A very well-written article that everyone who consider him/herself as UI designer needs to read.

Although this article focus on Prototyping for Ajax, it touches on many fundamental issues that could alter your design process (for the better).

Here’s the link to the article: A Designer’s Guide to Prototyping Ajax

A great article from QuirksMode that explains display property in CSS which is essential for creating layout in DHTML.

Here’s the link to taht article: The display declaration

This solution allows you to show a full-size image on top of the current page. This can help the flow of your site because no back/reverse path is needed.

This solution is using Javascript. You can learn more about it and get the script from: Lightbox JS page

A very nice step-by-step video tutorial from Swinburne University of Technology: How to create a gallery in Flash using XML data

“He loves computers but worries that they narrow creativity, which thrives on ambiguity, fuzziness, and the borders between ideas. Computers, he explains, are all about clarity and defined boundaries.”

That’s an excerpt from a BusinessWeek article about Milton Glaser: Why We ♥ Milton Glaser, a graphic design legend.

I used to tell my designers: “Designers think with their pencils.” We don’t plan a design. We design by trying out different approaches and possibilities with pencils and papers. Lots of thumbnail sketches. Exploration is the keyword.

That process works very well for me because I’ve been drawing since the day I was able to hold a pen. While my brother played with his toy car, I drew and brought to live my imaginary car in drawings.

Although not many people love drawing as much as I do, people who were born before the 80’s can manifest their ideas with pen/pencil on paper faster than using computers. They went through education with pen and papers as their main media. That’s why we still call writing assignments as “papers” although more papers are submitted electronically nowadays, thus no real paper involved.

My question is: if I can manifest my idea using computer as easy as I do with pencil on paper, will computer still define my ideas and limit my creativity?

I wonder if there’s a reverse connection between the complexity of technology used to creativity. In other words, is it true that the simpler the technology is, the more room for creativity it provides?

You can never be too careful. I learned that the hard way today.

I was trying to move my blog site from one domain to a new sub-domain.

I thought I was smart when I tried to make WP point to the existing db and it seemed to work, so I didn’t back up the db. I only backed up my theme.

Bad move. In fact, in retrospect,  it wasn’t a bad move. That’s exactly what the problem was… I didn’t make a move to back up the db.

While trying to figure out the domain pointer problem, I came across the feature on the hosting ops screen to uninstall the old WP. I didn’t realize that it involves removing the db. By the time I realized it, it was already in the process of dumping the data and deleting the db.

That is why I’m starting over with this blog. Oh well… this really is becoming a fresh start. too fresh.

AJAX is definitely one of the biggest things in web design/development universe at this moment. All the big sites use it and now it’s on the list of all job description for web related jobs. What is it about really? Is it really a new technology? (the answer is no).

So here’s a great article from DHTML Nirvana that explains the concept of AJAX and what it really does.