American Airlines fires AA.com designer for reaching out to customer 1.) Graphic designer and blogger has bad experience with AA.com, 2.) Designer mocks up AA.com page design and blogs about it, 3.) AA.com UX designer emails blogger with info about challenges the AA.com web team faces, 4.) Blogger posts UX designer's response (anonymously), 5.) American Airlines figures out who UX designer is and fires him/her for talking. [more inside]
posted by tippiedog on Nov 17, 2009 - 158 comments

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color vision deficiency. The color blind are unable to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites. The patterns and examples on We Are Color Blind help developers create websites the color deficient can use with minimal problems. Take a color vision test to see where you stand. 50 facts about color blindness.
posted by netbros on Sep 28, 2009 - 93 comments

The Museum of Modern Art began working in late 2007 to renovate its Web site substantially for the first time since 2002. It knew that it wouldn’t be just updating a few pieces — it would be entering a whole new era. Earlier this month, the new site launched, and is an almost complete reconstruction of how the museum presents itself online. It features livelier images from its collection and exhibitions, increased use of video and the new interactive calendars and maps.
posted by netbros on Mar 26, 2009 - 12 comments

RGB Garden is a purely design based web design gallery and web designers community featuring beautiful CSS and Flash based websites. They also feature design related articles and downloads. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Feb 5, 2009 - 1 comment

This used to be really hard with CSS. Fluid 960 Grid System: Up to 16-column grid design that is flexible and fluid. Created by Stephen Bau, based on the 960 Grid System by Nathan Smith. [previously]
posted by netbros on Jan 27, 2009 - 56 comments

Newspaper Website Design: Trends And Examples. News websites can be intriguing to examine from a design perspective. Regardless of what type of news they cover, they all face the challenge of displaying a huge amount of content on the home page, which creates plenty of layout, usability and navigational challenges for the designer. The lessons that can be learned from examining how news websites address these challenges can be valuable for designers who work with other types of websites, including ones with blog theme designs.
posted by netbros on Nov 11, 2008 - 9 comments

Tiled Background Designer is just a small, useful tool to create patterns. Experiment with pictures, colors, textures and transparency to get best result.
posted by Dave Faris on Jul 17, 2008 - 37 comments

Web Designer Wall is the personal weblog of Nick La who is N.Design Studio. He talks about design ideas he has, design tutorials from Photoshop to CSS, etc., and trends in modern web design. (see previous)
posted by netbros on Jul 3, 2008 - 7 comments

CommandShift3 is like Hot or Not. Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites. It's actually a pretty nice way to check out good design on the web. [more inside]
posted by MattS on Dec 11, 2007 - 16 comments

Best Web Gallery is an inspirational gallery site where we collect a wide range of quality design websites (Flash & CSS). What is quality design means to us? Quality Design = Visual + Technical + Creativity. Also, Best of CSS design for 2007.
posted by psmealey on Dec 3, 2007 - 14 comments

Jeffrey Zeldman on what web design is and isn't.
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Nov 21, 2007 - 40 comments

MakeMyLogoBigger Cream is a clinically proven formula which embiggens your logo, gets rid of annoying whitespace, adds SEO magic crystals and reams of powerful marketing text! See Also.
posted by deern the headlice on Oct 30, 2007 - 21 comments

If Google was designed for Google.
posted by armoured-ant on Oct 16, 2007 - 36 comments

Meet the new New York Times. After five years, the most popular newspaper on the web has gotten a facelift. Joining a recent web design trend towards optimizing for wider screens, they've gone for no fewer than six columns on the front page. And while I wouldn't look for a wiki any time soon, they seem to be giving a nod to the web 2.0 crowd with javascipty scrollable image bars and prominent links to recent video (hello, YouTube) and current rankings of their most popular, most emailed and most blogged articles (hello, Technorati). The new Times Topics aggregate articles (and multimedia) from across the site, along with background info (hello, Wikipedia). All the more impressive, considering the head of their design team (who also redid The Onion!) was hired just three months ago. Of course, Mickey Kaus will still see this as proof that Sulzburger should be fired.
posted by gsteff on Apr 3, 2006 - 92 comments

Patent squatters Eolas decide to break a significant portion of the websites in the world. (Previously)
posted by Tlogmer on Mar 20, 2006 - 89 comments

Tools for Web Developers. Yahoo gives away some free stuff for people who want to get into Ajax Development. This seems like a nice addition to the other libraries already available.
posted by empath on Feb 14, 2006 - 12 comments

How the Onion Got a Facelift , and in the process offered their full news archives from 1996 to the present available online for free. The Onion A.V. Club also finds a new home.
posted by Robot Johnny on Aug 31, 2005 - 58 comments

Follow the Rhinos Weblog tracking two white Rhinos as they travel next month to the Phoenix Zoo. Nice looking site (via CSS Vault). In related news, poachers have killed about half of the world's population of wild white rhinos in the last year (more here).
posted by oissubke on Aug 19, 2004 - 2 comments

A collection of the god-awful news-art that CNN churns out for its front page.
posted by machaus on Nov 30, 2003 - 21 comments

Looking for a design for your next website? Open Source Web Design is a site that offers tons of free web design templates that you can take and modify for your own needs.
posted by oissubke on May 30, 2003 - 10 comments

Looking for a design for your next website? Strange Banana is a generator that randomly produces XHTML transitional, CSS-layout-driven webpages. Hit "refresh" repeatedly, and find that one layout that matches your inner web designer's dream. (Found on Zeldman's Daily Report.)
posted by Katemonkey on May 30, 2003 - 20 comments

CSS Zen and the art of motorcycle website maintainance; a stunning demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design.
posted by riffola on May 10, 2003 - 36 comments

Visual Relationships at Amazon.com - Here's an interesting visual implementation of the Amazon API. It's almost like flipping through books on the shelf. What's next? A 3D bookstore rendered on the Quake engine?
posted by Argyle on Mar 3, 2003 - 2 comments

Web sites protest by going black. A little over 100 web sites have bandied together to go black on this international day of protest. Some with interesting art, some with personal notes and others with strong words. Are there other web protests going on that you've heard of? Links?
posted by DragonBoy on Feb 15, 2003 - 16 comments

Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number 5,933,841. Here's the abstract:

A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.

Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle's Cyberspace
posted by DragonBoy on Jan 21, 2003 - 47 comments

It would appear that our original warning was not sufficient.This is the second message you receive when you right-click at this website a second time. And then it LOCKS UP YOUR COMPUTER(use ctrl/alt/del to close browser and unlock.) The first time you right-click you are given this warning..Images and all text on our website are protected by copyright--DO NOT attempt to copy."give me one ping,give me one ping only please" What..the..
posted by JohnR on Dec 2, 2002 - 84 comments

The Portfolio. A different kind of web site (courtesy k10k). Great (and sometimes not-so-great) collection of sites that have developed unique ways of presenting their work. (more inside)
posted by poopy on Nov 23, 2002 - 27 comments

Zeldman likes it. Jakob isn't saying, though he'll probably weigh in. mathowie'll probably like it since he seems to dig those Adaptive Path guys. It's elegant, it's like a pleased-with-itself polar bear, it's the AIfIA and there are probably more than 25 reasons it's a Good Thing.
posted by jburka on Nov 4, 2002 - 35 comments

Building a community website One of my favorite strategy gaming sites, HeavenGames, gives us a peek under their hood with in-depth reportage on the design process they're undertaking for their new area devoted to the game Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard's Throne. I'm no web designer, but the ideas and procedures presented here certainly sure do make it sound easy (well, not really, but it's still an interesting read).
posted by WolfDaddy on Jul 25, 2002 - 4 comments

Bom is some sort of project management company, but I'm more impressed by their whiz-bang cool design on their site. Kinda like the HabboHotel, Eboy (their town), and k10k aesthetic taken corporate.
posted by mathowie on Jul 9, 2002 - 8 comments

DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again. We've all been thinking it.
Very Nielsen-esque, for obvious reasons, but without a lot of what we hate Nielsen himself for.
posted by Su on May 8, 2002 - 18 comments

May 1st Reboot . On April 25, participating sites shut down and post a Reboot Holder, until May 1st, at which time they relaunch. Why?
Upon review of all of this year's participating sites, a good number of them are not using the required Reboot Holder. Most have simply continued with normal operations and even made updates as recently as this afternoon.
posted by Su on Apr 29, 2002 - 15 comments

This orthopaedic surgery site seems more like a design exercise than an actual attempt at an informative site. Imagine that someone told you to make the site using poor technology choices, couple it with non-professional content not conducive to trusting the doctors, and add a map to the office that does more to enable chuckles than get people to into the business. It's so bad, it's good, and most definitely do not skip intro on this one.
posted by mathowie on Apr 13, 2002 - 32 comments

eDesign is a new magazine/web site dedicated to "interactive design and commerce." Nice design; bummer about the frames.
posted by kirkaracha on Apr 7, 2002 - 13 comments

The biggest web design myth is that screen graphics should be 72dpi. Sorry if this counts as a self-link (it's a long discussion that I sparked on a forum devoted to a vector graphics app called Xara), but I thought it might interest designers & programmers here.
posted by grumblebee on Dec 10, 2001 - 59 comments

Whoa! Amazon.com's added a new tab to it's menubar. And it's got MY name on it!
posted by Taken Outtacontext on Sep 26, 2001 - 46 comments

Deepend.com calls it quits. U.K. web design firm Deepend has decided to fire all 90 employees and liquidate assests, due to the ripple effect of the 9/11 attack. That's their excuse anyway. If most or all of their clients were air or travel related I could believe their reasoning. What do you think?
posted by catscape on Sep 25, 2001 - 11 comments

Transmission - this is the best (storming use of bog standard - works in Netscape - javascript) site I've seen in ages (via Shift via Play with the Machine) (warning: I'm no web designer, so you trendy people in black out there are free to tell me this is tired old cliche).
posted by andrew cooke on Aug 21, 2001 - 27 comments

Clippings is the GPL-ed code behind IHT's news-clip feature, which has been discussed on MetaFilter before. This is very cool code and I think any site with many front page links could benefit from it. Serendipitously found at smokinggun, which is not the smoking gun.
posted by icathing on Jul 31, 2001 - 19 comments

We keep hearing about this "who owes what to whom" now that Assembler has closed, and Kaliber and Dreamless are closing.

But what of it? What does it mean? Are we so closed minded to think our Web world is the only one and that somehow the rest of the universe revolves around those of us privileged enough to be able to embark on it as a daily journey?

All of us feel one way or another towards this debate. Either we hate it, or love it, and what of that too? What *do* each of us want from this virtual world? Is there something here worth redeeming and at least arriving at a point to agree to disagree? Discuss?
posted by sixandone on Jul 14, 2001 - 10 comments

'I think my standards have lowered enough that now I think ``good design'' is when the page doesn't irritate the living fuck out of me.' Does jwz have a point? (After all, he wrote enough of Netscape to know a bloated browser when he sees one.)
posted by holgate on Jun 5, 2001 - 32 comments

“Nobody needs information architects anymore” “His problem, he figures, is simple: Nobody needs information architects anymore. The entire discipline was overly specialized, a hologram created by temporarily explosive demand for Web-site design, which vanished last year.” (Link sometimes worked and sometimes did not over the course of ten trials in three browsers. ROBMagazine.com → Table of contents → “Crash Test Dummies” will get you there.)
posted by joeclark on Jun 4, 2001 - 21 comments

White House Web Blasted for poor functionality. This Washington Post article says nothing about the use of electronic e-mail addresses (as opposed to...), the non-clickable e-mail addresses for the people in the White House, or the strange navigational constructs used.
posted by vanderwal on Apr 30, 2001 - 21 comments

Join the first-ever Blogger Template Design Contest and you might win part of over $6,000 in prizes!

p.s. contest only open to residents of the United States, so nuts to you if you're a dirty steenkin foreigner
posted by lia on Apr 27, 2001 - 51 comments

May 1st Skiboot - Reinvigoration of the Ski Footwear.
posted by riffola on Apr 25, 2001 - 29 comments

Astounding Websites dies This evening I received an email from "Big" Dave Bastian with the sad announcement of one of the best online design communities the web had to offer. (more inside)
posted by Brilliantcrank on Apr 11, 2001 - 33 comments

A Flash usability white paper that says Flash can improve the usability of a web site.

"When executed correctly, with attention paid to the needs and wants of users, Macromedia Flash content can actually improve the user experience on any Web site."

Can Flash be saved if developers start thinking about usability? Is this going to impact Jakob Nielsen's 99% figure?
posted by Dugout on Apr 9, 2001 - 8 comments

MetaFilter is a hosting company now?
posted by mathowie on Mar 29, 2001 - 265 comments

Warning: useless Flash, animated GIFs, slow loading, annoying, buzzing, warped up piece of work. [Requires Flash and Pepto Bismol to view.] Even though this is a site for a radio station, I figured something was amiss when I was scared to click past the splash page...
posted by hijinx on Mar 26, 2001 - 12 comments

The Web Page from Hell. Be sure to look at the client list.
posted by cfj on Mar 1, 2001 - 20 comments