Alister Cameron is asking people to dig up the oldest business card they can lay their hands on, and post a photo of it. The oldest example I could find is this card from my web design days during the dot-com boom, when I was working for (the sadly now defunct) Sydney design studio, 110 Design. A photo of my ... Read full entry

Have design conferences grown so big, and expensive, that they have outlived their usefulness? An interesting essay by Alissa Walker on planning and executing design conferences. If you're really hankering to plan some kind of get-together, don't! In all likelihood what you think you need to say can be accomplished in the form of a blog, a film, a book, a social network. If you want to make a ... Read full entry

How to get the most out of being an in-house designer, especially when working as part of a larger design team, by Ted Boren. "Compromise," implies that someone gets something they really don't like, but are willing to put up with. I prefer to think in terms of synergy. Working together, the whole team can come to see what is rock-bottom required, vs. nice-to-have, vs. not-really-that-important. This requires aligning ... Read full entry

A lovely euphemism for rehashing previously used design methods and even raw code: it's called your design signature: If you've designed more than five sites in your site, you likely have a design signature too, although it's probably different than most other designers and coders you know. You may not even know you have it, but you do.

These $10 website things aren't all beer and skittles mind you. In fact you'd actually be better off spending your $10 on beer and skittles. Drinking beer isn't too tricky for "nontechies". There are some downsides to these free hosting services. Each offers several dozen design templates, but you could still end up with a site that looks pretty generic, unless you have Web-design skills or hire someone ... Read full entry

... it would have to be the From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small panel. The web has always attracted mavericks and entrepreneurs, and a rocky economy makes the freelance life more desirable (or at least more inevitable) than ever. So what happens when your freelance business starts to grow? How big can you get without getting bad? How can freelancers and small teams compete with traditional agencies? ... Read full entry

I've mentioned Australian INfront founder, and web designer about Sydney, Justin Fox's latest personal blog before, but in a blogosphere choke full of make-money-online and blogs-about-blogging ... blogs, it is refreshing to read something again that is the no-strings-attached real deal. I feel like I've been sitting here all these years watching the world go by, in my "only dead fish go with the flow" sort of way, while ... Read full entry

Can you still be referred to as a graphic designer even if you usually do web design work? Every time I've told someone I'm a "web designer", the word "web" stuck while "designer" soared clear over their head. The outlander's perception seemed to be that web design was more about building than designing. This belies the skill and experience that a good designer contributes, instead making them out to ... Read full entry

Web professionals, this is for you. The Edge of the Web conference is on in Perth, West Australia from November 6 to 7 this year, and features a line up of well known local and international speakers, and also coincides with the 2008 WA Web Awards, which I profiled a couple of years ago at OnVoiceOver. Edge of the Web 2008 aims to set a benchmark in ... Read full entry

Less is always more when it comes to great website design, as this list compiled by Vandelay Design shows, but then again I am reasonably biased in this regard. It seems that everyone has a different opinion of what qualifies as a minimalistic design. Here are 25 websites that make use of very little unnecessary design elements but still manage to pull off a beautiful appearance. When it comes ... Read full entry