(1) Buy more ram for Photoshop. I know many people are skeptical if you’ll see much performance difference when using 1 gig of ram versus over 1 gig of ram. But, if you’re running Photoshop with large files you will benefit from more ram. I’ve been running 1 gig of ram on my Dell 9150, Pentium Dual Core 3Ghz for about 8 months. It’s been nice, but lately, I’ve had to work with 100+ layer Photoshop docs and things were getting slow. The extra gig I just added (for a total of 2 gig) has increased my typical Photoshop tasks 30% to 250%. The time savings will pay for the $99 gig of ram update in no time. Below is my very unscientific benchmark test of Photoshop speed before and after the ram upgrade.

(2) The next tip. Buy your ram from The Chip Merchant. I remember buying my first ram upgrade for my Mac Quadra 700 from The Chip Merchant in 1991. They had the best prices and service then, and still do 15 years later!

I had a ram slot question about my Dell when I went to install the new 1 gig module so I called The Chip Merchant. Within minutes their tech support knew my exact Dell model and everything about the installation. He explained some nitty gritty details for options I’d have down the road and we were done. I love The Chip Merchant.

I started to redesign www.asp.net this week. The project has been in talks for months but was green lit recently. I spent this past week on full scale black and white wire frames / storyboards. They’ll be more storyboards of the user experience than abstracted flow charts. Flow charts of information architecture are too abstract and can get people agreeing on concepts that just don’t matter to end users. The current site has a ton of information, product types and a diverse audience. The redesigned site will sing with less visual fluff and more easily findable content for specific audiences. Slick visuals and pretty graphics will be the easier part, as they always are. Working the information design, writing style, extensibility and seeing the transfer of the existing content into semantic formats will be the heavy lifting.

The last few months I’ve been designing the Microsoft IIS web site. It was a pleasure to work with Bill Staples, Chris Adams and all the folks at Telligent to pull this site together. We have some new features and design additions coming this summer as well.

1. Design for the user experience not for technologies and tools
2. Design with semantic mark-up in mind
3. Design for accessibility, you’ll get more than just accessibility benefits
4. Make menus from lists
5. Use CSS and image sprites for hover effects or when you need a related set of graphics to be available on the client at the same time
6. Use the yellow fade technique to give feedback to users
7. Create wire frames as full size storyboards that “play” in time like animation storyboards (flow charts and static Visio line drawings don’t communicate the real life experience of the UI and will ultimately hurt the end product)
8. For complex web apps start with wire frame storyboards instead of full color Photoshop comps
9. Know your target browser “folds” (horizontal and vertical)
10. Hand off XHTML & CSS to developers not PSDs