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Here’s what my trip taught me:

• Rome is a dirty, noisy, magical city.
• Italian drivers are the worst thing ever happened to driving. And I thought Greeks were bad.
• San Pietro basilica was awe-inspiring.
• Italian food is overrated (and overpriced).
• Fontana di Trevi is coooooooool.
• Why don’t people speak english? Really. I know some italian, could find my way around, but I wouldn’t expect any tourist visiting Greece to speak greek!
• Italian people are hot, in the steamy dark Mediterranean way.

All in all, despite the ranting (you know me, guys), I had a fun time. Flickr photos coming, and that’s a whole slew of them.

Now back to work!

italy, fontana di trevi, san pietro

I’ll break my usual Monday - Wednesday - Friday posting rhythm to inform you about the trip I’m leaving for tomorrow.

We‘ll be joining a dear friend of ours in Turin, Italy, for a few days’ trip to the eternal city, Rome.

I’m anxious (as always) about the trip but somehow managed to get excited during the day, it’s always refreshing to visit new countries and learn new stuff.

So I will be off for the next week. See you all next Sunday! Will miss you.

italy, turin, milan, rome

I admit it: I love looking at mockups designed by other people. It gives me quite a dose of inspiration, and I seriously love taking a peek under the hood of big sites, like Vimeo.

Vimeo offers a nice visual roadmap of features to come, complete with photos, videos and a level of completion. Seriously cool stuff to look at, especially if you are a designer.

Cool Vimeo roadmap

Recommended.

vimeo, roadmap, web design, mockup

I think I saw that semi-meme post title somewhere around the ‘nets…

Well anyways, without further ado, I present you my almighty reading stack for the spring of 2008:

My reading stack, consisting of 5 books

These are:

• Homepage Usability by Jacob Nielsen and Marie Tahir (B+ so far)
• Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. (A- so far)
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell (B so far)
• Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer (B- so far)
• Designing Web Usability by Jacob Nielsen (B so far)

The above marks are given according to how useful I’ve found the book as a web designer. All in all, they’re all great books, it’s just that Designing for Interaction was kinda disappointing in my humble opinion.

design, web design, books

Flickr credit: Geof Harries

Wireframes, mockups, you name it: if you’re a designer, you know what they are.

They are these ghastly but pretty in their simplicity and grayness images that are used to form a framework on which your design is built.

Wireframes are the first stepping stone of a good design, because since they’re so flexible they allow a myriad of changes without real cost.

So, wireframes are fun. But doing them in Photoshop is not always fun! I’m looking for an application (preferrably a Mac one, but a good Windows one will do too) which exists exclusively for this kind of work. It doesn’t need to be fancy, just pleasant to use and effective.

I checked out OmniGraffle but well, it’s mostly targeted to GUI designers and less to web designers. I’ve also downloaded the trial version of Axure for Windows, still haven’t used it though.

Photoshop is my bread ‘n’ butter, it pays the bills, but it’s not the easiest tool of the trade for wireframing.

Any other suggestions by fellow web designers?

wireframe, photoshop, web design, axure, omnigraffle