Web dynamo Liz Danzico alerted us to some valuable tools for all you info-archs (information architects if you missed the earlier post). Yahoo! has released two resources, the Design Pattern Library and the User Interface Library, which basically give you access to Yahoo!-level design and code for free. We're pretty sure you won't get this from the plain white wonder.

Yahoo!'s Erin Malone:

"Since 2004, Yahoo! has been collecting and cataloging interaction design patterns in our internal Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We have presented about it at conferences and in articles. But now we have opened it up for the public. This first release is small (just 13 patterns) but we will be adding to it over the next few months to round out the offerings in there.

Since early in 2005, Yahoo! has been developing its own Ajax/DHTML framework. Core requirements for this library included excellent browser compatibility, industrial strength scalability and good documentation. The library is now available on the Yahoo! Developer Network under the BSD license! It's got all of the things you would expect (drag and drop, animation, event management, widgets, etc.)

Notice we have rolled these two libraries out together. Today there is a small amount of synergy, but going forward we expect many of the design patterns to link directly to our code library for examples and help in implementing design solutions."