I don’t know if it’s a world wide phrase, but one that is used in the UK is to label a really useless thing as "useful as a chocolate teapot". When you show someone a design the response often is a dead end critique. I would label such responses - yes, no, good, bad, wonderful, wrong and many other solo or dual words - as dead end critiques. These are a pointless response and gives the designer nothing to build on or work with. The main place where dead end critiques are worthless is during the design process. A designer always benefits from another eye seeing their work. There are times when you need a good poke in the right direction to put your design on track. I can think of more than one occasion where one of my designs has been saved by this input.

Pas 78, the document on standards for the web is now available free. Slightly annoying to those of us that paid for it - but on the upside more will read now. Get your Pas 78 on by downloading now.

When illustration is great it’s wonderful and these examples from hethe prove that point. Reminds me a lot of the Jamie Hewlett and brings back fond memories of Tank Girl.

Humour and what someone finds funny has to be one of the most subjective things in the world. As a designer you have to be really careful about how you use humour. I would state that really anyone producing work online (and offline) has to consider use of humour carefully. Online humour can get taken in many ways. There are so many instances where attempts at easing the user through humour ends up just putting them off or at worst offending them. My own experience has recently been regarding my spelling of the section as Expresso not Espresso on this blog. It was done so as a joke as I am dyslexic and couple with this I actually liked the notion. Thing was, not many others seem to have got this and after another comment regarding this today I have gone back to plain old Espresso. This just illustrates what I thought was humour just confused people and may have even put others off my site.

Just what I need, another time waster, thanks Stumble upon! Stumble upon is basically an instant website delivery with a nice toolbar too. Select the categories you want and then thumbs up or thumbs down and stumble some more.

One thing I’ve been noticing lately is the importance of text to a website design. Text has always been important and I’ve been looking more at the interaction text not just the copy. I am talking about the labels, marks and leads there are on every websites. From navigation to form elements and a dose of section headers.