Zen Master of the CSS Zen Garden, Dave Shea, will now be joining Derek Featherstone as a speaker at the next meeting of the Better Web Posse in Victoria.

The evening will begin with Derek talking about “Accessible mapping with Google Maps” and then Dave will end with “Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Web Design”.

Please take a moment to help us prepare for a sane event, and sign up to RSVP. Again the event details are:

MONDAY, December 10 | 7:00 pm
The Sticky Wicket, Maple Room (map)

Derek Featherstone a WaSP committee member and and usability consultant with FurtherAhead in Ottawa, will be speaking at the next meeting of the Better Web Posse in Victoria. The event details are:

MONDAY, December 10 | 7:00 pm
The Sticky Wicket, Maple Room (map)

Derek is also one of the organizers of the Web Directions North conference that will be held in Vancouver this January 28th to February 2nd. WDN has a great lineup this year, and if you live in the Pacific Northwest, this will be the premier web design/development event of the year!

24 ways is back for a 3rd holiday season with 24 new posts by some of the worlds best web developers.  Starting December 1st and continuing through to Christmas day you can get your holiday fill of web geekery.

Thomas Baekdal has authored an insightful report on the Actual Browser Sizes that are being used by the people visiting our sites.  The report has some interesting findings like users with screen resolution of 1024×768 and lower typically maximize their browser window, where users with larger screen resolutions are less likely to browse with maximized windows.

The report is broken into 5 parts:

• Where did the data come from?
• Display usage
• Browser usage
• 800×600/1024×768/1280x??? Specifically
• What size do I need to support?

Take the time to read this report.  It will be well worth your time.

Particletree has an amazing post on Visualizing Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ Law is a guiding principal of HCI and understanding this concept is essential if you consider yourself an Interaction Designer or User Experience guru.

Here is a great tool that that makes it super easy to create a favicon.ico file for your website.  favikon is a slick little web app that lets you upload any image you like, crop and resize it, then finally export it to a favicon.ico file that you can then place on your website.  For those of you not aware of what a favicon is, they are the little icons that appear next to the URL in your location bar.  Here are some details on favicons and how to place them on your site.

Michael Angeles has created a fantastic OmniGraffle HTML Wireframe Palette that will take your wireframe diagrams to the next level.  OmniGraffle is a Mac OSX only diagramming tool that can be used for creating diagrams of floor plans, database schema, network topologies and much, much more.

If you design web sites and use a Mac, you must check out Sim Daltonism.  It’s a small little application that allows you to preview your work as a person with color blindness would see it.  The program lets you choose between 8 filters of the four types of color blindness.

N.Design is offering up a nice collection of 14×14 Mini Pixel Icons that are perfect for the web. The icons can be used for free by simply providing a link back to N.Design. If that’s not good for you or your clients, you can purchase the set for $30. Sounds pretty fair to me!

Jonathan Snook has a great post on Making a Good Favicon. Favicons are those small icons that appear in your browsers address bar, tab bar and next to bookmarked web pages.