Design Treasure 35/5

The good people at Smashing Magazine have released a survey of 35 designers, each answering 5 questions about their design process, workflow and approach and other tips. What it amounts to is a vital resource of ideas and suggestions and consequently a link dump of portfolios from other designers.

For anyone who is even remotely interested in design all the way to established designers, this is an excellent place to gain some perspective on what drives others in the field and maybe pick up a few nuggets of information to add to your design toolbag.

Highlights included

1. Communication, Usability, Typography, Navigation and Details being the top 5 things designers focused on when designing. Others were listed.
2. Normalizing the browser (reseting margins and paddings to 0px or 1px) before applying new styles as one of the top CSS techniques used by designers.
3. Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Arial, Garamond - classic fonts still widely loved.
4. Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" came out on top by far as the book most designers referenced. (Just added to my Amazon wishlist)
Robert Bringhurst's "Elements of Typographic Style" also caught my eye in the list of books mentioned.
5. DigitalWeb Magazine as well as A list Apart came out as designer favorites in the online magazine category for the surveyed group. A good number have also opted out of reading online magazines and focusing on relevant articles as they come out.

View the full survey here..

Humorously Yours

Inevitably in my travels around the interweb, I find new things that tickle me. Based on a link from a podcast I follow quite faithfully, I discovered this online column/video podcast on technology from David Pogue at the New York Times.

I particularly like the perspective he brings with his column, obviously tailoring it for the everyday user, who frankly is the average N.Y. Times reader. It's full of good insights and fun to watch. As a techie, it's sometimes hard to remember that not everyone understands why having an 802.11n router is cool or VOIP for that matter.