The single overarching principle in any design project in any discipline is to "give the people what they want". See how German industrial designer Dieter Rams can influence the sites that we design.

If you engineered a bridge you wouldn't leave the guardrails off and hope nobody goes near the edges; engineering security for software is the same. But while valuable and important, security is a difficult thing for many clients (or potential clients) to analyze, and a fairly thankless task for an interactive company to do well.

On January 28, we stopped using sIFR to replace headings on the Clockwork site. Instead, we moved to Typekit. For you web type geeks out there, here are a few of the reasons why we changed as well as some comparisons between the typefaces.

All the nerds and geeks at Clockwork were so excited for the Apple announcement today that we all brought our lunches to the table and watched the event unfold together.

How many times have you been asked to move something "above the fold" on the homepage of a website? In this post we'll start with a definition of the "fold" term itself, look at some of the web design principles we can extract from this print term, and then give some recommendations on how to handle the situation should it ever arise.

Yeah, you heard me. Kiss ‘em! Don’t get me wrong – I love apps. But, too many marketers are mistaking "There's an app for that" for a true mobile marketing strategy.

The emergence and rapid adoption of apps have given mobile the attention that it deserves, but overall they’ve given marketers and brands the wrong impression when it comes to mobile strategy.

This morning at the Clockwork kitchen table, Marty and I had an argument centering around the Flip camera. It went something like this:

When you commit to creating meaningful, usable experiences one of the best ways to make sure you're doing it well is to conduct usability testing. This testing can uncover areas of your site or application where users have a hard time understanding how to accomplish what they need to do, and can also confirm where the site is working well in terms of usability.

There are many days where you might find me walking up to my coworkers and asking "Do you have a couple minutes for a quick usability test?" It's not scientific, and not how a traditional usability test is run — but that's okay because even these quick ad-hoc usability tests can confirm that a design is usable or uncover that it needs a little rework. We at Clockwork see the importance of doing usability testing not only ad-hoc, but also a step up from that too.

In order to conduct those tests, we recently set up a new addition to the Clockwork office: the Usability Lab!

Validating web page forms is a remarkably difficult task. But if you make websites, you'd better be good at it.

Being good at it means not doing things like this:

Clear, intuitive site navigation is a critical, foundational aspect of any online experience. Without this core necessity, your project will fail. I like to think of navigation as pants. The skill level of a pro football running back means nothing if he is out on the field with no pants. Right?