Design literature

I'm assembling a list of books for my research. This list is already too long, which probably means my subject is too broad. However, I like to read and these books will come in handy no matter what!

On (interaction) design:

• In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex …

Design Research

As you might be aware, I'm currently doing a master Communication & Multimedia Design (C-MD). Coming up with a good research subject is, for most of us, one of the hardest tasks. To make it easier, we were asked to setup a blog to reflect on our interests, hobbies, …

Simple, accessible jQuery menu

Not every website needs to be powered by a content management system, or even a simple blog engine. Sometimes, a fully powered CMS like Drupal or Joomla is just a little too much. Sometimes it's not even possible to use a database and all you have is your webserver, …

Thesis proposal

My pre-master year at C-MD was concluded on the 25th of june with a presentation of my thesis proposal. My ideas have shifted quite a bit and my proposal evolved with it.

Initially, I wanted to explore the possibilities of Web 2.0 for police research, by building on …

Edupaper

Edupaper is an innovative company with a green goal: it intends to reduce paper use in education by implementing mobile applications. Using electronic paper will reduce the number of books students need to carry, and in effect reduce the number of trees which have to be …

YUI grids extension

Despite the extra required <div> tags, I regularly use the Yahoo! UI grids framework. This provides several advantages when buidling multi-column layouts with CSS. Besides speedy development and source-order independence, it gives you a lot of flexibility when creating …

Drupal image attach block module

I recently created several PHP blocks for a Drupal website that made heavy use of the image module and the image_attach module. While the block creation wasn't very difficult, it was still a process that took me a long night of researching api.drupal.org and fiddling …

WYSIWYG editor usability tip

Open Source WYSIWYG editing in CMS still sucks, but with developments like the WYMeditor ("What You Mean" editor, built on jQuery) the situations is improving steadily. This editor lets content writers focus on the structure of their document instead of visual layout. …

Do you use personas?

37signals state that they don't use personas because:

"We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels."

Personas are poor substitutes for real people, they argue, and you should always base your …

We feel fine

Did you know that people are happiest in Hawaii and saddest in Singapore? And that people feel most sexy in Las Vegas? We Feel Fine is an art experiment that has collected allmost 10 million feelings from 2 million people around the world and has built a unique …