Web Standards Plugin For Adobe Dreamweaver
If you don’t know who Jeffrey Zeldman is, he’s the web genius behind sites like A List Apart and Happy Cog. He’s also written several books and is pretty much just an overall web genius with a strong background in web usability.
About a month ago he released a plugin for Dreamweaver that makes writing standards compliant code much easier. He says that it is for pretty much anybody who codes, from n00b to l33t web haxor and even said he found some errors on his site with it. I haven’t had the chance to play with it yet simply because I don’t mind spending the extra time to check my work and validate it…oh, and I don’t want to spend $50 on it yet.
What Do You Consider Good Design?

I just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. An excellent book about what makes good design good, and more importantly, bad design bad. It has many different examples but keeps coming back to a couple of everyday objects that we use everyday. The car and the door.
Norman keeps coming back to how complex a car’s interior controls are and yet for the most part, they are fairly easy to use. Without much thought, you can steer the car, make it move, park it, turn the radio on, find a station, adjust the seats, etc. A basic model car does hundreds of tasks, yet you are able to use it fairly easily.
The Design Of Everyday Things Review

I just finished reading The Design Of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Although this book is really focused on design of physical objects, as a web designer, I always love reading about design theory in general. While I can’t use most of the examples as is, there are tons of concepts, design standards and theories that could potentially give websites an enormous edge in terms of usability.
I just wanted to put a few of my favorite quotes/saying from the book here to give you an idea of what it’s all about. Mind you this is a thousandth of the information from this book. It really is an exceptional book to read if you are at all curious about the theory of design and really knowing how much work goes into designing something as simple as a pen.


