Kristopher Strom creates a new drawing on his iPhone every day and posts it to his blog. He uses Sketchbook Mobile or Brushes Apps – check them out.

Jeff Atwood has an interesting post on his blog about the inverse of Fitts’ Law.  Basically he comments on the fact that UI designers take a lot of time thinking about how to make it easier for the user to do things that you want them to do, but rarely put the same thought into making it harder for users to do things that you DON’T want them to do.

He uses Gmail as an example, but this kind of behaviour is prevalent all over the web.  Why?

My hypothesis is that the web’s exponential growth has only been possible through converting traffic to money, and that the only effective way of making that conversion is by leading the user.  As a result, UI designers had to learn how to call to the user, and now there are countless heuristics around that practice.

This whole time, we’ve been trying to make the user click, and never thought about how to prevent him from clicking.

With the rise of web applications and web services that charge fees for the actual website instead of driving traffic to sales, usability is going to become increasingly important.  In a lot of applications, usability is the only competitive advantage (the classic example being how Gmail effectively “stole” millions of users from services such as Hotmail).  Maintaining that competitive advantage is vital, and so I think we’ll see more research and best practices around this aspect of usability.

Remember: you can bring a horse to lava, but you can’t make him not drink. (I apologize profusely for the preceding sentence =p)

Two of my all time favourite design blogs are Lovely Package and Logo Design Love. Not only are they beautiful to look at, but a good source of information on all things design related. So go ahead. Spread the love.