Paddy Donnelly has a nice write up about the lingering dogma of the fold. His point, with enough room left in 120 characters for a shortened URL, is this: The virtues of keeping relevant content above the fold are no longer.

This is probably something we've all realized, but it's nice to have a clear write-up that details just why this is the case. It's also something worth keeping at hand to try and reason with client-cum-designers, as Paddy recognizes. Here he is:

We all know, people have learned to scroll. They did a long time ago, but still the 'everything needs to be above the fold' concept lingers on.

Many web designers, after presenting a site design, hear the client worriedly ask 'But, where is the fold?!' Your first response is usually to switch on the guides in Photoshop to show and they then nervously say 'Hmm, yeah, we're going to need those articles, and those links, and those 6 images all above the fold.'

And there goes any sense of white space, readability and story telling you had planned for their site.

(On a personal note, this is also good news for us, since by the time you're reading this, it's almost certainly below the fold.)

Once weekly, GOOD Magazine posts an infographic, or a "transparency", visualizing everything from the amount of our national acreage controlled by major retail chains (below) to the length of time people spend on popular email clients. They have now created a flickr archive of them all.

Student Debt: GOOD and Futurefarmers look at the ballooning student debt in the United States.

Retail Store Space: The biggest retailer in the world covers an area larger than Manhattan. GOOD and Futurefarmers look at "the amazing amount of space occupied by a few ubiquitous chains."

Nothing too revelatory for the BlogLESS regular here, but I thought I'd offer you a little story. This all happened in about ten minutes last Friday, and in those minutes, I found myself mentally reinforcing a few key maxims for web design.

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Taxi Key to the City makes these nice Taxi Cards, cards you give to a taxi driver in a foreign country (here, China) to explain to him or her where you want to go, as almost certainly you don't speak Chinese, and on my experience, Beijing taxi drivers in particular speak just enough English to make it very dangerous to try to communicate.

DLB loves this diagram, from the Beijing Taxi Cards website.

When I was in China, I stayed with a family of American ex-patriots, and they lived in an ex-patriot community. They give out packages of these kind of taxi cards when you move in. The ones they give you are specific to your neighborhood, whereas the ones sold here are more general (they are mainly targeted at tourists for the 2008 Olympics).

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