Tufte’s initial work will be on the recovery.gov website, which is the primary way the board will conduct business transparently to the American public.

Wonder if he brought his own litter of kittens, or will be borrowing them from DC shelters…?

1. When ignoring an experienced and talented designer, your organization will only waste more dollars “trying out” everyone’s ideas, testing what’s been tested, ad nauseum, etc. 
2. As far as handling feedback, I don’t think it’s the designer’s responsibility to manage feedback process. Typically, a designer is hit with competing and often conflicting feedback from every direction– an overwhelming experience that often includes a healthy dosage of office politicking. The design team manager (or any manager) should set rules for unsolicited feedback. I think designers should not be forced to balance conflicting executive feedback. 
3. Design input is always valuable and fresh eyes often can see overlooked design weaknesses, but a business/client should understand years of design experience is worth something. 
4. Being a good designer is not only a matter of creating great work, but being able to work with various stakeholders to successfully deliver the project.

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!

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?

Log-In on the Homepage: Before and after

This article takes a detailed look at the design, layout and usability of Craigslist and point out some areas where the author feel change and improvement are possible. This is only one opinion of what could be done to improve the site. The goal was to demonstrate the process of evaluating a website in certain areas and determining specific improvements that can be made.