10 Quote-Worthy Comments from the first quarter of Pastry Box Project

Are you reading The Pastry Box Project each day? It’s a project where 30 web designers and developers posted a thought of their choice once a month for the past year. The Pastry Box is the brainchild of Alex Duloz, edited by Katy Watkins. Over the months I’ve been reading it, I’ve found a few choice gems I thought would be fun to collect all in one place. I scanned just the first quarter of the year and reached my self-imposed limit of 10 almost immediately. Here they are:

1. January 3, Andy Clark:

“Anything that’s fixed and unresponsive isn’t web design anymore, it’s something else.”

2. January 12, Keir Whitaker:

“Surrounding yourself with highly talented people is a sure fire way to improve your own skillset.”

3.  January 18, Stuart Langridge:

“Don’t be creative. Be a creator. No one ever looks back and wishes that they’d given the world less stuff.”

4. February 6, John Allsopp:

“Make your technology magical. Make it disappear, make it just work.”

5. February 28, Leisa Reichelt:

“What do you want your life to be? That’s how you need to spend your time.”

6. March 5, Rachel Andrew:

“In this industry we don’t have to wait until the “powers that be” recognize our talent, we can put ourselves out there, and we have the skills and tools to do it.”

7. March 15, Matthew Weier O’Phinney:

“Step away from the computer when angry.”

8. April 13, Bruce Lawson:

“The mobile pundits got it right: sites should be minimal, functional, with everything designed to help the user complete a task, and then go. But that doesn’t mean that you need to make a separate mobile site from your normal site. If your normal site isn’t minimal, functional, with everything designed to help the user complete a task, it’s time to rethink your whole site.”

9. April 14, Jon Tan:

“Fonts are like wayfinding apps for emotions.”

10. April 29, Emily Lewis:

“If there is one thing that is guaranteed to damage — if not doom — a project, it’s ego.”

Let me know if you’d be interested in reading quotes from The Pastry Box Project from May through whenever . . .

Brain Power: Comparing a child’s brain to the Internet (video)

Fascinating film directed from Let it Ripple. It is based on research from Harvard. Interesting that you can put a customized call to action at the end, which in my opinion would be something like “love your children well.” I can see many organizations coming up with something better for the call to action, however. What would yours be?

The film is based on a TED book.

Useful links: top 50 books, form validation, Windows 8

Here’s what .net magazine thinks are the top 50 web design books. I haven’t read them all, but it is interesting that the titles they picked range from fairly technical to practical good sense to broadly philosophical.

Accessible form validation with HTML5 from Deque Systems uses HTML5, adds ARIA, and finally adds jQuery validation. This is the first of three parts.

Jakob Neilsen joins the list of critiques of Windows 8 for poor usability. Here are some early reviews of Windows 8 from several other sources.

Useful links: communication equivalence, tablets, eBooks

Glenda Watson Hyatt, aka the left thumb blogger, uses an iPad as a communication device. She recently went to SOBcon and has some must read comments about the difference between communication equality and communication equivalence. First read Communication Devices: An Communication Equivalent, But An Equal? and then Communication Equality in Social Interactions: What Does that Really Look Like? And, bonus info is a preview of Kel Smith’s upcoming book Digital Outcasts: Moving Technology Forward Without Leaving People Behind.

TechCrunch ran an article saying iPads will garner to most downloads for the next five years. I was in my local Apple store yesterday and the place was crowded and buzzing. That seems to be the case every time I go in there. Even when the recession was at it deepest point, the Apple Store was busy, busy, busy. But predicting for the five years ahead with so many competitive tablets coming on the market now seems a bit risky to me. However, the prediction is only about downloads, and Apple does have the apps. I posted a poll about the most important features of tablets a few days ago, and the tools and  apps available on the tablet were the top factor. (Not many voted, but of those who did, that’s what they wanted.)

Do you check out eBooks from your local library to read on your mobile device? I do. I use Overdrive for this. According to The Verge, eBook availability may increase because of a new deal with the publisher Penguin. Wish Overdrive would make a deal with Peachpit, O’Reilly and Sitepoint!

Useful links: Figure/figcaption, a main element?

HTML5 Figure and Figure Caption Elements is an excellent tutorial with good code examples.

A couple of people are talking about the proposed ‘main’ element in HTML5 in On HTML5 and the proposed main element and The ‘main’ Element. Here’s the proposed ‘main’ element spec, by Steve Faulkner, that prompted the discussion. To contribute my opinion to the discussion of the proposed new element, I think it would be a valuable addition to HTML5. There is so much confusion as to the proper tag for the main content area of a page – should it be a div? A section? Something else? A new element with the semantic name and purpose ‘main’ is perfectly clear as to purpose and use.