Category "Design" on Smashing Magazine

Category: Design

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.

10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites

By Paul Boag
February 10th, 2009
Corporate, Web Design
320 Comments

We all make mistakes running our websites. However, the nature of those mistakes varies depending on the size of your company. As your organization grows, the mistakes change. This post addresses common mistakes among large organizations. Most of the clients I work with are large organizations: universities, large charities, public sector institutions and large companies. Over the last 7 years, I have noticed certain recurring misconceptions among these organizations. This post aims to dispel these illusions and encourage people to face the harsh reality.

The problem is that if you are reading this post, you are probably already aware of these things. But hopefully this article will be helpful to you as you convince others within your organization. In any case, here are our 10 harsh truths about websites of large organizations.

Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design

Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.

Because of the significance of communication with visitors, it is an essential consideration for every designer and website owner and the responsibility of both. Unfortunately, communication is sometimes overlooked and takes a backseat to the visual attractiveness of a website. Ideally, the design and other elements that do the communicating work together to create a clear, unified message to visitors.

In this article, we'll take a broad look at the subject of clear communication in Web design. We'll start with a discussion of the primary methods of communication for websites and typical challenges that designers face. From there, we'll move on to look at what specifically should be communicated to visitors and tips for implementing this in your own work. At the end, we'll look at some of the goals that should be established in terms of communication when developing websites, as well as some of the results of having a website that communicates effectively.

Colors In Corporate Branding And Design

By Steven Snell
January 28th, 2009
Branding, Colors, Corporate
82 Comments

Color is a major consideration in any Web design. Whether for an individual, small company, or major corporation, color scheme is one of the most significant factors in the overall look and appearance of a website. In some cases, the designer may have the sole discretion in making color choices, but many times a color scheme has already been established and needs to be followed. In situations where a company already has a strong brand, color usage for the website can either build or take away from this.

In this article, we'll take a look at the impact that website color schemes have on the overall branding of a company, and we'll also look at plenty of examples. We won't be going into the subjects of color choices for branding or the psychology of colors, but rather we'll look at established companies to see if the colors in their website branding are consistent with the rest of their marketing.

50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography

By Noura Yehia
January 27th, 2009
Tools, Typography, Useful
99 Comments

Typography is elegant when it is attractive and communicates the designer’s ideas. When chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective in supporting the overall design. Designers are always exploring different techniques with type: some use images or sIFR to produce very beautiful typography, while others prefer CSS alone to get the typography just right.

Today, we will look at 50 most useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly. These tools are great for experimenting with different font types for your website.

Below we cover typographic tools, useful typographic references, font browsers, typographic CSS- and JavaScript-techniques, hyphenation techniques, sIFR tools and resources, grids and related tools, free and commercial fonts, a guide to Web typography, examples of great Web typography.

Please feel free to suggest further tools and resources in the comments to this post. And if you like this post please feel free to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter.

You may want to take a look at the following related articles:

Looking Back On 2008 With Top Web Designers

The start of a new year is often a time of reflection on the past year, both personally and professionally, as well as a time to look forward to the year ahead. With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting to do a New Year's group interview with a number of top designers and developers. We put together a big list of questions and posed two in particular to each of the participants.

We think you'll enjoy the insight this panel provides into 2008 and 2009. There's a wide variety of topics covered, including favorite resources, trend predictions, business lessons learned, upcoming events for 2009 and more. Let's take a look at a large group interview with top web designers that takes a look back on 2008 and presents some predictions for the year 2009.

15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts

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 Aller Sans, Mayberry Pro SemiBold, Quicksand, Agrafa Hairline, Sketch Rockwell, Megalopolis Extra and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time.

Free Fonts Of March features Myndraine, Museo Sans as well as handwritten and grungy fonts.
40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design
You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts.

15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools

There are many useful Web development tools that integrate in your browser. These in-browser tools are commonly known as add-ons or extensions. Though add-ons and extensions aren't just for Web development, many of them out there are designed specifically for Web developers. In-browser tools vary greatly in the jobs they perform; for example, some of them help you diagnose issues with CSS, HTML and JavaScript, while others evaluate the accessibility of your website.

In this article, we explore some of the most popular and useful in-browser Web development tools. You'll find tools for popular Web browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer. Whether you need to debug and inspect your HTML, inspect HTTP headers, access FTP source files, evaluate accessibility or just figure out what color a Web page element is, you may find a variety of tools discussed here useful.

15 Useful Batch Image Processors

Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks.

With batch image processing, you can specify a size or file type, and then a script runs to convert the images. You can process hundreds or thousands of images with just a few clicks. And nearly every image processor comes with a unique feature set.

Image processors are worth their weight in gold if you’re a designer or developer spending a good chunk of time converting images by hand in Photoshop. Let's take a look at 15 useful batch image processors for both Mac and PC.

« previous

18 19 20 212223 24 25 26 27