On almost any mailing list or forum you still encounter developers venting their frustration as to how buggy CSS is and how hard it is to switch from table layouts to CSS layouts. A lot of this frustration is not based on bad browsers or missing elements and concepts in CSS, it is based on an old school view of web design. Web design was never easy, but it can be if we start embracing the complexity of our development environment and be flexible enough to develop for it (more…)

Are you scrounging ebay or price comparison sites daily for deals? If so, give rectifi a go. It is a search engine that donates 92% (no idea how they came up with that number) of their advertising income to charities.

Doesn’t cost you anything, and it is a nice idea.

I got some emails by people asking me how the script powering the css table gallery works. Instead of answering each and every email, please refer to the following if you are also curious:

• The making of the CSS table gallery

It is by far not a “best of breed” piece of scripting, but hey, it gets the job done.

Why is it that every time game console crazy friends send me links about happenings I stand there confused as heck?

http://www.origenxbox360.net/, probably brought to you by the same designers as the XBOX 360 main site (which was featured on the daily sucker) is once again a high tech flash site that should encourage interactivity, but I honestly don’t get what they want me to do and why I should try to find out what it is about…

Other companies are more subtle, and not at all less impressive: IKEA’s 360 degree kitchen portfolio got me stunned and I had a lot of fun using it.

Maybe if usability militia members and arty designers would stop bashing each others’ work and learn from another we could sell Flash as a rich user interface, and not only as a pretty animation toy.

Some may remember that I reported on the unfortunate logo of an oriental school some time ago. I am also still puzzled what the Olympic Games 2004 in Athens mascot is, but what really got me was a new German creation:

This logo, chosen from supposedly hundreds of creations by top design agencies should encourage me to feel good to be German. How can something resembling either

• a white shirt after a boozed up stop at the chip shop (gravy, ketchup, mustard)
• a dog turd in the German national colours

should inspire me to feel good about my nationality?