“Microsoft” and “design” are not two words you normally expect to hear in the same sentence. The image of PCs - and by implication Microsoft - as boring, corporate and unimaginative is well entrenched in the public imagination. It’s a stereotype that Apple has cleverly exploited for the popular “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” television campaign, which personify a Windows PC as a dowdy paper pusher. It is interesting then to observe Microsoft’s recent efforts to reinvent themselves as a design oriented company, with user experience taking center stage in their new philosophy.

In the client-designer relationship it is usually the client who does the hiring and firing. Occasionally however the roles are reversed, and the designer finds themselves forced to give a client the heave-ho. It may seem to contradict the wisdom that “the customer is always right”, but sometimes the relationship you have with a client does more harm than good, and severing ties can help to restore balance to your business.

Back in October MTV redesigned their flagship site mtv.com using Flash. Last week they redesigned the site again, abandoning the Flash experiment and reverting to an HTML design. On the MTV Labs blog MTV cite user dissatisfaction with the Flash version as being the primary reason for the switch. Alexa traffic stats show that the site had its lowest usership ever during the 8 months the Flash site was running.

For the next week I will be a guest blogger over at Notes on Design, a blog for design students operated by Sessions School of Design. I’ll be writing about 5 posts on the topic of web design, aimed towards a student audience. My first post is an introduction to APIs, so pop on over to Notes on Design and check it out.

Even though HTML forms tend to be much of a muchness, each is different enough to require customized markup, styling, and validation. Sometimes it feels like reinventing the wheel. Over the past year I have been progressively streamlining the way I build my forms, and recently got to a point where I realized it wouldn’t take much more work to create an all-in-one PHP class that generates form markup, validates input, and displays error messages to the user. So that’s what I did, and I’m sharing it here in the hope someone else finds it useful too.

A couple of months back I wrote a post about the importance of making links look like links. From the comments left by readers it was clear that peoples opinions differ widely on the best way to style links, so I thought I’d follow up with a brief survey of the various ways it is possible to make links stand out on a page.

Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design announced today that he will no longer be operating his popular blog And all that Malarkey in its current form. Andy cites a disillusionment with the blogosphere’s negativity and lack of respect for others as the reason for his decision.

Recently the web standards debate has taken an interesting turn, with many standards advocates re-evaluating the role of validation in their daily practice. Most recently Ethan Marcotte contributed an article titled Where Our Standards Went Wrong to A List Apart. Marcotte concluded that validation is still a vital part of any web development project, but the fact that the opposite side of the argument was given serious consideration is significant.

I’ve long been a fan of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain’s design work, and appreciate how openly he talks about his design process. Jesse was responsible for the recent redesign of the ExpressionEngine website, and over at Digital Web he gives us a warts-and-all walk through of the project. The article provides a fascinating insight into the workflow and problem solving methods of a talented web designer.

Since beginning work as a freelance designer I have found managing my time effectively to be one of the biggest challenges. In previous fulltime jobs I had the luxury of project managers who established timelines and made sure that projects were delivered under budget and on schedule. These days I am responsible for those aspects of my business, as well as winning pitches, meeting with clients, doing the books, paying the bills, and manning the phone. And that’s not to mention actually doing the design work! Fortunately I’ve discovered several time management techniques that help me keep my business - and life - on track.