“A common activity at the outset of many design projects is a competitive review. As a designer, when you encounter a design problem, it’s a natural instinct to try to understand what others are doing to solve the same or similar problems. However, like other design-related activities, if you start a competitive review without a clear purpose and strategy for the activity, doing the review may not be productive. One risk is that you may find you’ve wasted your time reviewing and auditing other sites, because you end up with findings that don’t help you design your own solution. Another risk is that the design and interactions of competitor offerings might influence your solution too heavily, whether you intend them to or not. Once you’ve seen how others have solved a particular problem, their solutions may subconsciously affect your own thinking.” – (Michael Hawley – UXmatters)

“When developing user interfaces, designers increasingly use custom graphical elements. As the web browser becomes basic technology for software interfaces, more and more elements derived from graphic and web design replace the traditional desktop approaches to the concrete design of human-computer interfaces.” – (Milan Guenther – Boxes and Arrows)

“News websites can be intriguing to examine from a design perspective. Regardless of what type of news they cover, they all face the challenge of displaying a huge amount of content on the home page, which creates plenty of layout, usability and navigational challenges for the designer. The lessons that can be learned from examining how news websites address these challenges can be valuable for designers who work with other types of websites, including ones with blog theme designs.” (Steven Snell – Smashing Magazine)

“Recently, I had the opportunity to reflect on common misconceptions about the role of visual design that are still prominent in the beliefs of executives, product leaders, engineering managers, and marketing professionals. Is there anything team members can do to illustrate certain beliefs are wrong? What could they do to demonstrate the truth about visual design to coworkers and stakeholders?” (Luke Wroblewski – UXmatters)

“The whole may be more than the sum of its parts, but without the parts, there is no whole. Lest that sound like some weird philosophical meandering to you, take comfort in observing the finer aspects of creative and appealing user interface design.” (Torley Wong – Smashing Magazine)

“RISD: Rhode Island School of Design or Reason, I’m Sleep Deprived?” (YouTube)

“In this tutorial, I describe various common graphic design elements in modern web (“2.0″) design style. I then attempt to explain why they work (i.e. why they have become common), as well as how, when and where you might use each element in your designs.” (Web Design From Scratch)

“Whether we’re designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)

“This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication.” (Elif Ayiter – Citrinitas) – courtesy of mvuijlsteke

“As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment.” (Andy Rutledge – Design View) – courtesy of ruurdpriester