This blog uses a color scheme that takes less energy to display on a CRT monitor than a standard page with a white background. Many great discussions on accessibility (color blindness, etc.) are found in the comments.

(Found on salon.com.

The Boston Globe’s team created a great interactive view of the Boston Marathon course.

(Tomorrow’s marathon is going to be grim, with 50 mph winds and heavy rain.)

“Help” is a pretty unhelpful navigation label. What’s even less helpful is if instead of saying “help” you say “H” and then put “help” in tiny letters underneath.

Now, the instructional designer for this online course needs to explain that you need to click “H” to get to “help” which is where you’ll learn “how to use this course.”

Starting the Course
If this is the first time using this course, please click Help (”H” top-right navigation) to learn about how to use this course. If you are familiar with teh course, click the Overview topic in the drop-down menu to begin.

When you see “click Next to continue,” in the course topics, please click the Next button (”>”) in the top-right navigation bar.

There’s a lot of extra space in the design. I would change the link text to “Learn how to use this course.” I’d recommend also changing the > to “Next page.” (And then make the “back” button operable; I had to reload the large Flash file to get back to the main page.)

As a rule, if you have to parenthetically explain how to use your navigation, you should reevaluate your navigation design and labels.

Hillary sent this “simple picture of how darn rainy it is in Seattle.” I love the elegance of the design. (In Boston we’ve moved from snow to sleet to pouring rain. Progress…)