jmulder

The biggest change in their redesign has nothing to do with the new logo, redundancy in navigation (because that can't be an issue) or making the different search tools more discoverable.

The biggest change is the top left position of the first search result relative to the top left position of the document. In other words, the average scanning pattern has completely changed with the addition of a fixed side bar.

It will take a lot of people a long time to adjust and its effectiveness can't be judged by a couple of hours of usage. It's not unlikely to assume Google is very willing to take a slight hit in this area and win in the discoverability of their different ways to use Google, hopefully, eventually improving a person's overal searching efficiency.

Time will tell, but we all know Google tests these things through and through.

I work in Amsterdam and live in the Amsterdam area, so Amsterdam or Utrecht would be no problem for me.

However, for me personally, I'm fully booked every weekend the coming months. But don't let that stop you :-)

Edit: I'd be up for a short talk about a personal/work Javascript/jQuery project I've been working on. Very not exciting, just very practical for our organization.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Funda Real Estate B.V. -- http://www.funda.nl/neveradullmoment (Dutch)

We're looking for a fourth UX designer to join our current UX team. In our company a UX designer is multi-disciplinary capable in the fields of communication, to design, to front-end development (HTML/CSS only with Javascript as a plus).

Please see above link for details. You're always free to send an e-mail to the contact person in the listing or myself at jeroen.mulder@funda.nl

I work in Amsterdam and live nearby.

Exactly. Too many people think UI design is about making something look pretty, but it's not. Making something look pretty is a nicely added bonus, but before all you must help the user in doing what they want in a way that's efficient and effective, while still supporting the company's commercial goals. More than often it's an incredibly challenge to balance this properly, but succeeding in this is what, in my opinion, makes a great designer.

With all due respect to the aforementioned people, but personall I think the real rockstars are the leading designers behind sites like Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, BBC and digg's Daniel Burka. Designing for such a large audience while still keeping an eye on a company's goals and vision is what really is impressive. Making something look good is the easy part -- making it work flawlessly in an pre-existing environment with an incrediblyt large audience is the challenge.

Love TextMate. Also, need TextMate 2 _now_.

Use the latest 'unstable' build of Intype (www.intype.info) on Windows daily.