Rikcat Industries

There is a great post on the SitePoint Blog about new features the Webkit team has added to their CSS implementation. New features include CSS Transform, CSS Masks and CSS Gradients. Unfortunately, these features will probably only be in the next version of Safari.

So why are these features a big deal? Recently, I’ve been fooling around with doing some web development for the iPhone and find it liberating. Just having the ability to use PNG24’s with full transparency and border-radius that is anti-alias opens up a world of possibilities. There are ways to use these features in other browsers, but they aren’t as easy to implement.

So check out the article and hope that some day these features become standards.

Just noticed that this site is ranked in the top 100 out of over 11,000 sites on Command Shift 3. Wow super surprised. Those of you unfamiliar with Command Shift 3, it’s basically hot or not for web site designs. Its a fun site and has some really good use of the meta data provided by the voting. Sites are also ranked by related tag, so this site is currently 20th in designer and 3rd in simple. So cool, be sure to check out the site and participate.

From time to time I get emails from people asking about design education & career advice. I have a different perspective on this topic because my path was different than most designers. I went to a small art school that was primarily an illustration & sequential art school called the Kubert School. The school did not offer a degree, but I learned a lot in a short period of time. After completing the program, I felt that I learned a lot but wasn’t equipped to do a real world job. …

Blogs and blog-like designs have become so commonplace, it made me ask the question “What interface traits make blogs successful?” By far the unifying quality is design rhythm. Blogs break a lot of the early web design convention, like pages being too long or the fear that people will not scroll past the fold. So why is this approach more accepted and used today? …

There is no doubt there are many more reasons then just three to love Flickr, but these are my top three. My first exposure to Flickr was in late 2004, prior to them being bought by Yahoo. Its early use of Ajax, in place of editing and other user interface enhancements, made Flickr stand out and unique. Below are some of the features and qualities that make Flickr my favorite site and one that I visit and use everyday. …

Email Standards

On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction. …

I’m a huge proponent of open platforms and open API’s, so when Google announced Open Social I was excited. After thinking about it for a bit, I’m not so sure about it now. It’s great for developers to have exposure to these host services’ large user-bases, but at what cost to the hosts brand? The thought of a Facebook style Vampire application on Linkedin just doesn’t sit right. …

There have been a lot of XHTML/CSS services that have popped up recently. Seems like anyone with a text editor and a copy of Web Standards Solutions is setting up shop. I’ve seen a range of prices from $150-$300 per page, but I’m sure in this case the old adage is true: you get what you pay for. …

I haven’t seen much written on the subject of metadata, especially as it relates to information architecture and designing interactions with users. This post describes metadata and shows real world examples of advanced uses of metadata. Metadata is at the core of what makes mashups, a Web 2.0 staple, so popular.

Wikipedia describes metadata as data about data. So, for example, you might have this post’s content as the main data but the date published, date edited, author, category, tags, etc. would all be its metadata. …

When designing a user interface, be it for the web or an application, my core goals are always to eliminate redundancy and make the UI as intuitive as possible. Sounds fairly simple, but like with all subjective processes, keeping those core goals on track can be tough. By no means are the suggestions below written in stone; these are just things that I keep in mind when designing a user interface. I also use simplicity or the KISS principle as a guiding tenet when developing my user interfaces. …