thirtyonethree

I found this via The Rissington Podcast.

Brian Christiansen wrote about the music he uses for the UIE podcasts. Brian mentioned that he has licensed the music through ASCAP. I checked their Web site and there is information about getting a license to use music for podcast intros, etc. The minimum license fee is $288 annually and then the balance is determined by revenue generated by the site and other factors.

ASCAP Internet Music License Agreement

Yesterday I read an article by John Dilsworth on NorthTemple. The article came about as John considered the question, “what is the one skill that can make the most positive impact in your profession?” John breaks down the work that designers are called to do into 3 categories

• understanding
• identifying
• crafting

He goes on to talk about the work that must be done under those categories and then lists some skills a designer must have and sharpen to be successful in that work. He also lists some specific skills that a Web site designer or interaction designer must have. It is a good list to check and determine where growth needs to occur.

Thanks to Cameron Moll’s Premium linkage for bringing this article to my attention.

Here are some memorable points from Dan Rubin and Bryan Veloso’s talk, Design is in the Details from Webmaster Jam 2007, get MP3 of talk from RSS feed. I listened to this talk over my Christmas vacation. I listened to it again this morning. I had immediately applied several of the things they talked about to my personal site and have integrated into my design process.

• Let your layout breathe - CNN.com is a great example
• Consistency of spacing or use multiple scale
• Use range kerning in headlines (with larger font size)
• No hanging widows - Shaun Inman’s Widot plugin
• Alignment - aligning elements can make a huge difference
• Black is not black and white is not white - consider using #333 or #CCC instead of default black and white
• Flat is boring - create some depth
• Adding a pixel to add interest - as one border (they used example of Mint’s dashboard)
• Know when to quit

I found out about this site today, Internet Archive. It archives the code so if you no longer have the images in on your domain, then you will not be able to get a full page archive. It is an interesting idea. I found out about the site in a discussion with my team leader about archiving our company history.

Here is the site’s description:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.