Steve Smith of Ordered List writes about web design, CSS, product bootstrapping, and the company's acquisition by GitHub.
HN links it for the GitHub acquisition announcement, posts on design constraints and conference badges, and a CSS text-rendering tip for WebKit.
Here are a few links from my bookmark folder on the subject, in no particular order:
How to use contrast to your advantage-
http://www.gomediazine.com/design-tip/rule-three-contrast-contrast-contrast/
Use colors that have varying intensities, not just differnet colors. Focus on how it looks in greyscale
http://www.gomediazine.com/design-tip/becoming-a-master-designer-rule-two-limit-your-colors/
Visualizing Fitt's Law
http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/
Software Has personality.
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2007/09/lightrooms_goals_1.html
Copy sites you like, such as:
http://orderedlist.com/articles/single-line-css#comments
or http://www.joyent.com/
How to make your designs suck less:
http://jimwhimpey.com/blog/2007/simple-ways-to-help-your-design-suck-less-1/
Load faster, by doing a low-res version first.
http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=464
How to do sound design
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/why_is_that_thing_beeping_a_sound_design_primer
More on Sound Design
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2007/03/22/how-to-make-user-interfaces-musical.html
Use smart color pickers
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6434
Whitespace Matters!
http://alistapart.com/articles/whitespace
You can make a UI feel responsive, by minimizing the number of clicks
http://tantek.com/log/2007/02.html#d19t1813
Write Production UIs, never use…
Stop Being An Idiot - http://orderedlist.com/our-writing/blog/articles/stop-being-an-idiot/
"Our job, when designing features and interfaces, is to make them powerful, usable, and understandable. Not to cater to those people too lazy to think. Our job is to make things intuitive. But intuition still requires an individual to want to understand something. It requires an attempt to understand. It requires thought, even subconsciously. We have little power over people’s desire to succeed. We can only provide the tools to do so. So teach people, don’t criticize them."
From their blog post:
What Happens to Your Products?
GitHub cares about their customers, and they care about ours as well.
For the short term, it means that not much will change at all. In fact,
it means better, more frequent updates and feature additions, more stability,
and even better support.
For the long term, just as before, we will continue to evolve our products
to best meet the needs of the market and our business.
Source: http://orderedlist.com/blog/articles/ordered-list-acquired-by-github/
I've seen this done with a Quicksilver style filter as well. Where you don't have to type a strict substring of any of the items. For example typing "US" and still seeing "United States of America".
Demo: http://static.railstips.org/orderedlist/demos/quicksilverjs/jquery.html
Article : http://orderedlist.com/our-writing/blog/articles/live-search-with-quicksilver-style-for-jquery/
The text-shadow hack stopped working when Snow Leopard was released.
-webkit-font-smoothing seems to be a specific solution to the same problem.
via: http://orderedlist.com/our-writing/resources/html-css/thinning-text-in-webkit-safari/
Steve just posted on the constraints he used to design Gauges: http://orderedlist.com/blog/articles/design-focus-and-constraints/
Figured that is related so I should mention it here.