drop pages and the functionality is fairly intuitive. I believe, for example, that Google's product updates any navigation links dynamically based on how you order pages.

However, like Corel, Google's product thinks of web site and web page publishing as a silo. In fact, publishing web sites is part of a larger process. Red Wrangler is unique, so far, because we make it easy to corral in one place all the other related internet marketing activities that go with publishing a web site or a web page. For example, most business sites have a Contact Us page that generates leads and those leads must be gathered for follow-up and marketing with direct mail and email.

In any event, if you're interested in watching paper prototyping, this is an interesting video.

Basically, to target a style so that only Internet Explorer 6 and 7 web browsers will respond, add an asterisk before the definition like this:

If you want to target a style so that only Internet Explorer 6 will respond, add an underline before the definition, like this:

This tip is from Last Child, an excellent resource on CSS. This tip is really cool because it is lightweight and standards-compliant browsers like Firefox and Safari will ignore the hacks.

The real problem with CSS hacks, besides the fact the Microsoft browsers are so poorly coded in some ways, is future maintenance of your CSS code. At the least, you should put a comment next to any CSS element that is targeted solely to an IE browser. That way you can quickly find these hacks in the future and make changes on the day, one hopes, Microsoft releases a truly web standards compliant browser. One that requires no hacks. At worst, do not go for complicated hacks whenever possible. They're more difficult to maintain going forward.

People with fiberglass skills especially welcome. Those masks are hard!"

From Boing Boing, this looks like a fun workshop. It's in October 2008 in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The workshop site is here.

Then again, it's a Friday and quite possibly this workshop is a hoax. You decide.

From Brainstorms & Raves. Her icons here are very clean and muted. Her post includes a link to her Commercial and Free Web Site Icons page which has much more in the way of free and commercial web site icons, blog icons, and symbol icons.

From Grumblemouse Musings. This is a great example how Twitter and similar technologies can be easily used for social action, in this case, or other purposes. Many years ago, when we lived in LA, I remember jumping on the internet to follow an earthquake in Japan. The media had very little news but people posted images and wrote their experiences.

What makes this story much more interesting is that the traditional media was an unwitting participant. People effortlessly adapted social media technologies like Twitter to extend the "scoop" mentality of the news media, their manic drive to get a story first, in this case, using a helicopter to track the actual location of the Olympic torch. I wonder what the editors or corporate owners of NBC think about their involvement.

When someone tells you Twitter is hopelessly narcissistic, think about this protest. There are many ways that instant, bite-sized communications between networks of people can be harnessed in useful ways.

From Daily Writing Tips.

As a writer, this is one of my all time favorite topics. In the same way you have to learn grammar and spelling to write, you also need to learn rhetorical techniques (different ways to shape sentences and phrases) and some number of short cuts to help you edit quickly. One of my shortcuts is to convert gerunds, to change "Jack was running" to "Jack ran." Another trick I use is to look for the same word repeated in two concurrent sentences. For some reason, I often use a word 3-5 times within the space of 2-3 sentences, as if I'm auditioning the word. In those cases, I have to find where the word works best then convert the duplicates.

There's also a class of short cuts that deal with the process of editing. For example, someone recently told me she edits by reading the text backwards, from the last period and sentence to the first word. She finds this makes the text new and different and let's her see all sorts of things reading this way.

From The Content Wrangler. Includes a link to the service, Adobe Photoshop Express. The main site is here.

To me, Adobe Photoshop Express takes online photo sites like Flickr to their next obvious iteration: surround these services with tools to work with the images. The concept works not only for the people who use those sites but also will work for sharing image files with clients. It'll be interesting to see if someone mashes up Adobe's service with the existing photo sites, for example, through partnerships or private label or outright competition with Photoshop Express.

Also, as a rabid Photoshop user since 1990, I'm thrilled to see Adobe took the opportunity to rethink the Photoshop workflow, how you get work done in the application, as part of porting Photoshop to the web. For me, at least, I definitely had to learn the interface. It's great news that Adobe is willing to re-think how people use their software. I'm hopeful they'll tackle Illustrator next and put it online in a more usable form.

It's also not that far a jump to imagine paying $400 for a version of Photoshop and use that version online for years until you want to pay to upgrade to whatever is the latest version. Basically cut out CDs, counterfeit software, and all the rest. Adobe could upgrade its products online, and make the upgrade revenue, yet leave people alone who only need an earlier version of the product. This also is one small step towards moving away from software on a computer to software that is anywhere with a basic standards-compliant web browser.

As if Mac owners need more proof of their creative superiority, this report describes a test where people exposed to the Apple logo found more creative uses for a brick than people exposed to the IBM logo. Well, duh. From Science Daily. Found through a short but interesting status on the Apple logo in general and Steve Jobs' fixation with the New York City's new logo, at OpenLeft.

• HyperSpin
• Pingdom
• Montastic
• ScoutApp

How would you use these services? If you have a web design client with an ecommerce site or any site that they worry is down, these services can be set up to send an email or SMS to their phone if their site crashes. It's also a useful way to confirm that slow business on a site is not due to server hiccups.

The gold-plated solution is to use a web site monitoring service like these with a service like DNS Made Easy and a backup hosting service with your client's site. DNS Made Easy, and similar services, monitors their site and switches to the backup site if there's an interruption then switches back when the main server returns live. (Of course, you're left to synchronize any transactions that might have happened on the backup server with transactions on the main server.)

At the least, a website monitoring service might be a painless way to help your clients get some peace of mind about their sites.

From Escape from Cubicle Nation. One of the hardest parts about being self-employed is how keep a positive attitude on any given day. This article covers one very simple approach.