Discussing about donut chart in Is multistability a good thing on a donut?, a question arise.
Discarding the pertinence of donut chart, do you have arguments/studies that would favor one of the following layouts:
explanation then data vs. data then explanation
I am doing a business site for a web company, and was wondering if Captcha has become so well-known, that it no longer needs an explanation ?
Right now there is only a input box, the captcha image and a headline saying "Captcha". But should we put in an explanation, just to be safe ?
The client is against an explanation, since the design is very clean.
But how many people do you believe are familiar with Captchas now-a-days? (both with and without our target audience taken in perspective.)
Answer
I have found that most web literate users are familiar with the concept of a CAPTCHA, but most are not familiar with the term "CAPTCHA". Even my parents (who are not web savvy) understand the idea of "enter these characters to prove you're a human" -- however, they wouldn't understand the headline. I would recommend something more straightforward: "Please enter the following characters".
As an aside, please be absolutely sure you need a CAPTCHA at all! There's a lot of research which proves that they dramatically impact both the ease of use and conversion rates. See the following:
Be sure to see this related question on StackOverflow.
Global swatches are my friends. Being able to open a swatch in Illustrator, change its colour values and have my art change along is invaluable.
I know I can change a swatch to global by opening the swatch and checking the 'Global' box:
How do I do this for multiple swatches at once?
Answer
Select multiple swatches in your swatch panel holding either Shift (if they're near each other) or Control/Command if they're not.
Then on the top right drop down panel menu can click on Swatch Properties and click Global to set them all at once.
Many websites have their logo near the top which is a clickable link to the homepage. There's some interesting discussion about this kind of button in this question. I am wondering if it's a good user experience to make clicking the logo reload the page while you're already on the home page, or if it should be a link that does nothing.
Answer
In the past, linking from a page to the same page, without a target anchor, was a definite design error (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/113-design-guidelines-homepage-usability/), because it just reloaded the page and nothing else, which is a waste of time and there's an expectation that a link do something more.
But this design error, in the form of the logo on the home page linking to the current page, and similar nav link linking to the current page, has become well engrained in the vernacular of web design to the point where it's often not considered an error these days, although it shows an inattention to detail. If reloading the page accomplished something useful, like updated content, then a link-to-the-current-page is a less egregious error, but if it simply reloads the page it is a definite design flaw.
Generally it's still best to not link to the current page (except for anchor targets), even if it serves as a useful shortcut to page reload. The disabling of logo-home link serves as an indicator that they're already on the home page, so it gives the user useful information and is logically consistent.
I am using Paint to draw some swords for a character I have. I am not very experienced and this is my first time trying to draw swords.
My question is how large (Preferably in pixels) do I need to make the picture to make the curves on the sword to look smooth. I am using current scale of 100 pixels = an inch. For the first sword I made this worked fine as there were few curves and they were small but the one I am working on now have a larger curve. (A good reference is Ichigo's shikai.)
EDIT: I only have access to paint. I would use other programs if I could.
Answer
For screen or print?
For screen, the resolution setting is ignored. What matters is the number of pixels you are using and the resolution of the screen itself. An Apple retina screen is going to look a lot smoother than a non retina screen, as it has a lot more pixels per inch, for example.
In addition, there's the issue of anti-aliasing, which is where individual pixels are 'blended' from one to the next to give the appearance of smoothing from a distance. Simple example:
For print, it's going to depend on what you are printing and how, but typically for photographic/4-color imagery, you want to have images that can be printed at 300dpi. For line art, you typically want 1200dpi.
I'm looking for reliable data on US equity fundamentals, but not sure which vendor provides these features:
Does any of the vendors have a comprehensive list of variables available for each company through its platform? Or a sample profile exported from its dataset?
I found one for Compustat and Zacks, but not for the others. Basic financials (earnings, net margin, price) are freely available, but vendors like Capital IQ have a more comprehensive coverage.
Or maybe some vendor sells all historical data on US public companies as a single dataset?
Similar to Stefan's most intuitive delete icon question.
I'm designing a web app that allows users favorite pages. A lot of big sites use either a heart or star symbol -Which one is most intuitive?
