Karl's Blog

• How choice impairs your visitors – How excess in decision making can scare your users.
• Simultaneous Multiple-Browser JavaScript Testing With Yeti – Launching js tests from the command line, very useful.
• Free Wireframing Kits, UI Design Kits, PDFs and Resources – Smashing Magazine, always great posts…
• CaravanToBuy – After some months of work, the first public release of CaravanToBuy.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Made to stick analyses the aspects that make an idea stick. After an extensive research the authors came up with 6 principles that make an idea stick, and they can be contained in SUCCES (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories). Reading this book was a great experience, it’s very practical and the lessons learned can be used in different areas of my life, but of course in this blog I want to analyze the applications for the web. (more…)

• Nothing is more important than business objectives – Great post from Paul Boag arguing that there isn’t any aspect related to web desing more important then business objectives.
• 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition – A collection created by Smashing Magazine.
• 11 Principles Of Interaction Design Explained – Some basic interaction design principles, worth reading it.
• A Complete Guide to Progressive Enhancement – Do you know the difference between graceful degradation and progressive enhancement? No? Than you definitely should read this article.

I’ve worked with a lot of people who claimed to perfectionists (I say claim because I don’t actually believe they exist) and I developed an unlikeness felling about working with them. They turn my work days into stressful days and projects into less profitable projects. And no, I don’t believe they end up with perfect projects… here are the reasons.

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Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

Great book showing a lot of user interface patterns of successful web applications. The hard part is actually reading it since it feels to technical, in my opinion they should have added more stories, not only examples. By that I mean they should tell a story such as “Yahoo used to have this interface and after doing more research they changed to this and this increased their conversions in X%” (It’s just an example, I’m just talking about being more descriptive). (more…)

• Information overload is not the problem – Very good article, couldn’t agree more. If the design prioritize information it will never feel like information overload.
• CSS: A Little More on Less -An overview of LESS CSS, great tool for developing better css, I’ve been used for a month already and I loved it.
• Good Help is Hard to Find
• The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners
  

Today Bonzzay (The web development company I run together with 3 other partners) released the first Beta version of DecidoKit. It’s a social network linked with Facebook designed to help people make decisions. We are working on improvements and soon we will start releasing more features. (more…)

Today I just moved all the code related to the Jquery Photo Tag Plugin to GitHub. Actually it’s my first time with GigHub but I think we’re going to have a great time together.

GitHub Project Home Page

I’m really looking forward to get more developers onboard to keep updating this plugin. If anyone would like to help please contact me.

UPDATE: You can get LESS working on your .NET projects easier by using the Nuget package dotless.

This week I’ve trying out LESS Css, it’s a great tool for creating dynamic css. Christopher Owen, Erik van Brakel, Daniel Hoelbling and James Foster created a version of the LESS compliler for .NET, but there are no instructions on how to implement it with ASP.NET MVC. So, here it goes:

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I struggled a little bit with image uploading in Asp.net MVC so I decided to write a post about it so I can help someone.
The idea is to use the MVC binding capabilities to make this work well. (more…)