Icon Library

Jina is a must reference for all of you working in web design  & development. Her opinions on CSS are one of the most respected in the designer community, being a frequent speaker in the web developer’s conference circuit and being a consultant for the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. That is big stuff for a lady so cute my friends! The W3C as you might know, is nothing more than the World Wide Web consortium, the international organization that develops all web standards. So if this girl has something to say you better listen!

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This is the best starting point anyone should go to when beginning to dig in UX. Simple awesome and informative post made by the guys at ixd101. Must read for designers and developers.

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How can you assemble the perfect guys to develop killer Ux projects? User experience design is a relatively new area compared to all the other facets of design and technology, and it’s very difficult to know really who you are hiring just by their resume and interview. Anthony
Colfelt made this incredible two part article for the “Boxes and Arrows” blog, where he signals out some key details you can bet on to find just the team you need.

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A few times have I found such a easy to read, thoughtful and reflexive article as this post Andrew Maier wrote for his web site UX booth. Andrew talks about how user interface designers must deal with creating not only an accessible and aesthetically pleasant product, but to engage users in a long term relationship. There must be a real, breathing interaction between the platform and the user so the product becomes a dynamic part of peoples lives. As an example he mentions myspace, facebook and linkedIn, bringing to light their virtues and failures. Excellent read not only for developers and designers, but for just about anyone eager for an interesting article.

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Trident is a powerful and extensible animation library for Java. Their latest version 1.2 provides support for Android. Read all about it in this post I found in the pushing pixels blog.

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Want to see something really genius? How many times have you been in a meeting with designers and developers and couldn’t find an easy and effective way to express your ideas? Well… look no further. No Flash, no 3D max… no complicated long hours of animation. Chris from the Plain English Breakfast blog figured out a brilliant idea using the stop motion technique and a webcam, to do fun, fast and really effective visualizations to meet all of your UX demands. This is really outstanding!  You can download his stop animation software too.

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Incredible thoughts by Thomas Petersen for the Black & White blog, where he discusses the main focus about starting up a business idea. Or developing a product. Or… anything. The ideas he signals out here are applicable to almost all things in life. Google is not successful because of its sexiness and iphone is not a total hit because of it bulletproof performance. Petersen says that there are as many ways to design a successful product, as to design a flop. And he’s totally right. Beware, the “hammer” analogy is included. Truly one of the best articles I’ve linked on our blog.

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Matt Alexander wrote this incredibly clear article for Six Revisions where he signals out some mayor tips to better rank your blog posts. This is a very useful read, made in a clear and straightforward language suited to beginners and expert users alike. He also signals out some good plug ins to aid us in the job.

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Jeff Atwood made this hilarious post for Coding Horror, where he points out in a funny way how programmers have to be all the time with their senses always at 100% almost as if they were high performance athletes, because even the  most infamous and minimal error in their coding can ignite a real Armageddon. Good read for developers. Definitely not suggested for the average reader.

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“Forgiveness” as a concept that not only relates to the image of a guy running down a street in the middle of the rain shouting his lost love’s name. In user interface design, “forgiveness” relates to everything you can do to allow users to correct their errors. Like when you delete a file, the OS always asks you if you are completely sure. Even then you still have the recycle bin.

Famous design blog Janko at Warp Speed made this interesting post that talks about ways to implement the concept on your own designs.

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Anders Toxboe made an incredible compilation of books, conferences, and websites regarding user interface design. This is the ultimate, definitive list of resources every UI designer should have to improve. Thanks to UI patterns for posting.

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Websites are not static anymore. The internet is not that place full of animated gifs, popup banners and 56k modems. Ten years ago, web design was thought more as the labor of a graphic designer. Today, web sites are more considered as systems; complex entities that need to interact dynamically with a user. Andrew Maier, one of the most knowledgeable gurus of User interface design makes us a superb introduction to this incredible field.

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Testing, testing, testing. It’s all about testing. Good usability is key to the success of any web site and web app. And sometimes, when your company has a regular staff to do this work, opinions turn in time to be very biased, and well, that’s just about normal. Iconshock wants to give you some free and commercial alternatives so you can refresh your point of view and add some cool ideas to your projects. There are many apps out there but we just selected different usability test approaches with their finest exponents, both commercial and free.

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Simplifying a user interface might take away some possibilities form the user, and giving the user too much complexity may confuse and drown them out.  Brandon Walkin gives takes a tour throughout some key points in UI as contextual actions, Visual Hierarchy, Icons and much more. Must see guide to help developers and designers achieve that perfect balance.

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Here you can find more than 30 of the most useful shopping carts templates in the whole web. Design blog Noupe took into account credibility and usability, which are the most important factors in E-Commerce. In this list you can find templates for Wordpress, Magneto and other platforms. You will also find the best of both worlds, free and premium. So go ahead and check them out.

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