We live in a spectacular time. The pace of technology steadily increases, new fields of science are heavily explored and innovative concepts emerge almost every day, resulting in stunning and overwhelming products. The impact of these products can be tremendous: in fact, new technology can completely revolutionize the way we play, communicate, work and live our lives. Some of these products are just eye-candy, some are useful, some are visionary and some may become revolutionary in the next years.

This document represents a compilation of fundamental principles for designing user interfaces, which have been drawn from various books on interface design, as well as my own experience. Most of these principles can be applied to either command-line or graphical environments. I welcome suggestions for changes and additions -- I would like this to be viewed as an "open-source" evolving document.

Designer’s attention to small details often has a significant impact on how visitors perceive the overall design of a web-site. Although users’ main focus usually lies on finding information, it’s nice to find the content being supported by finest visual details. This holds for favicons, shopping carts, pagination and tag clouds we’ve covered in our earlier posts. But it also holds for… well, date stamps and calendars. Apparently, the latter are used not only in weblogs, but also on large web-sites where events, news and any kind of time-planning is involved.