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.
In my previous article on Smashing Magazine (“Understanding the Difference Between Typography and Lettering”), I wrote about how understanding type terminology can help us better appreciate the arts of typography and lettering.
This article again deals with terminology, probably more specifically than most designers are used to, and the title gets to the heart of what I’m communicating in this article. Everyone knows their serifs and sans, slabs and scripts, but most classifications go much deeper than that.
Read more...As Web designers and developers, we see the value in supporting mobile devices every day. We’re well-versed in tactics and techniques for adapting our work to mobile. Our challenge is to be equally well-versed in selling our clients on that value as being something in which they need to invest precious budget dollars.
I’ve been describing what I call the “mobile imperative” for a few years now when talking to clients or advocating support for mobile devices in Web design projects. The mobile user experience is not an add-on. It’s now a major part of the Web as we know it, and our clients’ content and tools will appear on an increasing number of devices, screens and contexts.
Read more...For most websites, navigation is not particularly challenging. A primary navigation bar, supported by sub-navigation, is often enough. Typically, sub-navigation displays the parent, siblings and children of the current page.
A persistent primary navigation bar shows top-level pages, allowing users to move between sections. However, there is one class of website for which this traditional form of navigation falls short. It is what I refer to as a "mega-site".
Read more...Comics are known to be one of the most powerful communication tools, and are a unique way to communicate — using both image and text to effectively demonstrate time, function, and emotion.
Today's article is an excerpt from Kevin Cheng's "See What I Mean" — a book that walks you step by step through the process of using comics to communicate, and providing examples from industry leaders who have already adopted this method. Enjoy!
Read more...Hundreds of tools may be available for interaction designers, but there is still no industry standard for interaction design the way Photoshop and Illustrator are to graphic design. Popular programs are out there, but many of them have considerable drawbacks, which has led me to explore alternative apps.
I eventually chose Adobe InDesign for much of my preliminary interaction design work. Yes, you read that correctly: InDesign, a desktop publishing app originally created for designing books and magazines, is currently my tool of choice for designing low- to medium-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes.
Read more...There are several tactics for deciding where to put breakpoints in a responsive design. There is the rusty idea that they should be based on common screen sizes, but this doesn’t scale well. There are no “common” screen sizes. Another popular tactic is to create a breakpoint wherever the layout breaks.
This sounds much better. But it still leaves us with the question, How do you determine whether the layout is broken? One logical answer is to look at classic readability theory and to define our breakpoints based on that.
Read more...Layout, for both print and screen, is one of the most important aspects of graphic design. Designs that extend across multiple pages or screens, whether containing large or small amounts of type, must be carefully controlled in a way that is enticing and is easy for all to access.
Careful control of visual hierarchy is a key aspect of the design decisions we have to consider. In this article, we will look at how frequently type needs to be broken down into different levels, such as topic, importance and tone of voice.
Read more...It’s time to stop thinking about the Internet and online communication in the context of a device, be it desktop, tablet or mobile. Advances by Google and Apple have heightened consumer expectations, which now require stricter focus from us to create seamless online communications — communications that work everywhere and that get their point across.
We need to embrace a device-agnostic approach to communicating with connected consumers and forget the idea of a "mobile Internet". There is only One Web to experience.
Read more...There’s no avoiding those Angry Birds. They are, quite literally, everywhere: toys, snacks, cartoons, plush toys and that wildly addictive game that seemingly everyone has downloaded at some point — 1 billion of us last year alone.
2012 was another landmark year at the Angry Birds aviary, otherwise known as Rovio. The Finnish-based developer not only released a slew of tie-ins — from Green Day to Star Wars — but also went social.
Read more...
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