Art Lebedev on the proper formatting of punctuation

This guy continues to blow my mind. Some tips on formatting punctuation in a visually appealing way. Check out the section on how to center things horizontally. And naturally there's a bonus section on the proper formatting of smileys as punctuation.

Reading this stuff is a good way to remind myself why I'm a crappy visual designer.

And also via Art Lebedev: Leonardo da Vinci invented stinkbombs.

He also has a brilliantly simple way of expressing the success of a design in terms of its requirements. "Design is not something to discuss ... the only thing that can be discussed is whether the task has or has not been achieved."

Plus there's an article on designing well by designing badly on purpose. This method is ingenious, since it lets you imagine your users as super-intelligent enemies and then work to defeat them. Considering how hard it is to really believe how helpless users can be, overestimating them could be much easier.