I’ve been reading up on Ruby on Rails lately, partially to prepare myself for the Carson Workshop with Geoffrey Grosenbach in late May, but also because it seems like a very efficient way to create websites.

Not really graphic design related but Russell Beattie has written a hsyterical yet inspiring post on his blog called WTF 2.0. He takes a refreshing look at all the Web 2.0 hype and asks why no one is paying attention to the business model. “The worst thing about all the Web 2.0 hype is the complete loss of business perspective”.

My wife has put together Get Started Using Ajax, a one day training workshop for Carson Workshops, focusing on Ajax, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

BD4D Co-Founder Ryan Carson has written a five-part series called “How to Build a Web Startup” and it’s been getting quite a bit of traffic, so we thought you might find it interesting. Here are links to the five articles: Where are the UK Startups?

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Jakob Nielsen has come out with the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. This year Jakob has mixed things up a bit by allowing his reader’s to share the “usability problems they found the most irritating”.

Lately AJAX and Web 2.0 have been the buzz words being thrown around the web design industry, and for good reason, but what ever happened to Flash? Well it is still here, and its getting better than ever with Flash 8!

The forums have been installed, and while there are bugs to be worked out, it functions…. Get authentic feedback for the first time ever!(Now with voting!)Please be assured — we aren’t in this for the spam. Any information you give us will never be sold or given away.

Last Friday, we slid a bit of work aside to make a difference.After watching the events of the week unfold, sending money, being upset,feeling helpless and watching one of the designers in the studio scramble tomake sure his family was safe, we asked ourselves what more we should do.You can help too (or so we hope) or your company (or corporation) or studio or friends studio, by offering to host a displaced designer, artist, or illustrator until they can go back home.We would like to see this work and inspire other industries to do the same. In 3 days it has been picked up by HOW, Adobe, Newstoday, k10k, and a dozen more design outlets across the web.

I stumbled across the Designers Toolbox this weekend. I haven’t personally been doing many projects since becoming a Business Manager, but I can see how these templates could be very useful.

Much to my surprise, we are spotlighted on Adobe’s Illustrator CS2 section this month!