The Thin Red Line

When choosing colours for your website, make sure you understand the cultural and emotional relevance they may have to your users.

Qype, the user-generated local reviews site, uses red as an accent colour and as the text colour for it's field labels.

It confused me for a bit.

7 Simple Elements

Whilst discussing primary and secondary buttons on websites (the kinds of chats we have here), I came across an informative article from Sun's Web Application Guidelines.  There are really good points and examples included in the body, such as:

"In some situations, such as where the user might lose a large amount of input data, present a confirmation alert before allowing a Cancel action. Also, when the meaning of the action is not clear, additional and/or different text may be used, such as "Cancel Wizard" and "Return to Wizard.""

7 Simple Elements

Communicating Errors

From UserFocus.co.uk, an excellent article on writing good error messages.  Very useful when you need to design those pesky 404 pages.

Communicating Errors (UserFocus)

How the whole User Interface thing started

This 1982 Byte Magazine article describes the design process behind one of the first computer user interfaces.

I find the article so interesting because these guys were amongst the first to consider metaphors for visualising computer tasks.  They originated the Graphical User Interface.