position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

As part of his master’s degree, Thomas Eichinger is conducting an interesting little design quiz. You are presented with 20 designs created some time during the last century. Your task is to correctly guess from which decade each piece is. You only have 20 seconds per piece, so it’s fairly fast-paced.

I’m afraid I only got 7 right, but I did realize I want to study the 20s… the style is lovely! Take the test and post your results here if you like.

“In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.” Get the survey results here.

Update 2007-10-19: as our readers Aaron and Kai have kindly pointed out to me, this is no longer an issue. Hyphens & underscores are now treated equally by Google.

—

Well, here’s something I wasn’t aware of until moments ago. When using SEO-friendly and user-friendly URLs, always go for hyphens instead of underscores.

Good:
/seo-quicktip-underscore-or-hyphen-in-urls

Bad:
/seo_quicktip_underscore_or_hyphen_in_urls

Why? Because according to this post, Google doesn’t recognize the underscore as a divider. Basically, that means you would have to include the underscore in your search term to bring up the URL. I don’t think anybody actually does that. Clearly a point for Team Hyphen. I’m just glad WordPress does “good” URLs out of the box.

TiltViewer by Felix Turner (who is also behind the excellent design-feed.net) allows you to browse Flickr’s most interesting images in a 3D space. It’s designed to provide a fun, intuitive user experience. Images are pulled from Flickr’s Interestingness list.

Max Design asks the question that I keep asking myself: “What are definition lists? When are they appropriate?” and then explains how to style them to look like tables, image galleries, calendar of events and more.

Joe the Peacock has had a hard day. Why? Because he had a conference with a potential client that seems very excited to get into this whole Web2.0 stuff.
One of many fun quotes:

You want four million users by DECEMBER?? You have four hundred active licenses for your product currently! Nothing – and I mean NOTHING – is going to add four zeros to the end of that number in three months short of hiring Arthur Anderson to handle the bookkeeping.

Read more of Joe the Peacock’s thoughts here.

Post sent to me (but not written ;) ) by my good friend and frequent p:a commenter Rob who has just completed his new portfolio site. Check it out.

One Blogpost For Burma.

Read here how you can support the people of Burma.