You'll find 10 sets of 1000 high-quality free .png icons in sizes 16x16 & 32x32 for bloggers and web designers to use in private & commercial projects (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License). Loving it!
How Web Designers Can Adopt a Global Mindset (by Christian Arno) - Cultural differences are shamelessly overlooked, depending on your audience that might be ok but you should know... read the article.
User Interface Design Framework (by webalys) - a really nice set of flexible GUI elements, free icon library and a graphic style library.
How to Navigate Design by Committee (by Andrew Follett) - Andrew outlines a feasible approach to steering design discussions into a successful direction.
Accessiblity Forum 2.0 (by buyaccessible.net) - promising blog to follow if you are into accessibility.
Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing (by Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain) - my take-away: don't jump to conclusions, that truly is a beginner mistake.
I know this might be a little off-topic but nevertheless useful to many of us. The book 'The Principles of Successful Freelancing' of Miles Burke is available for free to download (only valid for the next 10 days starting today), so get it now!
Contents
Considering Freelancing?
Prepare for the Transition
Manage Your Money
Set Yourself Up
Win the Work
Give Great Service
Achieve Work–Life Balance
Where to from Here?
About the author
Miles Burke has been creating web sites since 1994. In 2002, Miles founded Bam Creative, an award-winning Western Australian web company. Miles serves as Chairperson of the Australian Web Industry Association, and has been awarded for his entrepreneurship in recent years; he’s a recipient of the Contribution to the Web Industry award in 2005, winner of the WA Business News’ 40under40 award in 2007, and appears in the 2008 edition of Who’s Who in Western Australia. Miles can also be found writing at Miles’ Blog.
Marti Hearst generously made her upcoming book "Search User Interfaces" available for reading online. She is definitely not a newcomer to the scene and the book for sure not a Best-Of compilation, moreover the book is written in an academic fashion that backs up its theses usability studies, log studies, or some other form of proof (like it!) - like Harry Brignull states: "Caution: actual thought may be required when reading this book."
Contents: Search User Interfaces
The book has two main parts: search fundamentals (Chapters 1-7) and advanced topics (Chapters 8-12).
The last couple of weeks were pretty busy for me. We were trying to design an application that has potential to grow beyond national importance and get high visibility. Needless to say expectations are high. Time constraints aside, my focus was to extract the goal of the application and streamline the user experience, do I sound like a marketing person yet?
Powerpoint Wireframes
In order to get quick and accurate feedback from our client I wanted to create visuals as early as possible. That's when Microsoft Powerpoint came in handy. I created wireframe mockups and iterated through the slides via video conference which turned out to be not only useful but essential to the mutual understanding. The client was able to adjust their process, our project managers increased their knowledge about the domain and our developers identified potential issues with integrating our mapping software.
During the process of designing the wireframes I created my own set of Powerpoint stencils that covers all common interface elements as well as a set of small icons.
Powerpoint Wireframe Stencils
Example Usage
Just recently I started to redesign www.actress.at, the website of my sister who is an actress currently located in Berlin, Germany.
What better opportunity than this to put the wireframe stencils into work. After talking with her for some time over the phone I got a good sense of what her vision is based on the needs of job. Together with some photos from her agency and videos from youtube I created the following three mockups:
Mockup for the Homepage of Eva Gaigg's redesigned webpage actress.at
Mockup for a page inside the navigation architecture, in this case videos but also applicable for photos and other presentation items.
Mockup for the response form, probably a critical part of the application since this will be the butter on the bread.
Next Step: XHMTL Prototype
Following the wireframes exercise we created a color palette and implemented an XHTML prototype which roughly took us 3 days. Screen snapshots fed another set of Powerpoint slides for the big demo and will eventually go into the design doc as well. So far, so good.
Help me to improve the stencils
I really hope the wireframe stencils will be helpful for your work (as they made my life easier). I am interested in your opinion. What is missing? What can be improved? Send me your suggestions, ideas, updates