This is a fascinating explanation of why you sometimes need to make dogleg turns on otherwise straight rural roads:

De Ruijter soon learned that these kinks and deviations were more than local design quirks. They are grid corrections, as he refers to them in a new photographic project: places where North American roads deviate from their otherwise logical grid lines in order to account for the curvature of the Earth.

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Neil Jenkins on designing Fastmail’s credit card form:

So, the design and labelling is focused on making it as clear as possible what data the form requires and where to find it. The other part to a successful form is making the data entry itself simple and error-free.

This level of thought and care is all too rare on the web.

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Design, like all aspects of marketing, should serve a business need. Too often, this doesn’t happen, Paul Adams writes:

Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is often more aligned with winning awards than with primary client business objectives) and it’s becoming more prominent in product and interaction design.

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Ana Swanson:

In those early days, engineers were focused solely on efficiency — how to serve as many customers as possible without cutting into a company’s profits. It wasn’t until 50 years later that researchers began to realize that there were subtler factors influencing people’s experience of waiting in line, including ideas of fairness, mismanaged expectations, and the strange and inaccurate way that most people perceive both time and pain.

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Harry Roberts has put together a comprehensive resource to help you organize and maintain your CSS stylesheets:

CSS is not a pretty language. While it is simple to learn and get started with, it soon becomes problematic at any reasonable scale. There isn’t much we can do to change how CSS works, but we can make changes to the way we author and structure it.

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