Rikcat Industries

Their is a great debate going on over at 37 Signal’s Signals vs. Noise blog. They flat out say designers should code their own HTML/CSS. I agree for the most part, but there are exceptions to everything.

I work for a very large company and it would be mostly impractical for the visual designers to code all there work. At some point it makes sense to hand the coding responsibility off. I do think their needs to be a close relationship between the designer and the person who is doing the coding. Also the designer should get code approval. …

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.

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? …

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. …