March 24, 2008

Keeping up with Design

Filed under: Graphic Design, Web Design — Douglas T @ 4:23 pm

Somebody asked me a good question today. To paraphrase, it was “what websites do you use to keep up with what’s going on in the industry?”. Here’s the list:

While I don’t write about blogging, I do follow what’s going on with that industry. It’s too much of a factor in the web design business not to.

Mostly I like to read about Art and Design. You’ll notice that a number of these these sites aren’t web or graphic design related. Web design needs to be inspired by all arts, not just other web design.

Inspiration can come from all kinds of interesting stuff.

I’m particularly fond of Search Feeds. Most people don’t realize that a lot of search engines allow you to subscribe to the search. So you can be notified of anything new on the subject of your choice.

I also subscribe to a number of Technical Feeds. While some of these sites write about things outside of design, it’s important to keep up on these too. The more I know about all aspects of my job, the better I can do my job. This might include how my computer and software work, how to improve them or how to fix them, and what’s new in the industry .

I keep track of my subscriptions with the Sage feed reader for Firefox. I have posted elsewhere about other Firefox resources I regularly use.

March 6, 2008

IE8 to display like IE8

Filed under: HTML, Web Design — Douglas T @ 8:57 am

Despite early announcements that IE8 would default to displaying pages as if it were IE7, Microsoft is now announcing that it will default to Standards mode. This will alleviate the need for designers to opt out, by opting in as I’ve written about before.

Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards

Consistent with its efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft Corp. is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content - by default - using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability.

This is the best news I’ve heard from Microsoft in quite some time. I was really hoping this issue would be resolved before IE8 came onto the market, but I was holding little hope. They have in the past seemed more inclined to use their own proprietary standards than to “give top priority to Web standards interoperability”. I’m happy top see that that wasn’t the case here.