I was stuck for a couple of extra hours at the airport in Dulles and I noticed this amazing visualization of the Internet from AT&T Labs and a company called "Lumeta". Yes, I know these have been done before, but rarely with any sense of aesthetics in mind. Alas, some extensive searching revealed no aditional information on this monstrosity (it is rather large). It is one of those things you'd really like to get a copy of, but for some reason, a company smart enough to map the Internet is not smart enough to put an URL on the poster to follow up on their creation. Something this cool deserved a "How We Did It" type of explanation somewhere. Oh well. If you are in Dulles or Reagan airports, be sure to check it out. It color codes major nodes and networks, and that faint gray "haze" is actually thousands of labels for major servers in the network. A great marriage of science and design.

And apologies for the quality of the picture. It was taken with my phone.

If you are struggling with CSS in your projects, help is near!

The AOL Design Guide is now your go to place for CSS information, including:

• Recommended Software: a list of software and add-ons with free or have a free trial period.
• CSS Resources: the latest AOL CSS template file to start your project, CSS reference guides, the list of browser safe fonts, and other tools for working with CSS.
• Best Practices: If you have a question about how to get the best code and designs with CSS, check out the Best practices list. This list will answer questions such as when to use inline styles (never) and which is the best color value notation (RGB).

But the page is still growing! We will be adding CSS training materials, the AOL Dev/Design Process for working with CSS, and expanding the best practices list. Stay tuned!

If you have any questions about the best practices, want to suggest software and resources, or have any questions about designing with CSS at AOL, please email me at j.cranfordteague@corp.aol.com

Visit the CSS Best Practices page:
http://designguide.office.aol.com/BestPractices/CSS

I've had a few weeks now to play with the new Web enabled application from Google, known as Chrome. Some, including Google, call it a Web browser.

I respectfully disagree.

If it is only a Web browser, Chrome leaves a lot to be desired. Despite promised improvements (like the basic ability to organize your bookmarks), its stripped down interface has a long way to go to compete with the feature sets of Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer. But, then, it may not be Google's goal to create an application for browsing the Web.

Consider it's name: Chrome. In the world of user interface design, we call the buttons, backgrounds, icons and other graphic bits of the interface "chrome." And that's exactly what Google's Chrome is: it is the chrome ( lower case "c") for Google's current and future Web based applications.

And I'm not the only one who seems to thinks so. I remember just ten years ago when Marc Andreesen had the same idea and threw down the gauntlet, stating that Netscape would replace the operating system as the vector for users interacting with computer applications. It did not quite turn out that way, but maybe Google will be able to pull it off.

Maybe.

I recently needed to optimize around 30 photos that I exported from iPhoto. These files are huge and not ready for the web, but saving all 30 manually seemed a task for the mundane.

I then remembered Droplets, a little known feature of Photoshop to convert any Action (save, resize, filter, etc.) into an icon that you can drag and drop files to, and have it perform that action automatically - a productivity booster indeed.

Learn how to create a Droplet in Photoshop by checking out my video tutorial and article here:

Bulk Image Compression with Photoshop Droplets
A word of caution, always check the results to ensure quality and filesize are in total harmony!

It's been a while (since Sprites?) since I've had something new in optimization land for designers.

I've read a couple enlightening articles recently on PNG8, and how if you use Fireworks, you get a full alpha transparency layer that degrades nicely in IE6 (transparent pixels disappear, opaque pixels stay) without the performance impact of the AlphaImageLoader filter.

Check this article out first: PNG8 - The Clear Winner

And then read my article practicing real-world scenarios and let me know what you think:

PNG Transparency Tools & Techniques - Optimizing PNGs!

If you're a Photoshop user, Fireworks PNG8 should be a new tool for creating low-bandwidth transparent masterpieces. If you're a Fireworks user, you may just be thinking Artz is a newbie. Let me know which one you are :)

Over at InfoQ, they are debating whether it's worth while to support Internet Explorer 6 anymore. The article details several online serivices, vendors, and developmental frameworks that are pulling support, arguing that the browser that once made up 95% of the market share is no longer an online player now that Internet Explorer is on the scene.

On the one hand, deciding not to support IE6 and embracing Web standards can make it easier to create Web sites, expand your design possibilities, and generally allow for a better experience. On the down side, if you do go with a Web standards compliant site and ignore IE6, these sites do not tend to degrade gracefully and many users on the older browser can get frustrated. Any thoughts about what we should do?

Greetings shiftlings! I'm Dave Artz, leader of AOL's Website Optimization team, a group at AOL charged with helping the willing and able speed up their site and make it more accessible to devices and search engines. I created a screencast on a recently open sourced tool from AOL, Pagetest. This tool makes it easy to figure out why the designs you've worked so hard on might be slowing down once they're built, and ammunition to get back into shape.

For those of us that think visually and like to click on pictures (ok, that's most of us btw), PicLens is a pretty amazing app that brings the Web to life as a visual medium. Just download the extension and PicLens turns image and video feeds from top sources into an interactive "wall of media" that animates smoothly across your screen. So smoothly, in fact, that you may actually get motion sickness playing with it (like I did).

Like most interactive things it really has to be experienced to be appreciated. If you have ever felt that image or video search should be more compelling than this one is certainly for you. I recommend everyone on my team try it out. Though if you haven't wanted a more visual, interactive Internet than this plug-in will probably go into the "cool things" bookmark graveyard you never go back to visit. I do believe the new "Shop Amazon" feature is a stretch though.

Speaking as the General Manager of PIXCETERA, this one is a tough act to follow I must admit.

Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

Jonathan Meyers, the Program Manager for AOL News, passed on this great tip that we have posted an open competition cash-reward for an Elections experience. You can see it in the screen shot above at the bottom. All of the basic requirements are listing on the page.

For the uninitiated, TopCoder Studio is "the meeting place for clients who need creative work done and creative people looking to compete for that work." Nice to see an AOL project posted in an open marketplace like this.

Well, considering that that experience has little to do with words, I'll just say "check it out"...



But, if you like to read, the site says: "VUVOX is excited about the coming introduction of a new personal expression platform - called COLLAGE. This dynamic media creation suite will enable everyone to easily turn their photos, videos, text and audio clips into interactive story panoramas." At last someone finally built one of those. Been waiting... Thanks to Jonathan Meyers for the tip.

When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.

A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.

Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:

> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.

Click "read more" for more ideas >>

I am digitizing a life. Mine to be exact. One thousand two hundred CDs, piles of mini-DV tapes taken on my camcorder (normal and high def res), many boxes of negatives and prints, drawings I did when I was "destined" to be an Illustrator, the sketches of my growing sons. The list of historical assets seems endless as I troll about the basement. During the process I have occasionally envied those folks that have always been digital because the business of "porting" to a fully digital media life is a lot of work. It has literally taken me 3 years just to get around to digitizing all the CDs alone.

Then it hit me one night recently: "Should I even be doing this?"

Click "read more" for the good stuff...

Click "read more" to see all the new features...

According to a recent Stanford News Service report, Standford researchers are developing a camera exceeding our two dimensional standards.

Professor Abbas El Gamal and a team of students are embarking on research to develop a three-dimensional camera containing 12,616 lenses as opposed to the single lens in two-dimensional SLRs. Stanford News Service reports, "they've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to .7 microns, several times smaller than the pixels in standard digital cameras." These pixels are further grouped into arrays of 256 with a lens topping each array.

The coolest thing about this proposed invention is its depth perception and quality. Imagine having the ability to upload images and instead of viewing and editing a flat surface, different planes of the image are navigable and alterable. Direct your 'crop' tool to take you five feet into the frame instead of 20 pixels from the top and side. The quality of the imagery would lead you into gigapixel territory, eliminating the antiquated 'megapixel' devices.

Cost and size? Cheaper than your current point and shoot, and smaller than your cell phone. Now if that isn't photo-progress, I'm not really sure what is.