Weekly Round-up ~ Oct 16, 09 Edition

Every Friday, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Accessibility Camp DC

  As web designers and developers, we need to make sure the sites we build are user friendly to everyone. This is why accessibility is very important. This past Saturday, we attended the Accessibility Camp DC. We had a great time interacting with the experts and advocates in the field. Here’s our recap of some of the sessions we attended. We hope you find it helpful.

• Scott Thomas ~ Designing Obama

  Scott Thomas was the design director of the Barack Obama presidential campaign last year. His work on the campaign last year has defined a new standard for government websites to better serve the public. In that regard, I consider him one of the influential designers out there today.

From Elsewhere

• 8 Ways to Make WordPress Easier to Use for Your Clients

  WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs out there today. While designers and developers don’t have any problems using it, the WordPress admin panel can be a bit over whelming for non tech savvy clients. This article offers some good tips to make it easy for them.

• 9 Useful jQuery Calendar and Date Picker Plugins for Web Designers

  jQuery makes front-end development much easier. This article contains some very nice Calendar picker plugins.

• 50 Time Saving Photoshop Actions for Enhancing Photos

  A nice post processed photo can add so much more mood to your site. These free Photoshop actions will come in handy.

• Web Design is 95% Typography

  An oldie but goodie. Proper typography should be used in every medium, and the web is no exception.

• Social Media and the Federal Government: Perceived and Real Barriers and Potential Solutions [pdf]

  If you work in a government agency, this policy document on the usage of social media is an interesting read.

• CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

  Since Internet Explorer is still widely used by the public and government sector, this article is very helpful for web developers to debug IE. (Don’t forget about our Comprehensive Test Strategy for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.)

• Remove the outline from links on :active only

  By suppressing the outline from only the “active” state, keyboard users will retain the outline when the link is focused. (via Roger Johansson)

• Experience Design and the State of User Experience

  In this fascinating video from the recent Adaptive Path UX Week 2009 in San Francisco, Jesse James Garrett moves beyond medium-specific design – which he refers to as “mediumism” – to a broader concept of “experience design: the design of anything, independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.” He goes on to explain how our designs must evolve to be not only visual but perceptual, which is to say not only limited to sight. As we engage with our users through increasingly diverse media and channels, each interaction is an experience which is an opportunity for design and we must “orchestrate the facets of experience design to accomplish our goals and deliver the kind of experience that we want our users to have.”

• HTML+RDFa First Draft Published by W3C

  The W3C has published the First Draft of HTML+RDFa, which adds “attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints” and “bridge the human and data webs.” This is based on the W3C Recommendation RDFa in XHTML. (Note this is different from the Microdata section of HTML5, which is still in progress.)

• Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain
  

  Bestselling author Seth Godin argues that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.