When I worked as the lead designer on Microsoft Money, I eventually came across its scary basement: the elaborate checkbook register control for viewing and editing account transactions. This register control was first created around 1990 by legendary Microsoft engineer Doug Klunder. To get the most performance out of the PCs of the day, I believe he had the register itself more or less directly read and write transaction data from disk. In this capacity, this specific UI control was entirely and solely responsible for validating all transaction data; there was no separation between presentation, business logic, and on-disk representation.

Yup, sounds like MS to me. Bashing aside:

To prevent a critically important aspect of your UI metastasize into a scary basement means investing time in refactoring as you go, and this means moving more slowly that you would like. UI changes need to be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they compromise the solidity of the foundation.

Usage: Click the "Add Fonts" button, check the agreement and download your fonts. If you need more fine-grain control, choose the Expert option.

Pick a starting color and get complements, triads, tetrads, etc., calculated automatically.

HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass's base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.

After more than two years in iterative development, you get the best of the best practices baked in: cross-browser normalization, performance optimizations, even optional features like cross-domain ajax and flash. A starter apache .htaccess config file hooks you the eff up with caching rules and preps your site to serve HTML5 video, use @font-face, and get your gzip zipple on.

Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it's just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed.

Here are a few manner posters that appeared in the Tokyo subways between 1976 and 1982.

Like a lot of developers, we start every HTML project with the same set of HTML and CSS templates. We've been using these files for a long time and we've progressively added bits and pieces to them as our own personal best practices have evolved.

Now that modern browsers are starting to support some of the really useful parts of HTML5 and CSS3, it's time for an update, and we thought we'd put it out there for everyone to use. By no means do we see this as the end-all and beat-all, but we think it's a fairly good starting place that anyone can take and make their own.

Who do you think you are to make demands?! I’m the client, I get to make the demands! It’s not like this is a real job anyway, all you’re doing is drawing.

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

We’ve put together this guide to save you the time and frustration of figuring it out for yourself. With 23 different email clients tested, we cover all the popular applications across desktop, web and mobile email.

A vast proportion of software at work today is horribly over-engineered for its task. And I’m not talking about the interfaces, about having too many controls or options for the users. These are, indeed, terrible sins but they are the visible ones. The worst of the overengineering goes on under the surface, in the code itself.

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The most insidious cause of overengineering is over-generalizing. We will over-generalize anything given half a chance. Writing code to work with a list of students? Well, we might want to work with teachers and the general public someday, better add a base People class and subclass Student from that. Or Person and then EducationPerson and then Student. Yes, that’s better, right?

Only, now we have three classes to maintain each with their own virtual methods and interfaces and probably split across three different files plus the one we were working in when a one-line dictionary would have been fine.

I will introduce you to some of the basic Japanese Smileys(Emoticons), which is used in e-mails very often in Japan. You can try them as I explain them.