Veerle's blog

Maybe you don’t know who Jakob Nielsen is, he’s a usability expert with an ugly website called Alert Box. Some of you might have discovered this article, but for those who didn’t, I can only advice to take a look and read the story. Design and usability don’t always go hand in hand so prefectly. But now a team of web professionals has proven the oposite in a superb piece of kraftmanship on guidelines for visualizing links.

In other words they re-worked Jakob's advice into something much more attractive, and have proven that design and usability can go hand in hand.

The guys who took on this hard task are:

• Andrei Herasimchuk, Design by Fire
• Didier Hilhorst, Superfluous Banter
• Keith Robinson, Asterisk*
• Cameron Moll, Authentic Boredom
• Greg Storey, Airbag

The content of Nielsen's latest Alertbox is actually very reasonable, but it's just how it is presented that bothers these (and probably you) webdesigners. Andrei did a good job in re-writing and re-shaping the content. He turned all the mumbo-jumbo into sharp and easy to read webdesign advice and took it from a positive point of view.

Didier created the graphics in a clean, icon-like style to spice it up. Then Keith transformed both content and graphics into standard coded webpages. Cameron converted the these webpages into a good looking printable PDF version, and called it the Quickcard. And as icing on the cake Didier also made a cool Flash version of the guide. At the end you read Greg's point of view on this subject.

Really folks, check it out, it's not only fun to read the story on how these guys established this, it's also advice every web designer should take to hart, plus, this time it's nicely presented, so more satisfying to absorb.