Bill Cooper describes the origins of personas in this 2003 essay from the Cooper Journel.

"Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master. Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of study and months of practice before we consider them to be capable of creating and using personas at a professional level. Many practicing designers have used the brief 25-page description of personas in Inmates as a “Persona How-to” manual, but a complete “How-to” on personas has yet to be written. I hope someday that one of the very accomplished architects at Cooper will write that book because they have developed the technique to a degree of sophistication well beyond my seminal efforts. I look forward to contributing to it."

This is an article by Steve Calde who will be presenting at the July 2008 Catalyze webcast.

"Personas and other user-modeling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too.

Using personas to guide your user-documentation creation-process helps you:

• Determine the primary and secondary audiences for your documents
• Prioritize technical writing tasks by giving you a tool for identifying which aspects of the product are most important to your readers
• Write documentation in a way that helps your users achieve their goals, instead of simply cataloguing all of the product's features."

In this blog post, Andy lays out the Skills and Traits necessary to become "employable" as a web designer.

"If you’re a student aspiring toward a career in Web design, I think it would be prudent to reassess your current education or degree plan to ensure that you’re actually employable by the time you leave school. From my observations, the vast majority of students emerging from university, design school, and trade school lack fundamental skills and understanding necessary for the Web design professions (in all forms: experience design, interaction design, marketing design, communication design, information design, etc…)."

In this blog post from Web Guild, Reshma Kumar interviews Luke Wroblewski on web form design:

"Forms are a staple of the online experience. We use them daily for a host of activities from signing in/up, purchasing something, asking a question, to downloading a document. They come in all sizes, layouts, and configurations. Some are better executed than others and ultimately, impact our businesses adversely if their designs and usability are impaired. So, how do we ensure that in creating web forms, we get them right? I am speaking with Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal at Yahoo! and author of a new book "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks"."

In this blog post from Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp discusses design in the context of publishing and journalism.

"On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs."