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I’m sure that you’ve experienced at least one instance where your email or someone else’s email caused a misunderstanding. It might have taken you a follow–up email or perhaps several to clear things up. This is a common tale, owing to the imprecise nature of text communication. We try and use what seem to be appropriate mechanisms for lending clarity and fullness to our message (italics, caps, bold, etc…), but we may yet fail in that endeavor. Why?

When considering or working to create interactive design, it is useful, I think, to examine the gulf of communication that exists between direct, face–to–face, truly interactive communication and impersonal attempts at communication on a Web page. But in order to appreciate the magnitude of this difference in effectiveness it is far better to examine the many layers of sensation and interaction as they apply to each context, from personal, face–to–face contact to impersonal text or buttons on a page.

As a member of the design profession, I get insights into a wide range of agency and individuals’ practices and I’m often appalled at what I learn from this experience. I’m continually surprised to see that there are plenty of individuals and, mostly, agencies that have abominably unethical and irresponsible practices habitually exercised as core features of their work. As a result, their clients are ill–served. Sometimes criminally so.

Those who visit my site regularly know that in April I left the agency where I had worked since 2004. At that point I immediately began to take on freelance work and hung out a shingle under the name, UNIT. You may remember that at that time I wrote about taking the plunge into freelance work, but I noted that while I was committed to developing my own practice, I was not content to be a solo freelancer for long. I had larger aspirations.

Those of you who are not chess enthusiasts may find it interesting that there is a direct parallel between chess players and Web designers. The most important distinction in both cases between amateurs and professionals lies in the method, content, and process of their critical thinking. The difference between how a professional chess player thinks and how an amateur chess player thinks is largely responsible for the most significant difference in their respective results. It’s the same for Web designers.

When content is of paramount importance and you want to facilitate visitors spending time reading the content rather than just looking at it, using quiet structure helps to create the right kinds of affordances.

By creating a document in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, published in the public access and opening up in Preview mode in the source code, you can find interesting line :

Trying to remember the event when Google linkovali foreign service similar way, and I can not.

What do you think about?

I recently came across a troubling article that clearly illustrates how a failure to understand the fundamentals of human psychology and behavior does not serve interactive designers well. If nothing else, the naïve conclusions in the article serve as a useful springboard for an examination of the relevant issues.

Agencies, right now you’re asking for second–rate employees and this will rise up and bite you in the butt one day. Right now you’re building crap websites and they’re trashing up the internet and building a reputation for your agency. Is this the reputation you want?

With its latest article, Design Observer shirks its responsibility to readers in favor of senselessly indulging its own political agenda. The article, written by William Drenttel, is a political diatribe and lobbying effort that has no place in a design publication. I don’t know William Drenttel, but I do know that he doesn’t understand the distinction between personal values and personal political views. He flaunts his unfortunate lack of understanding for all to see in his article, “Al Gore for President:”