I ran into this via an article on the UX Magazine site.

It’s funny, but real.

http://www.guardedlyoptimistic.com/2007/10/if-taglines-were-honest.html

This brilliantly illustrates a point that designers and agencies have been trying to make to clients for years.

Watch the video and spread the word by embedding the video or linking to the site — http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Who knows? Maybe the next client you get will have watched it and you won’t have to work as hard to make your point. Fingers crossed.

The online buzz over “going dark” began in earnest last January after Mark Ontkush, a self-described “green computing evangelist,” wrote a blog post concerning environmentally friendly Web design. Ontkush claimed that if a popular site such as Google switched its home page background color from white to black, it could save hundreds of megawatt hours a year.

I read this article over at BusinessWeek.com some months ago and thought to myself that it really was bordering on the ridiculous. No matter how energy conscious one gets, there are so many other ways to save electricity than to force-fit your design in to a dark palette.

I can’t even see myself using this as an excuse to justify a colour scheme because it’d sound ridiculous.

I really enjoyed reading this post over at Boxes and Arrows, because I’ve long held the belief that users aren’t resentful of scrolling. I haven’t really looked for any data to back up the assertion, so it wasn’t something I’d pick a fight about, but instinct said that the web had evolved enough in this regard to not be tied to its print brethren any longer.

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

We are all well aware that web design is not an easy task. There are many variables to consider, some of them technical, some of them human. The technical considerations of designing for the web can (and do) change quite regularly, but the human variables change at a slower rate. Sometimes the human variables change at such a slow rate that we have a hard time believing that it happens.

This is happening right now in web design. There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.