A site of training materials for icon designers (via Cameron I/O).

Smashing magazine asks 35 designers 5 questions about web page layout and design.

A game designer’s perspective on the Wii versus the PS3.

Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign, a semantic look at redesign versus refactoring a design.

So You Wanna Be A Game Designer?
“It’s no wonder so many gamers who want to work in the industry aspire to be designers, as opposed to, say, networking engineers. Despite the fact that creating a game today is a collaborative effort, involving the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of different people, being a designer is still the most glamorous job in the industry. Designers are the closest thing our industry has to rock stars or movie stars, because their names are the most visible. A select few have even become household names, at least among hardcore game players.” (via Slashdot)

AJAX & Interface Design
AJAX enables faster, more responsive Web applications through a combination of asynchronous Javascript, the Document Object Model (DOM), and XMLhttpRequest. What this means for Web interface designers is that a DHTML-based Web application can make quick, incremental updates to a user interface without reloading the entire screen. In the AJAX model JavaScript calls to the server can update a single element in the UI with data retrieved from a server. Because the full screen does not need to be reloaded, the application is much more responsive to user actions.

Essential Fonts For Designers As a web designer, you know that Verdana can get real old real fast. But you also know that there are millions of free fonts on the internet and most of them are horribly bad. Here’s a secret: not all truetype fonts are bad. Some of them are quite classy. The truth is you dont have to be rich and able to afford postscript fonts in order to look professional.

Return of the Mac All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.