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Being April 1st, Josh at Praystation turns back the clocks for just one day.

There are Quicktime clips of SXSW sessions and interviews, which includes one from the Josh Davis session. It is rough and not in context, but it does offer a good snippet of Josh and the magnetic dots.

Decisionmaking about design is critical and demonstrated. This walk through of how design influences impressions of a product. Communicating a message is important in the words and visual design. Each of these samples builds an experience and expectation for the product.

This evening I went to a jam packed AIGA DC event, Good Design is Smart Business 6, which included a panel discussing design and experience design as it relates to building a businnes' brand. The panel included Hillman Curtis, Neal Boulton, and Brian Jacobs of Pentagram. Hillman discussed the redesign of Adobe and pointed to the Web environment offering a double barrel of visual and functional design. Hillman had one of the best quotes that a "Web designer has to think of every pixel and the role it plays in brand". Brian Jacobs was another favorite of mine on this panel discussing his role in redesigning the Muzak brand. The brand now encompasses the organization, which was amazing. If you have the opportunity to see Hillman or Brian speak it is well worth the effort to see them.

I found Zoomify to be an insanely cool application. The clarity of the zoomed image was stellar. It reminds me of some of the LuraTech graphic compression applications I tried a couple years ago, when I was looking to build a document repository for Web based use that allowed quick loading snapshots of the documents prior to downloading. Zoomify would be a great application to inspect photos and painting details while keeping the image weight relatively low. Genius.

I have yet to get beyond the interface of Eye: the international review of graphic design. The interface reminds Joy of European train schedule boards. The content looks promissing. [hat tip xblog]

Oh so apropos of late, A List Apart offers the web designer and CMS, that is Content Management. This subject and experience in this area has been a favorite of mine for three or four years now. James Ellis' article nicely lays out the basic structure of CMS and the changes this brings to Web designers. The role of Web designers change with CMS and fantastic designers are done with a large chunk of the work as the site is in templates and needs not for every page to be designed and tweaked.

One of the elements that is missed in this article is a greater need for a strong designer in the template development process. Where sites in the past could modify the design of a page to meet those ever occurring "special occasions", these elements need to be woven into the templates. Templates need to have the ability to absorb these "special occasions". Great graphic designers are more than up to this challenge and often provide great results. The work of a graphic designer changes to more task based work and a string of template design projects rather than solid design work on a regular basis.

An USA Today article on poor product design provides insight that is helpful not only to product development, but also application development. The insights (while not new to most of us, but most likely very new to USA Today readers) include not including the consumer early enough in the process, product design team not well balanced, and technology runs amok.

These very closely apply to Web/Internet/Application development's downfalls. Not including the user in the development phases and/or testing with users early and throughout the development process. Having a development team that does not have a balance of visual, technical, and production skills can be problematic. Lastly, projects that are technology for technology's sake, very rarely offer success.

Conversely, success comes from getting these things right, involving the user and understanding how users would interact and use what you are building. Having a balanced team so that visual, technical, and production issues can be addressed and solved appropriately. And lastly knowing when and how to best use what technologies will drive success.

This last element, understanding the technologies, will help you get over the hurdle of accessibility/508 compliance. It will also help you find the best tools to interact with the users of the site/application. Having DHTML elements to provide action on a site or to serve information, when the user audience does not fully have the capability of addressing or handling the presentation, will have detrimental effects. Know what your elements your users have turned on and off in their browsers and what versions they are using. It is important to know what threshold of user profile can be the cut-off for developing a site. If 10% of your users have JavaScript turned off should you still develop elements of your site that are JavaScript dependant without providing an alternate service? Know and set this percentage threshold, as it will help understand why you can and can not use certain technologies.

A benevolent Secret Santa, I believe from the Boxes and Arrows project (using the Secret Santa - Mystery Menorah application I built), dropped of two wonderful gifts today. One was The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, by Lawrence Lessig, which has been on my highly desired list since hearing him speak at Web2001 in San Francisco. I have been really liking and agreeing with many of Lessig's articles of late, so the book should be quite juicy. The other was Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995, by Bill Watterson, which not only contains many C & H Sunday newspaper strips, but includes Watterson's background on the drawings. Many of the snippets I read this evening make for very good understanding of layout and visual presentation and tie directly to Web design. This seems to be similar (or a lite version of) to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which Peter likes.

Nancy Nowacek writes Us Versus Them in Communication Arts. Nancy discusses what design has been and what it is now. The article discusses specialization, which has been the way things have moved in recent years and gets into the more encompassing Web development roles that abound. [hat tip Nick at Digital-Web New]

Fellow Boxes and Arrows developer Adam Greenfeld is one of this weeks A List Apart writers. Adam focuses on the lack of discussion of design history in current on-line discussion forums. He goes into his own discussion of wonderful design in history.

I like that he brings up the lack of passion in the field of design, this can be seen else where around the Web. There should always be, I my little opinion, passion at the heart of a designer and/or developer. The passion to create a wonderful place to be used that provides life and breathes ideas. At the heart of this passion is a desire to go back and understand what begat what and who mothered ideas and schools of thought. It is from this understanding that we can build, research, and expand our understandings and knowledge to help the whole profession grow. (What you are still reading here, go read Adam).

I stumbled across Design Interact today. It is part of the Commarts Network, and is owned by Coyne & Blanchard, Inc., the parent company of Communication Arts magazine. It is a friendly site with site reviews, interviews, and articles.

Brilliant satire at Ernie XQ. Must remember to add little yellow different to weblog link list.

Every now and then one runs across or is pointed to a great innovative interface. Most often it is a design shop, as in the case of JDK Design. The interface, for me, is quite enjoyable, but I know many that would be completely lost trying to use it. It is a nice use of Flash as it loaded very quickly.

The designfeast graphic design resources is an annotated list of links and sources to gain more knowledge that is focussed on design.