Slate takes on signs and wayfinding. Part 1: The secret language of signs. Part II: Lost in Penn Station. Part III: Legible London. Part IV: Do you draw good maps? Part V: The war over exit signs. Part VI: Will GPS kill the sign?
posted by parudox on Mar 11, 2010 - 41 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

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

These sliding menus may not be anything much to you design mavens out there, but to a simple engineer/management consultant like myself, they are addictively neat. Whenever I check out the site, I find myself pulling them out and playing with them while deciding where to go in the site. How'd they do that?
posted by fpatrick on Jul 28, 2000 - 9 comments