SUGGEST YOUR FAVORITE sites, apps and people and celebrate the best of the web.

Nominations for the 13th .net Awards are now open at www.thenetawards.com. We want you to help us find 2011′s best of the web and there are 16 categories to choose from. This year there’s a renewed focus on emerging talent with new Awards including the Young Designer, Young Developer and Brilliant Newcomer Awards – presented in association with Happy Cog.

Last year the Awards clocked up more than 95,000 votes, and winners included Ravelry (beating Facebook and Twitter as Best Community Site!), Modernizr (Open Source App of the Year) and Typekit (Web Application of the Year). The mighty Jeffrey Zeldman, meanwhile, scored a hat-trick, bagging awards as Standards Champion and for Design Agency of the Year and Video Podcast of the Year (for The Big Web Show, co-hosted with Dan Benjamin).

netmagazine.com/news/nominations-open-2011-net-awards

Filed under: Acclaim, Design, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Websites

Comments off.

FOODSPOTTING FOUNDER ALEXA ANDRZEJEWSKI (@ladylexy) is our guest in Episode No. 47 of The Big Web Show, to be recorded in front of a live internet audience on Thursday, April 28, at 3:00 PM Eastern via 5by5.tv/live.

Foodspotting, a visual local guide that makes finding and sharing food recommendations as easy as snapping a photo, has received attention from Techcrunch, Mashable, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN blogs, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010.

Before launching Foodspotting in January 2010, Alexa was a user experience designer for Adaptive Path, where she helped both startups and established companies create great experiences that improve people’s lives. From redesigning MySpace to conducting the research that underlies the Palm Pre, Alexa has helped clients reimagine products from the ground up.

Through speaking, writing and teaching, Alexa strives to advance experience-minded thinking and methods to all who will listen. Recent appearances include An Event Apart Seattle, WebVisions, Big Omaha, SXSWi, the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and New York, UX Week, and LIFT in South Korea.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Filed under: Design, Startups, The Big Web Show

Comments off.

As we try to become more responsive with our designs, a lot of attention has been focused on providing “mobile” styles. We’ve all been adding viewport meta tags to our templates and @media screen and (max-device-width: 480px) to our stylesheets.

It’s very tempting (and scope-friendly) to tell a client that we can adjust their site for mobile users, when much of the time what we’re actually doing is simply adjusting a design for small screens.

…Simply adjusting a design for a smaller screen and calling it “mobile” does a disservice to both mobile users and developers. Making link targets bigger and image sizes smaller does help the mobile user, but it only addresses the surface issues of usability and readability. It doesn’t address their need to do things easily and quickly.

via It’s the Little Things – “Mobile” versus “Small Screen”.

Filed under: Code, Compatibility, Design, Responsibility, Responsive Web Design, Standards, State of the Web, Usability, User Experience, UX, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards

Comments off.

There’s a general agreement that the “mobile” user is not to be trifled with; give them the content they want as quickly as possible ‘cause they’re in a hurry. But the corollary does not hold true. Why do we think that the “desktop” user is more willing to put up with having unnecessary crap thrown at them?

Unnecessary page cruft is being interpreted as damage and routed around with tools like the Readability bookmarklet, Safari’s Reader functionality, and Instapaper. These services exist partly to free up content from having a single endpoint but they also serve to break content free from the shackles of stifling overwrought containers. This isn’t anything new, of course; we’ve been here before with RSS. But the existence of these new reader-empowering tools should be taken as a warning …and a challenge—how can we design for our content in such a way that the reader won’t need or want to reach for Readability or Instapaper?

via Adactio: Journal—Content First.

Filed under: Design, UX, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards

Comments off.

THIS POSTER illustrates a change in design practice. Computation-based design—that is, the use of algorithms to compute options—is becoming more practical and more common. Design tools are becoming more computation-based; designers are working more closely with programmers; and designers are taking up programming.”

Designed by Thomas Gaskin. Creative direction by Hugh Dubberly. Algorithms by Patrick Kessler. Patent belongs to William Drenttel + Jessica Helfand.

The 892 unique ways to partition a 3 x 4 grid

Filed under: Design

Comments off.

Filed under: Design

Comments off.

RICHARD RUTTER, designer, technologist, information architect, writer, and co-founder of Fontdeck and Clearleft, joins Dan Benjamin and me to discuss the technical, aesthetic, and business aspects of putting real type on the web in Big Web Show Episode No. 44, now at 5by5.tv and iTunes for your listening pleasure.

Filed under: Design, Fonts, Platforms, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, Websites, webtype

Comments off.

In Issue No. 326 of A List Apart for people who make websites: liberate your content to get ahead of the curve in 21st century publishing, and empower live audiences with backchannel wizardry.

Orbital Content

by CAMERON KOCZON

Bookmarklet apps like Instapaper and Readability point to a future where content is no longer stuck in websites, but floats in orbit around users. And we’re halfway there. Content shifting lets a user take content from one context (e.g. your website) to another (e.g. Instapaper). Before content can be shifted, it must be correctly identified, uprooted from its source, and tied to a user. But content shifting, as powerful as it is, is only the beginning. Discover what’s possible when content is liberated.

Conversation is the New Attention

by CHRISTOPHER FAHEY, TIMOTHY MEANEY

Baby’s got backchannel! If everybody at the conference is staring at their Twitter stream instead of at the person who’s doing the speaking, maybe the speaker should meet them halfway. Migrating speaker presentations to the backchannel can empower the audience while enabling the speaker to listen carefully to their responses. The broadcast model of presentations is dead! Long live the conversation model.

Filed under: A List Apart, conferences, content, Design, Publishing

Comments off.

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Filed under: business, client services, Design

Comments off.

BABY GOT FRONT-END! Tim Murtaugh, Dan Benjamin and I discuss “mobile” versus “small screen,” HTML5 and HTML5 Reset, Science Blogs, the Edible City beta, and more. The Big Web Show #45: Tim Murtaugh.

Filed under: Career, Code, Design, HTML5

Comments off.