templatedata

I've been playing around with Picnik. If you want a quick, easy, online photo editor you might like to take a look.

It works well with Flickr and also talks to Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket.

A long time ago, in a design studio far far away...

A new face for the Sydney Uni website is due to be launched this week and for anyone who has not had the chance to inspect the new design, please head over to the Web Services website for a sneak peek at some screen shots. Some elements have changed (namely banners and some content layout and formatting) however it will give you a good overall idea of the new look.

There is an opportunity for you to register your interest in the new look for your site, as well as provide some feedback.

The new design has a much cleaner layout with more consistent formatting for content and hyperlinks, when compared to the current version. Which brings me to an excellent addition to my list of bookmarks - The Way Back Machine.

This is a great resource which allows you to view fully archived (including graphics) versions of almost all websites.
To illustrate just how far back this time capsule can take you, take a look at some of the previous designs for Sydney Uni.

Scary and amazing at the same time.
Enjoy !

I may be a bit slow on the uptake with this, having just taken three months off and all but if you're a university web designer/developer/monkey/whatever you may find the Edustyle site to be of some use.

It's a gallery of university websites that also allows for commenting and voting ('My style' / 'Not my style').

The good people at A List Apart have produced a Primer for those new to their site. Even if you're familiar with the site, it's worth taking a look.

If you’re going to build a house—or a website—you need the right tools. A List Apart offers hundreds of articles on design, markup, style, accessibility, usability, and more. We’ve selected a few that you might want to start with. (Think of this guide as one of those reassuring brochures from Lowe’s or Home Depot, but about websites instead of ceramic tile.)

Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast doesn't like Technorati's new look. I have to admit, she's got a point.

Ugh.

Something I stumbled on today: Snipshot, an online imaging editing app.

Performs basic operations like cropping, resizing etc. Could be quite handy.

So we think it's hard to design a university homepage? Imagine if your potential audience included the entire country plus quite a large chunk of the rest of the world? And you had plenty of good content to showcase?

You may remember we mentioned the new online strategy of the BBC and the accompanying competition being run to redesign their homepage. Entries have started coming in and you can check them out in a gallery. It is interesting the different approaches taken by people (I was particularly tickled with one person's idea that people should search for things, not be given content up-front. I think s/he needs to put a little more thought into this design...)

More at currybetdotnet.

I honestly don't know how long this has been around so it might be old hat. Anyway, UX Mag is worth a look if you are interested in the 'user experience.'

Ok, it's a bit too clever by half sometimes but still, there is stuff there worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the piece Design 101 for programmers.

I have been blessed with working with wonderful techies in my time at the Uni. Generally they have always listened to me, even when I was being more than demanding, and tried to implement what I asked for. They never treated me like an idiot and always accepted that sometimes the interface was beyond them. More than that, they were willing to learn about interfaces. Now I'm not working with them, I miss them. Sniff.

(I also like the treatment of links to stories on UX Mag - much less room for mistakes when the whole box containing the title is a link. Nice).

Just what we need: a study has found that men and women prefer markedly different designs when it comes to websites.

For the study, researchers looked at personal Web sites created by 30 men and 30 women and found obvious differences in their use of language, visuals and navigation. Men tended to use straight lines rather than curves, fewer background and typeface colors, more formal typography, and language with fewer abbreviations. Men also were more prone to "promote themselves and their abilities heavily," the study found.

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Via Creating passionate users: a post on the symbols used in design that have become cliches.

This post is about those symbols we use … or rather, those other people use … to indicate common themes, concepts or ideas. Those symbols which have been used so often that they’ve become clichés. I warn against using them: or challenge designers to breathe new life into their rotting corpses. Welcome to the land of the living dead.

For those of you who work in Adobe, there's a new how-to magazine dedicated to Adobe stuff. It's called Layers.

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