Online Net Meeting

My world has changed (and I get to share with you)

Twitter’s new list feature is one of those things that seems simple on the surface and is easily ignored.

But it has deeply changed how I get my news and how I interact with the tech community.

Click through these lists and you’ll see a different world than you would have thought possible on Twitter. This is the order I visit the lists in the morning:

Tech News Brands.
Here’s 500 tech news sources. Everything from the Wall Street Journal
to TechCrunch. Watch this list for a few minutes and you’ll be up to
date on what’s happening in tech right now. This is far more complete
than Techmeme or Google News and far faster too.

Once I’ve gotten up to date on the news, I check out the people who write and produce the news.
Here you’ll find 491 journalists and bloggers and see what the back
channel is. Often this is more interesting than the tech news brands,
but it’s lots of fun to flip back and forth while some big news story
is breaking.

Want to know what the news will be tomorrow? Well, the rich guys who
are funding companies often know what will be big and so I watch this list of 415 venture capitalists and angel investors to see what they are thinking about.

The venture capitalists, though, are fun to contrast with 447 people who founded their own companies. Often these two lists have divergent points of view that are fun to flip back and forth between.

After all that I visit the tech pundits list. These are 451 folks who love to tell you what they think happened.

If you’re an entrepreneur I’ve built a list of weapons for you.
Everything from stationary companies to Yammer, for keeping your team
up to date. This is still a list in progress, so if you have a company
that has a weapon for entrepreneurs, let me know!

What about tech company executives? I have a list of 283 who are CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, or VPs.
Lots of times news gets announced by these people. Marissa Mayer, for
instance, announced that Google had made a search deal with Twitter and
if you were following this list you would have seen that.

Here’s a list of 376 tech companies and their official PR accounts (everyone from Google to startups). I find a lot of new products here and find out about updates, too.

Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting/Cloud Computing list.
500 people, news sources, hosting companies (not just Rackspace,
either). I’m trying to keep up to date on the hosting business and
Cloud Computing and this is how I do it. Find a more complete list
anywhere.

Everyone should watch their coworkers. I do the same, with a list of 302 Rackspace employees and data sources. Have you made a list of your coworkers? Why not?

These are my core information lists that I check many times per day.

But I have a few specialized lists too:

TechStartups:
this is a list of 500 startups that most people won’t have heard of yet
(mostly early stage). I’ll work on this list more over the next few
weeks.

Geolocation
(174 people and companies). I’m interested in developers and companies
that are building new kinds of apps that use GPS and location. Things
like Foursquare and Gowalla (both of those are on this list, along with
the founders).

iPhone. 500 of the top iPhone app developers and companies and other influentials and programmers.

Twitter tools and devs
(353). Twitter has a growing ecosystem of companies and people who are
developing tools and services. This list has everyone I’ve been able to
find so far.

Tech Event Organizers (239). These are people who run events and the events that they run. Everything from Emerging Tech to BarCamps.

Video or audio shows
(101 people and shows). These are podcasts and video shows, mostly tech
centric. Everything from Leo Laporte’s shows to Gillmor Gang.

My favstar list
(500 people). These are the people I’ve clicked “Favorite” on the most.
Favstar.fm keeps track of who I favorite the most and puts them on this
list. It’s actually one of my favorite lists, but less focused than the
others.

Web Innovators (79). If you’ve done something big for the Internet I put you on this list.

Programmers
(306). I’m not sure what I’ll do with this list in the future (Twitter
limits me to 500 people and obviously there’s more than 500 programmers
in the world). But, if you are looking for what programmers think this
is a good place to start.

Most influential in tech
(225). This is my most followed list, but it’s also the most
subjective. What makes someone influential? Well, I study who has the
respect of their peers and who gets stuff done. Or, who has a bully
pulpit and can get things focused on.

Anyway, if you are looking for other lists, I highly recommend using Listorious, which is a service that tracks lists (you have to add yours, if you haven’t you really should).

If you think you should be added to a list of mine, let me know in
the comments here or drop me a line at scobleizer@gmail.com. Thanks and
hope you get some value out of these. I know that these have
dramatically changed my world.

A few other things: 1. you should check out my favorites list. Every day I put my favorite tweets on there. In about two months I’ve put 8,000 items on this list.

My favorite Twitter client is now Seesmic Web, which supports lists now (and other new Twitter features like Geolocation). The other day I interviewed the Seesmic team about these new features and the video is very telling.

Thanks Robert,

Read the original:
My world has changed (and I get to share with you)

SAN FRANCISCO — The global credit crisis may have caused the decline in consumer and business spending that is assaulting the giants of high tech. But as the dominant technology companies try to emerge from this slump, they may find themselves blaming people like David Title just as much as they blame Wall Street.

Mr. Title, a 35-year-old new-media manager at a film production company in New York, has dropped his cable subscription and moved to watching most of his television online — free. While shopping for a new laptop for his girlfriend recently, he sidestepped more expensive full-featured computers and picked a bare-bones, $200 Asus EeePC laptop, also known as a netbook.

“We’ve reached one of those moments in tech history when there are low-priced and free alternatives that are both user-friendly and reliable enough to make the switch,” Mr. Title said. “Then there’s the extra bonus of saving some cash.”

Silicon Valley has been gripped by a growing sense that the economic retreat might do more than depress earnings. There is too much ingrained optimism here to think that the tech sector will not bounce back, stronger than before.

But the fear now is that consumers like Mr. Title, and businesses operating with the same cost-cutting mind-set, will erode the high-margin businesses of the information technology industry — slowing some technologies and companies but giving new momentum to others.

A normally confident Steven A. Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, expressed this very fear last week after announcing the company’s first big reduction of its work force. “Our model is not for a quick rebound,” he said. “Our model is things go down, and then they reset. The economy shrinks.”

This has happened before. The dot-com bust earlier in the decade dragged down high-fliers like Sun Microsystems and America Online but set the stage for a new generation of Web powerhouses like Google and other innovative Internet software companies like Salesforce.com, founded on disrupting the status quo.

The recession of the early 1990s sent I.B.M., then the dominant force in technology, into a five-year tailspin. But it also propelled Microsoft and Compaq, later acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and Dell to the forefront of computing.

Indeed, Silicon Valley may be one of the few places where businesses are still aware of the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist who wrote about business cycles during the first half of the last century. He said the lifeblood of capitalism was “creative destruction.” Companies rising and falling would unleash innovation and in the end make the economy stronger.

Recessions “can cause people to think more about the effective use of their assets,” said Craig R. Barrett, the retiring chairman of Intel, who has seen 10 such downturns in his long career. “In the good times, you can get a bit careless or not focused as much on efficiency. In bad times, you’re forced to see if there is a technology” that will help.

So who’s up, who’s down and who’s out this time around? Microsoft’s valuable Windows franchise appears vulnerable after two decades of dominance. Revenue for the company’s Windows operating system fell for the first time in history in the last quarter of 2008. The popularity of Linux, a free operating system installed on many netbooks instead of Windows, forced Microsoft to lower the prices on its operating system to compete.

Intel’s high-power processors are also under assault: revenue tumbled by 23 percent last quarter, marking the steepest decline since 1985.

Meanwhile, more experimental but lower-cost technologies like netbooks, Internet-based software services (called cloud computing) and virtualization, which lets companies run more software on each physical server, are on the rise.

Penny-pinching shoppers like Mr. Title could have the most immediate effect on the tech industry, particularly if more people consider canceling their cable subscriptions to watch video online, or drop their landline telephones to depend on their cellphones or on Internet calling services like Skype.

Many consumers appear ready to abandon the costly desktop computer altogether. Analysts expect PC sales to fall in 2009 for just the second time in the last two decades, with desktops falling even faster than they did in 2007 or 2008.

The only bright spot in the PC industry is netbooks. Analysts at the Gartner research company said shipments rose to 4.4 million devices in the third quarter of 2008, from 500,000 units in the first quarter of last year. Analysts say sales could double this year despite a deep worldwide recession.

Two lumbering giants, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, missed the first wave of these tiny, stripped-down machines, allowing Acer of Taiwan to grab market share. Acer pushed Apple out of the No. 3 spot behind H.P. and Dell as sales soared 55 percent. Dell and H.P. are making the devices now.

Even the mighty Apple, whose iPod and iPhone revenue had helped insulate it from the first phase of this recession, reported last week that revenue from its desktop line fell 31 percent from the same period a year ago.

“The day of the Rolls-Royce laptop and the high-end computer may not be totally over,” said Charles King, an independent technology industry analyst in Hayward. Calif. “But certainly the audience for that type of product is getting smaller and smaller.”

Companies have also started to examine what they can do without and what they can do differently, and their choices may alter the competitive and lucrative landscape of business computing.

Hoping to save money, Arista Networks, a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif., has much of its internal technology processes online, or “in the cloud.” Instead of buying its own hardware and software systems from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, it opted for e-mail and online document services from Google and online sales and manufacturing software from Netsuite, based in San Mateo, Calif.

It is spending a fifth of what it would be for traditional technology, said Jayshree Ullal, Arista’s chief executive.

She smells a trend. “I think 80 percent of the new high-tech and small to mid-size companies are doing what we’re doing,” she said.

A spate of start-ups have seized on cloud computing. Companies like Intacct offer online accounting software as an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft’s products, and giants like Amazon.com sell access to data centers for business operations. Amazon has outpaced the traditional hardware makers with such services.

The number of virtualized new servers has doubled over the last three years, which has driven the revenue of VMware, one of the leaders in this cost-saving technology, to an estimated $1.88 billion last year from $387 million in 2005.

The makers of open-source software also continue to benefit from the growing appeal of their often cheap, if not free, products. Sun Microsystems distributes 65,000 downloads a day of its MySQL database, which has turned into the favored business software of new companies. The job search engine Indeed.com shows a thriving job market for MySQL and Linux developers.

Linux has proved popular as well on a new crop of smarter devices — be they phones, TVs or set-top boxes — that have captured software developers’ imaginations. The new products they build will undoubtedly challenge the status quo.

“Companies like Intel, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments that make chips for these devices are hiring Linux talent as quick as they can,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. “They know the future is netbooks and mobile Internet devices.”

SOURCE

More:
$200 Laptops Break a Business Model

Written by Ernesto on January 24, 2009

Despite the fact that there are thousands of legitimate uses for peer-to-peer technology, most businesses are not keen on using it because of the negative associated with it. One of the areas where P2P can really make a difference is with video streaming, either live or through sites like YouTube.

Offering a decent quality stream can quickly cost tens of thousands of dollars a month for medium sized sites, and millions of dollars for bandwidth hogs such as YouTube. So, why not share this burden and throw in some P2P? That’s probably what CNN thought too, as they offered a P2P supported live feed of Obama’s inauguration. With 25 million viewers on CNN.com, this was probably the largest P2P live stream ever, although CNN did not reveal how many people used the P2P plugin.

CNN has been working with the Denmark-based company Octoshape for a few months now. Users have to install the Octoshape plugin for their web-browser, and this makes the regular Flash player through which they view the stream, P2P compliant. This means that users who download the video partially to their computers also share it with others.

Thus far, CNN has not commented in public on their use of Octoshape’s P2P plugin. However, from an insider who’s familiar with the technology, TorrentFreak learned that approximately 30% of the bandwidth for CNN’s live stream comes from peers. This obviously results in a significant reduction in bandwidth costs for the broadcaster. The rest of the bandwidth still comes from central servers to ensure that there is enough available for everyone.

CNN’s live stream was only boosted by Octoshape for those who watched it through the default Flash player, not the Windows media stream. The Flash team from Adobe has been working on their own P2P Flash implementation for a while, but thus far we are not aware of any public tests of their technology.

It is interesting to see that CNN supports P2P based streaming solutions, even though it’s a shame that they went for a closed source solution, instead of an open source product. Last year, the Tribler team showcased their open source streaming application which relies solely on P2P, through BitTorrent. Tribler is currently working with several European TV-broadcasters to test this technology in the real world.

In theory, broadcasters can send a live stream to millions of people by only sending out the stream once, from a single server. With the current upload speeds and the throttling efforts by ISPs, this still only works in theory. Nevertheless, since more and more TV is being watched online, filesharing technology is the future.

SOURCE

Go here to see the original:
CNN Uses P2P Plugin for its Live Stream

The rest is here:
389 years

We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go mainstream and become a classic approach. As a result, new design approaches come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them, new trends emerge.

Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. In this post, we present Web design trends for 2009: recent developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches. We also discuss situations in which these trends can be used and present some beautiful examples. Did you miss any recent development in this overview? Let us know in the comments!

This article covers only 10 of the over 25 trends we’ve identified over the last months. The second part will be published next week. We’ll cover new layouts, new visual approaches and new design elements. Please stay tuned.

Update: the second part of our review is now published as well.

Web Design Trends For 2009

Let’s first take a closer look at the main trends we identified, discovered and observed over the last months. In this overview, you’ll find a review of each trend and more beautiful examples that can inspire you in your next project.

1. Embossing Letterpress

   

2. Rich user interfaces

   

3. PNG transparency

   

4. Big typography

   

5. Font replacement (sIFR, etc.)

   

6. Modal boxes

   

7. Media blocks

   

8. The magazine look

   

9. Carousels (slideshows)

   

10. Introduction blocks

    

Now let’s go into detail and take a closer look at each of the trends presented above.

1. Letterpress

One of the most unexpected trends we’ve observed over the last months was the emergence of letterpress (actually pressed letters) in Web design. Probably the most important reason for this trend is the simple fact that this technique has been rarely used until now. Letterpress is used in various styles and on various websites and for various topics; in particular, it is often used in product designs and on websites for online services.

2. Rich User Interfaces

Happily, user interfaces in modern websites and Web applications are becoming more beautiful and more usable. Over the last year, the user experience for these applications has dramatically improved, resulting in rich and responsive user interface that have tremendous similarities with classic desktop applications. AJAX and Flash are widely used to offer users the dynamic interaction that they have come to expect from advanced, sophisticated, professional solutions.

In particular, we’ve seen much more white space over the last year, much more padding and much more space for various design elements. We also observed that many modern user interfaces display intuitive visual clues to communicate the status of a user’s interaction with the system. For instance, upon being clicked, event buttons often change their appearance from a “normal” to a “pressed” look (as on Newspond.com and Quicksnapper.com), confirming and providing immediate feedback on the user’s interaction with the system. Aside from this, more and more services are now able to be personalized by the user: for us, it’s a clear sign that adaptive user interfaces are coming in 2009.

Both examples are evidence that designers of Web applications are paying significantly more attention to the way in which functionality is presented and are trying to improve the user experience with more interactive and responsive solutions.

3. PNG transparency

PNG transparency, although unsupported by Internet Explorer 6, seems to have gained popularity on the scene over the last year. Apparently, designers are trying to better integrate background images into the actual content and are aiming for a style that is often seen in printed media, magazines for instance. In most cases, semi-transparent backgrounds stand out in the overall background of a page and are intended to highlight an important design element, such as a headline or announcement. Sometimes PNG transparency is used for the background of modal boxes as well.

Last year, we described a variety of ways in which can get creative with transparency in Web design, and many designers seemed to experiment with these techniques in their work. Interestingly enough, transparency is often used either in the header or footer of designs, but some designs go beyond that.

4. HUGE Typography

We presented some outstanding examples of BIG typography in previous posts. In 2009, big typography should remain popular. In particular, design agencies, portfolios, product websites and online services will use big typography to communicate the most important messages of their websites.

The font size of these design elements often goes beyond 36 pixels, and in many cases quite expensive typefaces are used to reach an audience. Overall, designers are paying closer attention to typographic details such as leading, line height and choice of font. The consequence: websites are more beautiful and more consistent and look solid and trustworthy.

5. Font Replacement

As designers pay more attention to typography, they also pay more attention to the fonts that are used for the copy in the body of websites. Although classics such as Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana undoubtedly dominate, we observed a slight trend towards font replacement (for instance, with sIFR).

What is interesting is that these fonts are often seamlessly integrated in the design of websites; they are almost never used for their own sake or simply to “upgrade” the typography of a website. Designers are trying to blend beautiful typography and arresting visual design to improve the appearance of websites and improve the user experience.

6. Modal Boxes (Lightboxes)

Modal boxes (dialog windows) are, essentially, the second generation of pop-ups. They serve as a user-friendly alternative to classic JavaScript windows and support users by focusing their attention on the most important area of the website. Modal windows are always triggered by a user action (e.g. signing up or logging in) and appear on top of the main content, like a window in a regular desktop application. Modal windows are often presented in a very subtle way: they are often semi-transparent and have a “Close” button.

7. Media Blocks

With more broadband Internet access, users can now afford to browse more than they did a couple of years ago, and designers can use this opportunity to present content in a more attractive and memorable way. Hence, it’s no wonder that many product websites use media blocks (for videos and screencasts) for this very purpose. The main advantage of such elements is that they can communicate content quickly and effectively and make it easier for users to consume information.

Users just lean back and enjoy the show; they get everything explained to them step by step, without having to click, search for descriptions or learn the navigation. The movies are usually pretty short and get directly to the point; they are mostly formal but can be entertaining, too.

But please make sure that videos are an alternative presentation of (and not the main or only!) content on your website. Not every user has broadband access to the Web, not every user is willing to watch a video (e.g. because he or she may have a radio or music playing in the background), and not every user has Flash and JavaScript installed on his or her machine.

8. The Magazine Look

An interesting development in the design of blogs is the adaptation of various techniques usually found in traditional (print) media. The arrangement of posts on the page, the use of typography, illustrations and even text alignment often resemble traditional techniques from print. Grid-based designs are gaining popularity as well but are used mostly in portfolios, product pages and big blogs; they almost never appear on corporate websites or in online shops.

9. Carousels (Slideshows)

Carousels are essentially slideshow navigations, in which the content rotates vertically or horizontally (hence the name “carousel”). To rotate the navigation, users need to click on one of two toggle elements (usually a left/right or up/down arrow). Depending on the toggle element selected, the content is rotated in the desired direction.

Instead of clicking through various sections of the website for their favorite stories, users can quickly skim through the available stories without vertical scrolling or unnecessary mouse movements. The result: users save time, and the carousel focuses their attention sharply on the content, instead of on interacting with the browser. Such slideshow navigation is often used on entertainment websites and big blogs, but designers also make use of it in their portfolios to showcase their work in a more interactive way.

10. Introduction Blocks

The upper-left area of a website is the most important block on the page, because it grabs the most attention from visitors. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to place the most important message of the website right there and thus make sure that readers get the message as quickly as possible.

In fact, this is exactly what many designers are doing. Whether for a Web application, corporate design, online service or portfolio, designers are pushing their slogans and brief introductions to the top of the page and are using strong, vivid typography to make a good first impression. Some introductions are short, others are quite lengthy; in either case, they usually take a lot of space; the full width of the layout and between 250 and 400 pixels in height are common dimensions for these introduction blocks. Notice, though, that introduction blocks almost never appear in blogs and rarely in online shops.

Stay tuned!

This article covers only 10 of the over 25 trends we’ve identified over the last months. The second part will be published next week. We’ll cover new layouts, new visual approaches and new design elements. Please stay tuned.

Update: the second part of our review is now published as well.

SOURCE

Read the original here:
Web Design Trends For 2009

Last week we presented 10 Web Design Trends For 2009, our review of the most promising developments and techniques in web design that may become big in 2009. In the first part we covered embossing letters (”letterpress”), rich user interfaces, PNG transparency, big typography, carousels and media blocks.

This post is the second part of our review. It presents design trends for 2009 in terms of layouts, visual approaches and design elements. Please notice that this post showcases trends and developments that were extensively covered in our previous articles (e.g. handwriting, retro and vintage etc.) and therefore weren’t covered in this post (they are all linked in the overview, so feel free to explore these single posts as well). Did you miss any recent development in this overview? Let us know in the comments!

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• Web Design Trends For 2009
• 40 Creative Out-Of-The-Box-Layouts
• Textures In Modern Web Design
• Retro and Vintage in Modern Web Design
• Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples
• Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design

Web Design Trends For 2009

Let’s first take a closer look at some of the trends we identified, discovered and observed over the last months. In this overview, you’ll find a review of each trend and more beautiful examples that can inspire you in your next project.

1. Out-of-the-box layouts

   

2. One-page layouts

   

3. Multi-column layouts

   

4. Huge illustrations and vibrant graphics

   

5. More white space than ever

   

6. Social design elements

   

7. “Speaking” navigation

   

8. Dynamic tabs

   

9. Still large search boxes

   

10. Category visuals

    

11. Author icons

    

12. Icons and visual clues

    

13. Tag index (instead of tag clouds)

    

14. Illustrations in blog posts

    

15. Watercolor

    

16. Handwriting

    

17. Retro and vintage

    

18. Organic textures, tiles and photographic backgrounds

    

19. Badges

    

20. Price tags

    

21. Ribbons

    

1. Out-Of-The-Box Layouts

As we pointed out a couple of months ago in the showcase 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box, we are observing a strong trend towards more individual and creative layouts. Instead of applying conventional boxy layouts, designers are experimenting with the way information is structured, presented and communicated.

In these out-of-the-box-designs, the overall creative approach is often more important and more memorable than the attention to details. Still, usability, typography and visual design are rarely overlooked and are often carefully executed. Creative layouts are particularly popular for portfolios, websites of design agencies and promotional websites (e.g. commercial campaigns of large companies), but they are also very popular on blogs.

When it comes to creativity, the line between a usable and unusable design is very thin; thus, usability testing is particularly important, because a new creative approach can literally break a website. Often, it’s a good idea to find a compromise between a creative approach and a classic, traditional design, and try to achieve a balance between a “bulletproof” (yet ultimately boring) usable designs and an innovative unusable designs. Keep in mind that innovative ideas need some time to mature: to be rethought, modified, adapted, optimized and finally integrated in the design.

We strongly encourage designers to break out of the usual boxed layout conventions, experiment with new approaches and risk crazy ideas. Show what you are capable of!

2. One-Page Layouts

An alternative route that designers often take to impress their visitors is using so-called one-page layouts: layouts that use one single page to present the content of the website. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these designs are minimalistic (adhering to the principle “Less is more”). On the contrary, such designs are often quite complex, include rich imagery and vivid animation effects and therefore take some time to load.

When the user clicks on a navigation option, the page changes (partly), and new content is displayed in the area that was previously occupied by the previous content. The navigation of such layouts is supported by sliding and scrolling effects from common JavaScript libraries.

The main advantage for the user is the simple fact that she needs less mouse movement and less clicks to get the information she is looking for. Because this approach is quite new, there is a good chance that some readers will get confused by the unconventional navigation techniques. An alternative “static” version may be helpful or even necessary in this case; you’ll have to offer an alternative version anyway for search engines and for people who have deactivated JavaScript support in their browsers.

3. Multi-Column Layouts

A design with multiple columns (3+ columns) is not necessarily a complex design. On the contrary, when designed properly, multi-column designs can be really helpful to visitors because they are given (hopefully) a better overview of the available navigation options and can more quickly find the information they are looking for.

Over last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of content on the Web, which has led to the problem of a decrease user attention span, the time that visitors are willing to spend on a given website (see an article on ReadWriteWeb for details). Consequently, it’s no wonder that designers have tried to find ways of presenting information compactly, both to keep visitors on a website as long as possible and to make it as easy as possible to find content.

One way of achieving this is simply to use layouts with more columns placed next to each other. The idea is quite reasonable. Screen resolutions have been constantly increasing in recent years (though a wide adoption of netbooks, like Asus’ Eee PC, may change that), providing users with more horizontal space and designers with additional space to fill with content.

The result: now more and more designers are using more and more columns. We have observed a strong trend towards these so-called multi-column layouts, which are often fixed layouts of 850 by 1000 pixels in width. Multiple columns are used in magazine layouts and portfolios. In these layouts, grids are often used to guarantee a structural balance, hierarchy and order.

With multi-column layouts, the importance of active white space between and within columns cannot be overstated. (Active white space is the space that is deliberately left blank to better structure the page and emphasize different areas of content.)

For this purpose designers often make use of Shneiderman’s Mantra (”convey big picture first, reveal details later”), providing users with a brief overview of available options first and offering details on demand — later, when a link was clicked (Mozilla Labs is a great example of just that).

4. Huge Illustrations And Vibrant Graphics

Just as huge typography keeps dominating modern Web design, huge illustrations seem to be gaining popularity across both professional and personal Web projects. And designers are trying to communicate the message of a website using interactive elements (embedded video blocks) and visual elements (introduction blocks and illustrations). Recently in designs, illustrations have taken up much more space than before and usually supplement huge typography, and they are more attractive, more vivid and therefore more memorable to visitors.

Alternatively, designers are also using vibrant graphics, particularly for backgrounds but also for other design elements. Various styles and graphic approaches are used: grunge, collage and scrapbook, ornaments, retro and vintage, watercolor, organic textures and photographic backgrounds.

5. More White Space Than Ever

Probably one of the most predictable, yet extremely beneficial, developments in Web design over the last few years has been the increasing prominence of white space. White space dominates many designs and is used generously to improve the flow of articles and structure of websites.

In fact, we have never seen so much padding in content areas and navigation menus. Padding of 20 to 25 pixels in the wrapper and content area is becoming a rule of thumb, and even more padding is often considered acceptable. Hopefully, this development is here to stay.

6. “Social” Design Elements

If you take a close look at the blogosphere, you’ll hardly be able to find a blog that doesn’t use some kind of “social” icons or social blocks to encourage readers to promote its stories on popular social media websites. Every author loves traffic and recognition, which is why the social element in modern design is becoming bigger and aesthetically more attractive.

Social icons are usually put all over the place, often in the top right of articles or at the bottom of the post. Social blocks often fill the area beneath a post and sometimes appear beside a list of related articles. Twitter, Flickr and Last.FM integration is still common for blogs and portfolios.

7. “Speaking” Navigation

We wrote about “speaking” block navigation in one of our showcases last year, and this design element seems to remain popular across various websites. The most significant task a navigation menu has to accomplish is to unambiguously guide visitors through different sections of a website. However, it’s quite hard sometimes to communicate the content of a website’s section with just one or two keywords, particularly if horizontal navigation is used.

That’s why navigation options aren’t often listed simply one after another using appropriate keywords (i.e. using “silent” navigation). Instead, designers are attempting to concretely explain what options are available and what visitors should expect from a website section upon clicking the corresponding link.

Because designers are trying to initiate more effective dialogue with visitors, we like to call this navigation scheme “speaking” navigation, as opposed to “silent” navigation, which is based on listings of keywords.

So that visitors perceive content as being easy to navigate, the navigation is often structured with blocks of the same height and width. Large icons are quite often used; but in most cases the decision as to whether or not they are appropriate depends on the content of the website and the overall layout. “Soft” hover effects often support the navigation design by making browsing more pleasant.

8. Dynamic Tabs

One of the most popular trends in interactive design is having a tabbed area whose content can be changed dynamically. The idea behind dynamic tabs is that the content of all tabs is loaded when the page is loaded, but only one part of the content is displayed at a time (the attribute display is used to achieve this effect). You can follow a tutorial on dynamic tabs and ‘tabs’ visual control in jQuery to create dynamic tabs.

Did we miss something?

Did we miss any recent development in this overview? Do you have any further ideas or suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

SOURCE

View original post here:
More Web Design Trends For 2009