If you are in Portland for the New Year’s celebrations, you can very likely expect to find us enjoying the fine musical stylings of our good friends and neighbors Koto y Soto at Berbati’s Pan. Please join us – but remember to enter Berbati’s on 2nd Avenue!

If you have more than one person in your business, organizing your computers’ file structure is an immense help!

Here at Needmore, we have a general Clients folder that houses all of our projects (and is accessible by each and every designer). Drilling down, there is an individual folder for each particular project (past, present, potential).

Once we are ready to roll, each project gets a number of subfolders, such as:

• Project – General project files, including: client survey, estimate, passwords, etc.
• Deliverables – All deliverables from client
• Design – Wireframes, mockups, etc
• Production – The designs that made it, sliced graphics, etc.
• Website

They key here is repetition. Each project folder has the exact same subfolders. Each subfolder houses the exact same information as in any other project. This has helped a great deal to end questions, such as, “Where did you put the estimate for project 102…?”, which leaves more time for discussing the engaging aspects of creating websites – the design!

Enjoy this lovely drawing by Tim Root!

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.

group94 are our most favorite Flash designers. Their sites demonstrate the very best of that technology’s features and abilities without many of the drawbacks often associated with Flash, such as long waits and slow performance. Each work has a unique character and flavor, yet you can tell at a glance that it is a group94 site. This is Belgian design at its finest.

Which is why it is so exciting to me that they have posted links to two samples of works-in-progress. You can see that they lack the polish of their finished works, yet already they’ve accomplished more than most Flash sites. The interactivity is there, for example, but not the final fonts.

I love the idea of sharing incomplete work with the world. When I record a song it can go through a dozen revisions, all quite different. It’s often the same with websites. Our blog might be thought of a book writing in progress. What other businesses or creatives share their works in progress?

We spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at our favorite vacation spot and I wanted to share with you this lovely photo.

If you have worked in web application development, even a little bit, you have had to deal with forms. I have had to learn quite a lot about this surprisingly complicated topic lately, for work on our Ladybug software. Sounds like a good candidate for a crib sheet like 10 Tips to a Better Form.

Incidentally, does anyone have a definition for crib sheet? I think I know what it means, but cannot find a definition anywhere. In fact, one of the first results Google gives me for crib sheet is another CSS Crib Sheet!

We just picked up the new O’Reilly book Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tidwell. It is wonderful. It covers user interface design from a design patterns perspective, giving several pages to each pattern. Some are obvious and some are surprising, but I have never seen a book that documented them so extensively. All patterns are given usage examples and case studies, and very generously illustrated in full color.

Most commonly known for their books aimed at computer programmers, O’Reilly has been producing books well outside this area of interest for the past few years, with outstanding results. This book will appeal to programmers and designers alike. It’s well-researched, well-written, and highly recommended.

We purchased two books this week, both of which have a copyright year of 2006. Huh? How do you figure? Is that some kind of attempt to make the books seem more current, like releasing the next year’s “model” of car in the fall? Does that mean that for the next fifteen days I can freely infringe, sending copies of this book to all my friends?