Donna Vitan

He’s in New York right now but I miss him  and hope that he comes home to me soon. I love you babe, in my heart and dreams always.

I will partake of Earth Hour 2008, on Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 8 PM. And for one hour, I will turn down the lights and join the movement against climate change. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing at that time because I have my niece’s birthday party sometime during the day. You can sign-up too and pledge your support of Earth Hour at www.earthhour.org.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

This weekend, Toronto was pretty much hit with yet another snowstorm. The kind of storm that has snow coming on you from every angle and the only recourse is to look down as you make your way to your destination, lest ye get a blast in the face with sweet, icy, goodness. I actually woke my boyfriend up on Saturday morning to brave the cold so that we can go to The Artist Project at Liberty Grand which turned out to be quite an adventure.

We took the Bathurst Streetcar down which usually heads straight to the Exhibition center but not today, and as the bus driver said, hasn’t gone there for a while due to track construction. So we had to get out on Harbourfront and take a bus back towards the Ex. We got out at the Princess Gate entrance, headed to the Direct Energy Centre which is the wrong building when we really wanted to go to the Liberty Grand which was on the other side of the complex at the Dufferin entrance. After more bus mishap, sign confusion and a lot of walking in the great, white blizzard we made it to the Liberty Grand.

I was really looking forward to this show even though I had only looked at the description in passing. My goal was to put myself out there to consume more culture and inspiration from the creative community. I didn’t even know that it was going to be art-art and maybe I was expecting something more craftsy. I was wrong but not disappointed. It turned out to be an awesome gallery of paintings, sculptures and textile.

Kyle Stewart: kylestewart.ca (Oil on canvas)

Giampietro Filippetti: filippetti.ca (Fine-art glass mosaic panels)

Soheila Esfahani: soheila.ca (Acrylic on canvas, other)

Joy Broadbent: joybroadbent.com (Painting, Design, Photography)

A class in the Art Institue of Atlanta built a quick survey asking which design elements you prefer, and by studying the results they can build better websites. Research ended on December, 2007 but the survey and results are still viewable. The survey is limited and is just scratches the surface of user interface design.

In my line of work, it’s very important to take into account the particulars of the UI (user interface) otherwise what’s the point? You’re just thrown into a website and left to fend for yourself without a clear understanding of which direction to go, which button to click and what to do with yourself.

I’m currently working on a website that very much needs a healthy dose of UI design… actually it just needs a UI. Period. Links are all over the place and sometimes, in order to get to the page you want, you have to go through a page which is only accessible if you go back to the home page and find it somewhere in the middle/bottom of the content. Did that make sense? No, it didn’t and that sucks. A website without a proper navigation will only lead to frustration and lost audience. So let’s not let that happen, shall we? (Maybe I’ll even show you the site once it’s good and ready.)

User Interface Design Links To Study

• Interface Research
• Usernomics: User Interface Design (Scroll below and you’ll find even more links to study)
• Bad Practice in User Interface Design - Misuse of the Drop-down Menu
  Simon Kitson wrote an article focusing on “the drop-down menu and its use, or misuse, in website interface design”.
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
  Have a look at one of biggest brand in the world is doing with interface design, and not only that, they have a whole reference library on it. To me, this is a gold-mine of a resource, perhaps too large and all-encompassing to be of any use when designing for the individual or small to very small business website but you can’t go wrong where one mega company went right.

What Not To Do

• SAP Design Guild: Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces
  From application systems to websites, SAP Design Guild rounded up the worst examples of UI design and urge you to do the opposite.
• Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design
  Jakob Nielsen has been rounding up these top-10 lists since 1996 and now that he’s updated this list for 2007, some of those mistakes are still in full force.