How often do you come across a t-shirt with nothing but words on it and yet everyone wants one? How important of a role does design play versus the actual message being delivered?

So many designers spend so much time trying to prettify everything without realizing why they are actually doing it? Are you really enhancing the message or are you simply putting lipstick on a pig?

Design encompasses a lot of individual components brought together to solve a problem. The message is simply one of those components, but without it the solution that the design is trying to offer can get lost.

1. Responsive and intuitive page elements
2. Branding and consistency of theme.

Focusing on these two things will give every pixel in a design a purpose and will contribute to the website’s overall usability. Sure, eye candy is important, but it isn’t everything, and that for a design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design.

I think rules #4 “Make your site’s goal obvious”, #5 “Navigation should be easy to figure out”, #7 “Don’t put animation in the way of your content” and #9 “Don’t have a splash/landing page” can be broken for personal portfolio or some entertainment sites, where a more creative approach might be appropriate, but not so much for e-commerce, news or corporate sites.

#6 “Use different colors for the text and background” should be “Use Contrast between Text and Background”, not different colors. Most of the examples here use variations of the base color, and use contrast to make the text readable, just like it supposed to be.

#8 “Stick to web-safe fonts”: I’m getting into using Cufon and Typeface.js (I used it for 2 projects), they offer a great solution in terms of progressive enhancement (better than sIFR), and think this is one area where the old rules no longer apply.

I also liked the tables joke and the tone it sets to encourage designers not to be so serious all the time!

For those looking for some base concepts on the idea of simplicity, here are John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity:

1. Reduce – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
2. Organize – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
3. Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity
4. Learn – Knowledge makes everything simpler
5. Differences – Simplicity and complexity need each other
6. Context – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
7. Emotion – More emotions are better than less
8. Trust – In simplicity we trust
9. Failure – Some things can never be made simple
10. The One – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

- David Lewis

I came across this new website from Adobe called INSPIRE, an online publication of the Adobe Experience Design Team, which will easily attract anyone into software, web & graphic design.

The Adobe team shares valuable, real-life experiences both written & via videos.

Here are some interesting content:

• Adobe and the future of multitouch (really cool!)
• Collecting User Feedback: You’re Doing It Wrong
• Icons In Space

Slow times are a perfect time to start putting together self promotional materials. What are the patterns in your business? How can you demonstrate competency beyond what everyone else is doing? Every designer has a portfolio of their designs, but how many have a portfolio of their minds?

Victoria's Secret website: In my opinion, is the best of the fashion list.

In the showcase of fashion websites, you’ll see some variety, but you will also notice the presence of certain trends.

Fashion websites are sometimes a good source of inspiration. They really try to push the boundaries of what websites can achieve, through their design and functionality. But most of the times they pay the high cost of having poor usability and/or missing their target markets: