This category features articles on general design principles, Web design, typography, user interface design and related topics. It also presents design showcases and practical pieces on the business side of design.
Popular tags in this category: Web design, Typography, Design Legacy, Navigation, Forms, Mobile, Techniques, Showcases, UI Design.
Let's face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?
Because installing a WordPress theme is so easy, anyone can have a blog up and running in minutes. While this is great, and we now have a wealth of blogs on countless topics, perhaps it’s too easy? Just thinking about the endless hours of effort that a print designer puts into creating the custom layout of a magazine article makes one respect the finished product so much more. A few individuals out there, though, are really breaking the mold of the blogosphere.
Read more...Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.
In this selection we’re glad to present you Madawaska ExtraLight, Apparatus SIL, League Gothic, Contra and many other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time.
Read more...Redesigning a website is a big job (needless to say) and should be handled with care. Many of us with a portfolio, blog or other website have probably thought about a redesign or at least know we need one. For many designers, though, that redesign never comes. As big and important as it is, the job can turn into a hugely daunting task that we put straight on the backburner of our to-do list.
Why is doing a simple redesign so daunting? Why is it so difficult to follow through, even when we've decided to do it? How can we work on designing our clients' websites successfully every day and then perpetually neglect our own?
The problem is both a lack of correct planning and a lack of understanding of the root need for the redesign. Once we've identified these elements, we're set for success. In this article, we'll discuss how to plan and execute a redesign, and how to find the perfect timing for it.
Read more...Your invoice should be prim and proper, so that you can get paid by your clients efficiently. While invoicing is not a fun task, it's a necessary one: by keeping clients informed of your expectations, you will get paid punctually and reinforce your professionalism. After going over some best practices for creating invoices, we'll review some great (and not so great) online invoicing tools, so that you can spend less time creating invoices and more time doing the things you love!
Their details and yours. This is Mickey Mouse stuff, but you can't afford to forget it. In addition to the client's address, make sure to include the name of the client's contact person who handles your account! A company with three employees can figure out what you're doing; but in big companies, invoices get misplaced, especially if there's confusion over who belongs to which project.
Read more...One of the biggest advantages of online media over print is the ability to change, update, and enhance online media at virtually anytime, with virtually no negative side effects. In fact, if a website or web application does not continually offer its users an ever-evolving and growing experience, that site or application would soon become insecure, unusable, and out of date.
Have you beautified your code, validated your markup, and made your XHTML more semantic? Have you implemented basic SEO best practices, spell-checked content, and removed legacy code? Have you ensured JavaScript is unobtrusive, applied the principle of graceful degradation, and minimized the use of Flash? If you've done all those things (and possibly more), what comes next? Are there things you can do to improve your site's overall effectiveness beyond those?
In this article, we will discuss ways that web designers and front-end coders can keep their websites relevant, timely, and accessible long after a site's launch. This guide goes beyond simple text and graphic updates, common "best practices" for CSS and XHTML, or other things you might see in a typical website checklist. We'll expand on many of the basics, and provide some effective tips for website maintenance geared towards front-end designers and coders.
Read more...As printed typography enjoys the fruits of high-DPI glory, proudly displaying its beautiful curves and subtleties, its on-screen counterpart remains stifled by bulky pixels, living in a world of jagged edges, distorted letterforms and trimmed serifs. Until display manufacturers produce affordable 200 or 300 PPI monitors, we'll have to rely on software advances to fix these problems.
Enter anti-aliasing: the next best thing to a world of higher-resolution monitors. The concept of anti-aliasing is fairly simple: add semi-transparent pixels along the edges of letterforms to smooth the appearance of the "stair-step" effect.
However, many factors and technologies determine the actual effectiveness of the process: hinting, subpixel rendering, software capabilities and operating system specifications, to name a few. Here, we'll look at what you as a designer can do to improve the results of anti-aliasing with Photoshop, Flash and CSS. Plus, we'll explain the constraints of hardware, browsers and operating systems.
Read more...A lot of designers think CMYK is the way to go when designing for print. We will, of course, always use CMYK-based ink, but this does not mean you have to work with CMYK files. You can work with RGB images to perfectly optimize your print colors and save a great deal of time in the process.
For several of the following tips to work, you will have to create and save all of your Photoshop images and artwork in RGB color mode. If you're a veteran designer, you probably think this goes against what you've been taught, which is to use CMYK color mode. Well, technology has come a long way, and nowadays RGB color mode is better because it produces a wider range of colors and allows you to use one image for several media, including print and Web.
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There he goes, the web designer, stepping up to the counter of an empty McDonald’s at 3 o’clock in the morning. He is scanning the overhead menu, putting a cheeseburger in his mental shopping basket. “Cheezubahga, onegaishimasu,” we hear him say, “with an iced tea.”
Waiting for his order, he examines the wireframe of the display on the cash register, the mechanical logic of the deep fat fryers, the input/output logic of the ice cream dispenser. Coming late from work, with his mind still in design mode, he starts tracing the restaurant’s interaction model, drawing arrows from the entrance to the counter to the tables to the trash cans; seeing how the conveyor-belt kitchen, the trays with the paper liners, the bolted down seats and the meals comprise a single, complete customer interface. “They must have run usability tests,” he thinks, taking his tray to the table.
Read more...Let's face it: Web-safe fonts are very limiting. Maybe a dozen fonts are out there that are widely enough adopted to be considered "Web safe," and those ones aren't exactly spectacular for much other than body type. Sure, Georgia, Arial or Times New Roman work just fine for the bulk of the text on your website, but what if you want something different for, let's say, headings? Or pull quotes? What then?
You have a few options. Many people just opt for more elaborate CSS font stacks, with their preferred fonts up front. But that still leaves a big chunk of your visitors seeing the same old Web-safe fonts.
Enter dynamic text replacement. In addition to font stacks, why not replace the heading text with an image, embedded font, or bit of Flash? The methods described below are easier than they sound. And the end result is that the vast majority of users will see the beautiful typography you want them to see. A word of warning, though: don't use dynamic text replacement for all of the text on your page. All that would do is slow it down and frustrate your visitors. Instead, save it for headings, menu items, pull quotes and other small bits of text.
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Opportunity: WellnessFX, a fast-growing health 2.0 company based in The Mission District in San Francisco, is looking for an engineer with skills in front-end…
YAGER is currently seeking a talented and experienced Game Systems Designer to join our pre-production team of yet unannounced title. Join us in shaping the direction…
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