Nick Finck sure can design.
in another life I am a fireplace
New at V-2, beauty now for the people has Adam despairing the state of design on the web, finding it flaccid and dull. He believes the latest "market softening" (setback/downturn/recession/etc) is to blame:
"Seen in this light, the sense of ennui that has suffused the web design community since the dot.com bubble burst has a certain self-fulfilling inevitability. When all around you, shops are closing or laying off staff; when every site you see seems like a barely-iterated rehash of somebody's year-old innovation; when designers left and right are slated by their erstwhile peers as "trendwhore" or "rock star" - well, this is not a prescription for the widespread emergence of novelty, is it?"
but he is ever an optimist, and points out a few innovators to get our juices flowing once again... check it out!
Lou Rosenfeld requests less adolescent pondering the meaning of our existance, and more planning (plotting?) for the future)
"Here are some areas that I think information architects can and should take on. Some are orphans that may have gone unnoticed and therefore unowned. Some are simply not well understood by most people working on web sites today, including most IAs. Each of these areas presents us with difficult and interesting challenges that will increasingly demand our attention over time. And they fit squarely within the scope of information architecture: "
he goes on to list and describe
which range from the granular to the super....
and what do you think (I'm still mulling)
The arguments about liquid design, scalable fonts and line length comes up again and again. You may wish to track down one of these publication for the next time it springs up.
"Line length was found to be a significant factor in influencing reading rate, whilst comprehension remained relatively constant. Long line lengths (about 100 characters per line) were read faster than shorter lines. However, this line length is judged as least easy to read, and people are generally in agreement that 55 characters per line is the easiest to read. "
later that same day
A couple more items
smoking gun has a way to use css and js to control layout while scaling (or so I am told) and this is an intriguing look at the browser as canvas...
still later
Dao of Web Design is a great article on accepting the medium's nature.