Our team of designers and engineers has been steadily working on a re-launch of our portal in October that really pushes AOL into some new places. And this is just the beginning! Here is a link to the info on TechCrunch. More details coming soon but the new page has features such as RSS, mail, and soc|net aggregation, customizable navigation, and some other surprises. Stay tuned.

I love this. OK, twitter was having some problems, but look how they handled it! An illustrator worked with a developer to make sure that this, in itself, was not a total bummer to the consumer. Really nice wacky brand experience.

Next time you're thinking about the drudgery of error handling, think about your audience: cold, confused and alone with an ERROR screen confronting them... Many are sure that whatever just broke was their fault. Then think of this ... whale, being lifted effortlessly over the waves. Not only is this feedback from the site on what is hapening, it is an extremely polite way of saying we did not properly plan load capacity and messed up--please come back later.

The opportunity to surprise and delight an audience is everywhere! Even, and maybe especially, in the areas of weakness. Sounds like a zen proverb, but it's all about the details.

You've worked hard, sacrificed nights and weekends, your site is out there for users to click around in, the beer from the launch party is now flat. And yet, there is an outstanding list of design bugs that goes around the corner. Columns are uneven, colors "off" from spec, fonts the wrong size, links going to the wrong places if working at all. Hmmmm... Obviously, something is wrong. Everyone is saying the site is live and celebrating, but it looks... unprofessional and not representative of the team's best work.

I'll state the obvious that this is not where anyone wants to be in this business. So, how to deliver quality each and every time? This post looks at each major role in the creation process and posits the questions that need to be asked individually to keep professional-level design a strategic priority.

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 :)

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.

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.

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 >>

Last week we launched a new PC gaming download experience called BIG Download. GameDaily and Joystiq are partnering on the editorial coverage.

Take a moment to check out the personalized "game tracker" If you add [+] games to your tracker, we'll automatically place the downloads in your queue, whenever there's an update!

I really like where we landed with the branding... we wanted to have fun with the logo. It's a downloading site for PC gaming enthusiasts and we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Look out in the future to see more of the big guy doing different things across the site.

The Webby Awards have been announced! There are some overwhelming overachievers who rightfully deserve many a nod (ahem, TED.com), as well as some interesting discoveries. My favorite findings consisted of:

Moo.com- An ingenious printing press allowing users to create paint-swatch-esque "moo cards". The cards come in a petite box and can be used as a mini collection of images or as satisfying business cards.

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years- MOMA's illustrious flash experience devoted to the sculptor. Full screen images of work with a nice splitting zygote menu for effect.

Checkland Kindleysides- The most soothing promotional design site EVER. Imagine: a paper tree blows leisurely in the wind while you look at hard-hitting design work for some of the largest corporations in the world. The navigation is as fluid as the calming background music.

PostSecret- A cheap and easy (yet so gratifying) blog. Concepting off of I can Has Cheezburger, this blog takes random doodlings, drawings, photos and offers them vulnerable narratives.

Blurb- Make your own book. Blurb allows users to download software and put together a collection of images/words for a very captivating price. It seems to offer more options than iphoto and has a FANTASTIC URL.

Our iPhone web app for TV Listings made Apple's Staff pick! Check it out: http://www.apple.com/webapps/

Much thanks to the creative team behind this one: Mike Costantino, Amzed Hussain, John Kilpatrick and a host of others. Read more about their app here: http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/aoltvlistingsforiphone.html

The TV listings app is the latest in a series of apps we've been working on. There are a bunch more to follow, and I'll be sharing them here with you as we get through them.

Next up is AOL Money and Finance's Quotes app. Check it out on your iPhone at iphone.money.aol.com.

Please let me know if you think of something that you think would make a great iPhone app-- maybe we'll make it happen...

Here goes another one... we launched a new blog today called Urlesque. Following up on the success of Asylum, we developed a new site that will focus on "what are people blogging about today."

Let us know what you think about the design.

It was a heartbreaking loss for Memphis but for the first time in 20 years the Jayhawks are the NCAA BB Champions. The final game tonight capped off a tumultuous final on March Madness and was the end of a record year for AOL Sports. The March Madness package was the best to date, surpassing our goals and setting page view records, that included editorial coverage of each region, live bracket scores via an interactive flash scoreboard and individual gamepages with news, team and player stats.

The heart of the package was built on original coverage, realtime game data, player stats and differentiated further by a strong edgier look and feel that made the package stand out on its own. Top it off with a first class sponsor in Audi.

We rounded off the experience with a host of games for tournament fans. Starting off with the best looking printable bracket to the interactive bracket games built in collaboration with our partner Stats, inc. -- Bracket Challenge, Bracket Manager and Second Chance Challenge.

Our AOL Food team launched several new features last week, including a series of Get Cooking videos, enhanced search functionality and category sorting. These incremental improvements lay the groundwork for many great features that we have in our pipeline to launch in the coming months. It demonstrates the team's ability to break down large ideas into iterative launches to get great features in the hands of our audience quickly.