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I am excited to announce the launch of my latest project at Yahoo!, the redesigned Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. This is a project that’s been in the works within my team for over a year now (and on my radar for a few months), so it’s very exciting for all of us to see it go live.

A couple of months ago, I caught word that the always fascinating Christian Crumlish needed a hand finishing the construction of his Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The old pattern library was painfully out of date, both visually and content-wise. I was happy to lend a hand to help build something that not only matched the modern aesthetic of our Yahoo! Developer Network (a site that I helped build and launch in its current state about a year ago), but also integrated some new features, while supporting a massive content inventory.

Last Summer, Chris Hanrath wrote up a great IxD spec for the new Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, which then made its rounds through the classic big-company hurdles. Eventually, Nick Terry designed the vis-de for it (based on Stepan Douris’ original VisDe), which made its way to my desk. I built the new front end with the help of Mich Cook on the middlelayer engineering, while Christian Crumlish tweaked the content to fit the new format.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, it’s a very powerful design asset, especially for anyone who needs to communicate/refer to the “correct way of doing things” when designing a site/project. Christian Crumlish is the resident Yahoo! Design Pattern Library curator, who observes and documents common interaction design patterns and documents them here, on the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. Christian (or xian, or mediajunkie) is a really fun guy to work with because his mind is constantly in the IxD Design Patterns headspace. If you get a chance to see him give a talk, don’t miss it - his wealth of knowledge matched with his great sense of humor makes for always a great time. Christian is currently putting the finishing touches on a book titled, ”Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide)“. He’s co-authoring the Patterns book with Erin Malone. This book is the evidence of a ton of hard work by Erin and Christian and is due out in a matter of weeks.

When you’ve got a moment, head on over to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and check out our hard work!

The super-crazy, bright-colored, 80’s-hyper-color blog style was fun… for a while. Over time, I got so tired of seeing my face with the wincing expression and super-trendy sketchy colors. I got to the point where I couldn’t stand looking at my blog anymore. I stopped posting and became quite disinterested in my blog… using Twitter and Flickr to fill my yearn for Internet-gab. I woke up at about 5am and couldn’t sleep this morning, so I decided to bring my blog back from the dead. I’m quite excited about creating a super-clean, super-simple style that loads in a fraction of the amount of time, as well as working on getting my flickr and twitter streams integrated in to my actual blog stream. Yay for contiguous life streams! Stay tuned for some big changes. 

Another useful tool to add to the growing surplus of great webdev tools is this CSS element selector bookmarklet built by John Allsopp. Just launch the bookmarklet on the page you’re inspecting, type the element you want to highlight and hit the ‘MRI’ button. John also built XRAY, which works the same way as MRI, but returns data similar to Web Developer Toolbar’s Display Element Information, but works in a more HUD capacity. Both excellent tools that I’ll probably be using a lot from here on out.

Thanks ajaxian