If you’ve been thinking more about web forms recently, you’re not alone. Luke Wroblewski has been actively campaigning for better-designed forms, educating and evangelizing about a topic hardly considered before: the design of forms. Even if you’ve been unable to catch his worldwide talks (and even more so if you have), you need to drop everything. Right now. Because his book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, is now available for sale.

From the book’s official description:

“Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.”

Congratulations to Luke and the entire Rosenfeld Media team!

More on the book:

• All 218 images from the book
• 14 chapters in the table of contents
• Purchase the book

Despite popular opinion, vocabulary can actually be pretty volatile. Take “innovate,” for example. At one point in the not-so-distant past, “innovation” had some pretty positive connotations. We aimed to be innovative; books on innovation crowded our reading lists; we bookmarked and emailed articles mentioning the topic. But somewhere along the way, “innovation” became dirty. The word has lost its way.

Scott Berkun, who’s been writing on design, the design process, and management since 1998, helps us understand why. In his recent The Myths of Innovation book, he deconstructs a whole series of myths about how “innovation” gets done. Not only does he despise the word, “Often the word means nothing—crammed in press releases or as one of several vague adjectives used to describe a not-so-innovative product,” but he backs up his point of view with centuries of evidence.

I recently had the chance to interview Scott for AIGA’s recently re-launched Gain: AIGA Journal of Business and Design (led by newly appointed editor-in-chief Debbie Millman). The interview is packed with the kind of honesty that’s made his own blog popular for a decade:

“Casual Fridays, innovation offsites or giving people copies of Who Moved My Cheese are all nice things, but have zero direct impact on creativity in the workplace. It’s the behavior of leaders and managers that determines how innovative a group is, and most of what enables creativity is entirely free. You can spend a zillion dollars on creativity efforts, but if the basic behavior of managers doesn’t change, you’re wasting your money.”

Thanks to Scott for a great interview! You can read the rest of it on the AIGA site.

I’ve always been that person who brings a something to write on to every meeting — a sketchbook specifically. But for years I never used it to sketch; instead, I fill it with fairly rigorous notes of every meeting detail. Almost ten years of sketchbooks are archived neatly nearby (by size, then date), and their notes, historical artifacts of meeting narratives for later reference.

But last year, I had the pleasure of working with Jonathan Harris. After meetings with Harris, I watched my 10-year-old sketchbook-tradition change: what used to be pages of fairly rigid text notes evolved into charts, scatterplot graphs, four-quadrant diagrams, and Venn diagrams.

Without even realizing it, I’d started to think about conversations in terms of data that could be visualized. And these days, I have the transcripts of my meetings archived visually. That’s the thing about Harris: his love of visualizing data is contagious.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Harris for Adobe’s Think Tank about his process, his work, and his landmark way of telling stories.

When asked about his working style — working solo rather than in a group or with a company — Harris responded with:

“To make something really beautiful, you have to treat it like a lover. It has to be personal. It has to obsess you when you’re falling asleep. It has to be in your dreams. It has to be with you when you wake. It has to torment you.

If you allow the work to accompany you in those intimate moments, it will reveal itself to you, and the result will evolve like a life form, nuanced, and crafted with love. This is why I resist hiring assistants or interns, and certainly why I will never work for anyone else. This resistance to hired help limits my ability to produce more, but I think it makes each thing I do produce better.”

Thanks to Jonathan for a great interview. You can read the rest of it on the Adobe site.