At Manchester airport in May I noticed Web Design Essentials (WDE). Reasons of cost £14.99 and weight meant it was put back on the news stand. The content was excellent! Back in the UK a week later, no sign of it in the supermarket. I found a copy this week at WH Smiths and made the 'investment' - a belated holiday treat.This is gold mine of nuggets on HTML5, design - wireframes, user experience (UX), fonts and typography:
http://www.font-face.com/
http://fontdeck.com/
- personas, CSS3, jQuery and much more. Now I think about it UX has been around for quite a while, it's a sure sign of how web design has matured such that practitioners can and must focus on the experience. There's another blog post there contrasting UX in web design with UX in health services. Reading about the use of personas in design and planning for a site might also deserve a specific post. As WDE indicates there are companies dedicated to UX. I do not have that luxury and yet I do have to define my initial target audience and their anticipated experience.
The web design related listing I maintain at LINKS I (Intrapersonal) are being updated as a result of the leads in WDE.
Through the scheduling and poll services of Doodle (thanks Chris) and with the Drupal NW England list I'm checking on which day in the autumn - November - is best for a group of volunteers to help jump start the new site. Everything is sorted now for Drupalcon next month.