Fi, the Stockholm/New York City agency that was formerly known as Fantasy Interactive built up its history by making glossy flash sites where nearly every element on the screen moved and had audio attached to it. The agency has matured over the years and uses Flash more selectively and strategically now, and the name change is meant to reflect that maturity.

The founder talks about usability as the thing that will characterize Fi in the future, and their clean site update reflects that. The site organization is easy to grok, and easily navigable, and projects a company with a bold and confident point of view. The screenshots, slideshows, and project reels of their work tell the story very effectively.

Christian Behrens' information design pattern repository collects solutions for "...the display, behavior, and user interaction of complex infographics. The collection is available in the form of a 200-page book that additionally includes a profound historical record of information design as well as an introduction inthe research field of design patterns."

via swissmiss

The conclusions in this A List Apart article about zebra striping, the method of using alternating row colors in tables, strike me as odd. My first reaction to the article was, "Why do you need to study the usability of that technique?" I wonder if the issue isn't so much a question of usability, but rather of aesthetic sensibility. Bad table row style without zebra striping can adversely affect readability as much as good zebra striping or horizontal rule style.

Personally, I've never questioned whether zebra striping was a waste of time or not. I usually try to use methods that skirt the issue by using adequate spacing of rows and columns, using alignment well, and when necessary designing thin, faint horizontal borders that might aid in readability in the larger tables. I then use background color where categories or layers are warranted. This practice comes to us from Tufte's Envisioning Information in the third chapter, where he talks about freeing tables from the imprisonment of grids and using typography instead to suggest the grid.

I wonder if the author might have just been after a way to justify removing zebra striping. But the problem with the study was that the implementation of borders in combination with background colors on the tables that were tested compared bad zebra striping to non-striped tables. A better study would have added a table that was designed as I describe above.

In large tables or spreadsheets it might be difficult to follow a row across a large set of columns. In those cases, some light horizontal rules might help. When designed well, tables can go without borders and zebra striping or light horizontal rules can aid in this quick scanning across a row. More than a few times in the past, I've found myself working with large tables skimming across and then not knowing if I was in the right row.

The point here is, they can be helpful, so if there's no harm in using this stylistic technique, why question whether they're worth the trouble. You can create them with code that looks for odd/even rows and applies classes where appropriate. I don't buy the argument that they cost us time in implementation. I just think we need to lean on better ways to style them.

TwittEarth is another spinning earth globe interface for displaying geolocalized information that's similar to the Yahoo Newsglobe and wii news channel interfaces.

I don't care much for viewing the public twitter feed, so it's not very interesting to me. I'm still trying to imagine the context that makes these interfaces practical for everyday use. The place where it makes most sense to me is in the 10 foot experience, as with the wii news channel. I think applications like this need find more ways of taking that PC information to the big screen for casual information browsing or information delivery in the background, like screensavers for TV.

abduzeedo has a brief interview with Italian illustrator Alessandro Pautasso. Pautasso illustrates his photography by creating ornate, curvilinear, and beautifully decorative overlaying lines.

In the interview he talks about his gear and his inspirations, talks about how he got started as an illustrator, and offers a peak into his toolbox. Check it out.

You can view more of Pautasso's work at:

• http://www.nosurprises.it/
• http://flickr.com/photos/kaneda99/

Luke Wroblewski's book on form design is finally out. From the author:

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field's leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.

More info and purchase options available from the book site.

On seomoz, Matthew Inman points to 15 rarely used CSS properties, and why you might want to be aware of if you don't already use them. I have to admit to only using a handful of these, and not with any regularity.

1. clip
2. visibility
3. text-shadow
4. content
5. quotes
6. counter-reset and counter-increment
7. marks
8. page-break-before and page-break-after
9. orphans and widows
10. font-size-adjust
11. font-stretch
12. font-variant
13. caption-side
14. table-layout
15. empty-cells

GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.

Via DigitalWeb

A wireframe stencil for designing iPhone interfaces.

That's one hell of a domain name: http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

If you're looking for resources related to data visualization, look no further than the lists on these 2 great resources:

• Random Etc.'s list of 20 resources
• Meryl.net's list of 175 resources

Mike Padilla offers up a description of facets and their use on web sites for browsing and filtering. He defines the types of interactions or behaviors that are typically found on sites with faceted browsing, describes what happens in terms of the system when you apply filters, and shows some examples of faceted browsing in use on sites including my favorite, Nike.com.