web design

No more bullshit. Join the revolution.

We're done with the tired old fontstacks of yesteryear. Enough with the limitations of the web, we won't have it. It's time to raise our standards. Here, you'll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.

A few moments ago, shortly after President Obama took the oath of office, a switch was flipped and a new website for the Whitehouse was unveiled. Since the 90's there have been more than a handful of upgrades, updates, and redesigns to the President's website but this new site is a vast improvement over the others. Not due to the wonderful design or the fact that each page validates, those improvements are nice but they are small and mostly unseen merits compared to the bigger improvements to the space.

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One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

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Meanwhile, anyone who is looking to succeed using the Internet as a main channel for talking to clients, customers, and constituents should follow closely the work Macon and his team are doing. The model they are following is one that can certainly be used beyond government work.

This is awesome.

People used to trick others into clicking links to goatse.cx and other shock sites. Now it's Rick Astley. Even 4chan which not that long ago was full of gore and borderline kiddie porn is fascinated by a cute hyperactive girl from Gaia Online. Torrent sites are no longer about kinky porn - they're mostly about downloading TV series so you can watch them without following TV schedules, just a more convenient version of TiVo.

That part about wget is so right.

A good argument against trying to build web apps that closely resemble desktop apps. Google gets this -- consider that Gmail is beloved, but MobileMe's webmail is not.

With the recently launched WordPress 2.7, bloggers now marvel at how clean, beautiful and usable is the new interface. But do you remember what it used to be a couple of months ago? For those who started using WordPress years ago, can you remember what your admin area looked like?

Since I have an archive of all versions of WordPress on my development computer for function implementation historical purpose, I thought it could be fun and interesting to install them all and get reminded of what we used to use.

choose widths:
_ columns
_ column width
_ column margins
_ outer margins

Basic web accessibility is a known commodity now. Web applications can almost be made accessible; eventually web application accessibility will also be a known commodity, too. Those are clear wins.

But nearly ten years after specifications first required it, online captioning still pretty much does not exist. That's probably going to change, and the way it's going to change is by government regulation.

Does that strike you as unthinkable? Do you view the web as a libertarian place where old-media laws barely apply, if at all? Well, prepare for a shock. Legislation is probably coming. And not only should you let it happen, you should get behind it--but only if it's done using open standards.

This incredible video called "Web 2.0... the Machine is Us/ing Us," is deeply moving and incredibly smart. The creator is Michael Wesch, an assistant Cultural Anthropology Prof at Kansas State U, and he has strung together a bunch of animations, text, and screenshots in order to tell the story of "Web 2.0" -- and why it matters, and how it's changing the world. Link

Local high-quality mirror of Web 2.0 ... the Machine is Us/ing Us

Have you seen Scribd.com? If you haven’t consider yourself lucky. You can try to avoid it, but every once in a while, for reasons I can’t really understand, an idiot will post a link to a document there.

The main advantage of excellent typography lies in its ability to be both attractive and functional at the same time. Although images communicate more vividly, text presentation can impress visitors with its sharpness and precise geometrical forms and curves. Consequently, chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective -- and there are dozens of outstanding examples of how the latter can be achieved.

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In this article we present over 35 examples of big, "loud" and yet elegant typography in web design; some listed designs are Flash-based, and in some cases designs are based not only upon typography, but also upon some visual elements.