I’ve recently come across a wealth of icons from various sources. At first I thought “I’ll keep all these to myself so I can impress my designer friends,” but then I thought “what else am I going to blog about?” So I decided to share them. Besides, sharing is cool too — just ask the creators of all these amazing icons:

• Crystal Icon Set by Everaldo Coelho
  Over 300 icons released under the Lesser General Public License.
  

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• Flag Icons from famfamfam.com
  247 public domain icons. They are free for any use (attribution appreciated but not required). The flag icons use the ISO3166-1 alpha-2 country codes where appropriate.
  

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• Nuvola Icons by David Vignoni
  These icons are released under the Lesser General Public License.
  

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• Royalty Free Icons by CocoaDev
  This is a smaller set of toolbar icons for general use. No license information is given but the readme.txt file states that they are free for use with a linked credit, similar to the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
  

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• The RSS Feed Icon
  Download the standard RSS feed icon in various editable formats.
  

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• Silk Icons from famfamfam.com
  This is a free set of 700 icons released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. That means you can use the icons for anything so long as you link back to famfamfam.
  

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• Tango Icons from freedesktop.org
  These icons are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. The download links weren’t on the page, but I found them via Google cache:
  • Tango Icon Theme 0.8.0
  • Tango Icon Theme Extras

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Several of the icon sets were designed as desktop packages, but because the icons are individual PNG files (in most cases), they’re perfect for web design too.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. If the above list doesn’t satisfy your craving for icons, then you have to check this out:

Icon Themes on Wikimedia Commons

Edit: Also check out Icon Finder

Please check out the licenses and follow the rules when using these icons. The licenses are legally binding and it’s the right thing to do. The designers have put in enormous amounts of time and, in most cases, just want credit for their work. I think that’s the least they deserve.

Lately I’ve been coming across a lot of really cool stuff on the web via a variety of sources. The most recent of which has been Digg. I had heard about Digg for years but a system to rank popular news stories just didn’t interest me that much. I finally took a look at the site and I was an immediate convert. The design category is fantastic.

Are you a designer? Do you have clients? Are they in love with their logo to the detriment of anything you try to design for them? Then this song is for you:

Make the Logo Bigger presumably by Burnback.

Song and links courtesy of today’s Compiler Blog.

A lot of people don’t know that NASA makes their satellite images available for free. They actually have a lot of cool websites these days (a lot better than what they had a few years ago), but the one I’m most interested in right now is the Visible Earth website. That’s where I found the most amazing picture of planet Earth.

Click on the image to view a (very) large version.

I just updated my WordPress admin interface to use the WP Tiger Administration plugin. Take that.

I’m a little behind on my reading (and posting) but work has been busy and taking time off for SXSW didn’t help things. I found myself reading the February issue of How while I ate my lunch today. February was the issue on typography. I was surprised to find an article on web typography but even more surprised by what it wrote:

Of course, you can create text as a graphic using any font in your arsenal. The drawbacks to this tactic are that it’s not easily changed later, it can’t be copied and pasted with other text on a page, it doesn’t scale in size when the user chooses a different default font size for the browser, and it’s not accessible to people with visual impairments who use text-speaking devices. The benefit, however, is that the text you create in Photoshop appears exactly as you want it to appear, with your font of choice and any graphic effects or other visual stylings.

Now, there was a little bit of FUD there about the screen readers (text-speaking devices). If you provide the text in an alt attribute for the image it will be perfectly accessible. However, I found it amazing that a magazine for designers, primarily print designers, would be so astute as to point out all of the failings of using images for text.

Later in the article was another paragraph, this one about Flash:

When designing Flash projects, most of the same typographical rules mentioned above still apply; you’re simply gaining the freedom to use whatever font you like. However, Flash isn’t nearly as accessible as HTML, and certainly not as flexible as CSS if you want to change the appearance. Frankly, waiting for Flash animations to load can be annoying to site users, even those with broadband internet connections.

Steering designers away from Flash because of accessibility and load times? I’m not religious but Hallelujah! I take this article as a sign of the maturity of the online design community, our tools and our pool of knowledge. We’ve come a long way in the last 10 years and pieces like this give me hope for the next 10.

I don’t know how he did it but somehow he managed to steal this list straight out of my brain. Sure he added a few things like move to New York and picking up music again, but it’s basically my list. Compare:

• Start drawing (both offline and with a sweet pen tablet)
• Write those stories I keep starting (and participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month
• Look out for myself (okay I’m stealing that one from him)
• Stay in better touch with my friends — and get out more
• Practice my Spanish*
• Design more and code less — including designing some t-shirts
• Start blogging about things I’m passionate about (design and the web)
• Redesign my site — I’m using someone else’s design!

See? Same damn list. He might have tried to customize it a bit to “make it his own” but we all know the truth. James Craig reads minds. I don’t know if he has to get close to you to do it, so I want to make sure I get these out now:

• Finally create my web-based cartoon — it’s been six years
• Start a t-shirt company (hey, everybody else is)
• Create some sweet WordPress plugins:
  • Real estate listings
  • Events calendar using the hCalendar microformat
  • Contact list using the hCard microformat

Okay, it appears that Structured Blogging is way ahead of me on the whole microformats-for-WordPress thing, so I’ll have to check that out.

* This one is major since my wife’s family doesn’t speak English and we visit them several times a year. I would also like to learn German since my own extended family doesn’t speak English either. As it stands right now I can’t communicate with her family or mine.

I’m normally a “play-it-cool” kinda guy. I don’t like to fawn over people or even go out of my way to meet them. They’re just people. And if they’re well-known people they probably already have enough of that going on and wouldn’t mind a little bit of personal space.

But a combination of fascinating people, one day after another of free booze (top shelf stuff too!), and a lot of really interesting discussions combined to push me past the bounds of propriety.

Did Matt Mullenweg need to hear me tell him that I make money off of his product that he gives away for free? Probably not. Did Tantek çelik need me stalking him for 20 minutes to take a picture ? Definitely not. (I was really just sitting two rows behind him and trying to get a shot when he turned his head.) Did the guys who make Red vs. Blue need me to take advantage of their open bar tab? Well, that one’s their own fault.

I’m slowly recovering from SXSW Interactive, which ended last night. I’ll (hopefully) post more on it once I’m a little bit caught up on work. Like it does every year, it has left my head bubbling over with ideas.

Random notes from the panel which is still ongoing. Maybe I’ll liveblog!

1. Web design should be controlled by designers
2. AJAX is the future of the web
3. Every big company should have a usability lab
4. All web apps require ethnographic research
5. 99% of Flash is BAD

The above are all DOGMA. Forget it. Let’s talk about the direction we need to be going. –Dirk Knemeyer

Savant
Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. –Steve Jobs, Apple

Scientific Method
Introduce cautious, well-measured changes and introductions of new features and products. […] UI is a science not an art. –Marissa Meyer, VP Product, Google

The above pair of quotes were presented on a slide

Hey, I’m am liveblogging [Update:]

Grossman is talking now: discussing how usability testing can be taken to extremes and become dogma. It reminded me of a common theme today for the smaller businesses that are creating beautiful products that work well. Amazingly they have product release cycles measured in days or, in some cases, hours! (I can’t even conceptualize that.)

They pointed out something that has been obvious to me for years: Amazon has a horrible interface. Yet they do a ton of usability testing and A/B testing for any change they make to their site. A/B testing is like comparing McDonald’s burgers with mayo to McDonald’s burgers with mustard (analogy stolen from one of the panelists). At some point a radical change is required to move forward with the design of the site or product or whatever.

Of course the example of good usability testing is the Apple iPod product line which also popped up on a slide.

Conventions are a useful thing. Jakob Nielson is not. (That one is my own.)

The Leadership Triumvirate

1. Ideation
2. Communication
3. Implementation

Design normally comes in at the implementation stage as the production part of the product assembly line. It should start after the initial idea stage (design as communication is a strategic value add).

“He who can define the problem can define the solution.” –Goto

Really neat process map by Wroblewski:

http://www.gotomedia.com/goto/lifestyle/process/

On a mailing list the following question was asked:

Does anyone have links to any usability studies comparing 2-column layouts (1 column with navigation + ancillary information, 1 column with content) against 3-column layouts (2 columns with navigation + ancillary information, 1 with content)?

As an independent web developer I don’t get to do usability studies for my websites. I have to rely on published studies and common sense. That’s okay: most small businesses can’t afford usability studies but they can, and should, have the best website they can afford.

The question piqued my interest so I did a quick Google search for “web design usability study two-column three-column“. The first result led me through a virtual wonderland of usability studies that provided a lot of really interesting information:

Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends!

Large high-resolution displays can now have resolutions of over 1900 pixels, resulting in extremely long lines of text. One way to resolve the problem of very long text lines is to divide the text into multiple columns, thus decreasing the width of each individual line. Some sites even allow users to customize pages into one, two, or three columns…

Effects of Link Arrangement on Search Efficiency

Results indicate that column treatments of a large numbers of links has an effect on search time. - This statement could imply that if the designer is given no choice with regards to page depth, that no tested improvement can be made on the search time. In other words, nothing shows that arranging many links in particular formats is going to generate lower search times, so choose the best one from a design point of view.

I found this study to be particularly interesting because it determined that users were able to find links quicker when they were spread across multiple columns whereas I would have expected people to more easily scan a single vertical list.

What is the Best Layout for Multiple-Column Web Pages?

An important issue regarding the physical layout of a web page is the use of space or in this case, how the contents of a web page should be placed within the confines of a window. Web designers have dealt with this issue by using several different methods…

This study found that fluid layouts are preferred by users. Left justified layouts (fixed to the left of the window) are least preferred. None of the tested layouts caused a significant difference in usability. Unlike the previous study regarding link columns, the results of this study are exactly what I would have expected.

Where Should You Put the Links? A Comparison of Four Locations

Online newspapers and journals, as well as many other types of informational sites, are invariably confronted with the question of where to place links associated with the online document. Currently, many informational sites place associative links below (as seen with CNN.com) or on the side of the document (as seen with techreview.com), while a shrinking number of sites embed associative links within their documents, such as scientificamerican.com.

This one studied link locations. Again, no significant difference in
usability based on location of the links. Users preferred links embedded in
the content. I’m with the users and, despite the findings, disagree on the usability aspect. Embedded links appear within a context. I know what they’re about and that makes them more useful to me.