Archive for February, 2009

A few weeks ago, a new travel startup called Tourdust quietly slipped into public release. It was my first major project for Clearleft, so I’d like to explain a little about the design process, challenges and decisions involved in its development. Information architecture The Tourdust proposition is a classic exploration of the long tail: linking [...]

Anyone who’s worked in the web is aware of the “best practice” cult. To me, it’s a lazy creed that exhorts us to switch off and plunder others’ work, and the time has come to rebel. Firstly, there’s the pure language involved. “Best” implies something that cannot be improved upon. A world of best practice [...]

January was the month that Twitter lurched towards the British mainstream. Stats show an astronomical rise in site and search traffic, and the rich and famous are now falling over themselves to connect with their fawning public. One may ask why this tipping point has happened first in the UK, rather than the States or [...]

Warning: There follows an arcane debate about HTML semantics, which will be extremely tedious to some. Today has seen a minor revival of one the web’s perennial debates: whether the site header or page header is the most important. Its trivial intractability is perhaps only exceeded by the old UI chestnut of whether positive confirmation [...]