"I’d go so far as to say that the majority of the Web design field, by and large, is too easily motivated by technique, that the majority of us are thinking tactically far more often than we’re thinking strategically."

Andy Rutlege on the difference between creativity and self-expression, and the importance of a professional approach to creativity in design.

An interesting personal homepage.

Some rather obvious reflections, but valuable all the same -- the continued appearance of articles like this shows how important these lessons are. On the volatility of web apps, designers, the relationship thereof, and how important the user is.

Finally, a tutorial for getting size and line height to render and scale exactly the same in all browsers for a given font size. Requires some basic math in the stylesheet.

Free Mac software for taking webpage screenshots. Can capture the entire length of a page (beyond the "fold").

An excellent resource for wireframing.

An excellent, diagram-guided overview of Fitt's Law, which declares that the closer and larger something is, the easier it is to access. The relationship is curved: small changes to small items can have a large impact.

Notes on optimizing for speed and the benefits thereof. Note: "If someone completes their task on a site successfully, they will feel the site was faster than it truly was. If they can’t succeed, they will perceive it as being slower."

"A tool for visual layout development of YAML based CSS layouts." YAML stands for Yet Another Multicolumn Layout.

"Striped background generator."

Detailed to the point of being almost unreadable!

Notes on the growing importance of design in business. Good short reads.

A fine review of the trend in minimalism on the web and in technology in general since the late 90s.

Ugly "Browse..." buttons be gone!

On starting over. "It's better to have something we're both proud off than to try and salvage the work done so far. Sometimes you have to go all the way through the design process before you realize that you've built the wrong thing."

A history of Amazon's site design, and a preview of what's next.

A list of corporate and organization identity guidelines. A good sampling of conventions, though many of them are terribly designed and poorly organized.

Design inspiration.

"The need for these distinctions becomes moot, of course, when no secondary actions are present. Make sure you really need each secondary action on a form and don’t add them indiscriminately."

Commence the drooling.

Embarrassing effects.

Using one large image with all of your smaller images inside of it, and using CSS to position the background into the right position.

How to hide unsightly outlines.

It's about time. But when will this actually become an official recommendation? When universally adopted? And will that adoption be as awful as the previous implementations?

Works perfectly with scriptaculous.

A table of who supports what.

Checks through CSS and HTML to find redundant and unused style definitions.