As promised last week, we have more to celebrate our first year. The OK/Cancel Store is open featuring three T-shirt designs! We hope to add more designs and other merchandise in the future but it all depends on the demand for this set. Any feedback on the shirts are also welcome. If you have any questions regarding orders, please e-mail me or Tom.

Internationalization has become a very popular topic around web design. Designers are becoming more aware of the global scale of websites and are taking into account different language character sets, date formats and currencies. The more subtle effects of culture, however, are less evident. In an attempt to study these factors, Aaron Marcus and Emilie W. Gould (pdf) discuss how Hofstede’s cultural dimensions of power-distance (PD), individual vs. collectivism (IC), masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) and uncertainty avoidance (UA) and long term vs. short term orientation (LTO) may apply to global web sites.

As an exercise, I looked at several corporate and consumer websites that might illustrate - or perhaps contradict - the patterns Marcus and Gould described.

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