Three good questions to ask clients when embarking on a web site redesign:

1. If your site was a person, what would he or she be like?
2. How would you expect visitors to react when they first view your site?
3. What celebrity (or car, movie, etc.) is your site most like? Least like? Why?

Nice ice breaker and a way to get them thinking creatively [...]

I recently read a great article on Boxes and Arrows about the myth of the fold.

Turning to the sidebar to learn more about the author, I was struck by some of the design decisions that had been made regarding this part of the page, most notably the choice to right-align all the sidebar content.

As I looked a little deeper I began to wonder how much more readable the content would be if it was left-aligned and paragraphs were used. How might the visual design be improved if more differentiation was made between the sections? What if the text was a little smaller to better separate it from the article? And so on.

I couldn't resist firing up the 'Edit HTML' feature of the Web Developer toolbar to find out. Here are the results of 20 minutes or so of tweaking...

After putting together a registration form design showcase, the logical next step was to do the same for login forms.

MySpace's login form has a clean, elegant design

65+ examples later, it's been interesting to see the creative approaches that some designers have taken to this most basic but important element of a web site.

Here's an interesting idea. Text Prefs is an online typographic survey where you can choose your preferred text formatting — font, text size, line height, column width — and then vote for it. According to the creators, Message, the site was developed because...

I just came across three versions of the RSS icon on the Stargate Worlds web site. I've not seen green or blue icons being used to represent video and audio RSS feeds before. I was wondering if this was a convention I wasn't aware of or if this was just how they were trying to differentiate the feeds on this web site...

I've often wondered why there are no good tools for easily developing information architectures and producing wireframes. Visio tends to be the standard, although I regularly use PowerPoint due to its ubiquity. Thanks to the PowerPoint Prototyping Toolkit you can produce quite good results. The problem with Visio (other than its cost) is that it tends to get pretty fiddly/messy. Sometimes it seems that I'm spending more time fighting with the software in order to get everything laid out properly than actually designing.

In writing about redesigning the TechCrunch footer I came across many great examples of creative and useful footer design. So I thought it was about time I created my own showcase of web site footer designs.

I've been a reader of TechCrunch for some time. Although I mainly read it via RSS, I occasionally visit the site — either to post a comment or view something that's not displaying properly in my RSS reader. I'm always interested to check out the design of popular, content rich sites like this, to see what they are doing to make the full range of their content available to their readers.