An "essential" document for mobile web designers

We've often maintained that 2008 will be the official "Year of the Mobile Web". But I've always thought that it's also the year when it comes out of the technical shadows - and web designers start to take it seriously.

Mature mobile web design has been a long time coming, of course held back by usual gripes like browser capabilities, device diversity and network speeds. But life moves on, and now it's time to make the mobile web look amazing.

It's a exciting new visual canvas, with plenty of chance to innovate, explore and defie convention - that of desktop sites particularly.

I'm no designer myself, but I think there's also something very refreshing about having to create elegant, concise sites and pages that still retain the qualities of good graphic design and appeal to users in the mobile context.

Mark Twain famously said, "If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter". Similarly, there's a real art to creating a compelling and visually thrilling mobile site - particularly in contrast to just lamely hacking an existing desktop site up into small pieces.

Designing a beautiful mobile site is like writing a haiku: a craft belied by the size of the result alone.

So anyway, with this in mind, I'm thrilled to see we made a list of 30 Essential PDF Document Every Designer Should Download. Now, I'm not sure why being a PDF is so important :-) ...but still, you'll see our popular Mobile Web Developer's Guide made the cut - along with some other great texts.

Be sure to check it out if you're at all interested in modern web design.

And be sure that you
continue to write lots of
beautiful haikus.