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White Space and Simplicity: An Overview

Last year we’ve seen a lot of simple, even minimalistic designs, which impress not with the amount of presented information but with the way the information is actually presented. Complex layouts are giving way to simple 2-col- or 3-col layouts, which usually have large amount of white space without any content whatsoever.

Indeed, the importance of both white space and simplicity shouldn’t be underrated. Used correctly, they can enhance the performance of a web-site, improve readability and make a great first impression. Recently Mark Boulton has written an insightful article about Whitespace and its importance in web design. Very well written, it describes in a very simple, but clear way, how to deal with white space in practice and how to use it in your web-projects. We’ve collected some more articles on this topic. So what do we have?

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Hand-Picked Photoshop Tutorials

Adobe Photoshop is a powerful tool for designing various visual elements one can use for web-pages. However, sometimes it’s important to know what to do in order to achieve some effects. In such cases, step-by-step tutorials can provide help and save a lot of time you would have to spend on finding a solution otherwise. Let’s take a look at some of the best Adobe Photoshop tutorials we’ve found in the Web so far.

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Free CSS Layouts And Templates

As a web-developer you don’t have to re-invent the wheel all the time. If it just has to work, and has to be valid, and has to have a nice, visually appealing design hierarchy, you just can use css-techniques developed in the web-dev-community over the last few years. If you take a look around, you’ll find many templates, which include basic (X)HTML/CSS-markup.

You can start from there, learning and exploring the possibilities of CSS and modifying templates for your exquisite taste. Below you’ll find a list of resources which offer free, gorgeous and valid CSS-based templates - usually with images and full layout structure, such as headers, navigation bars, content containers, sidebars and footers.

Usually developers require a link to the site where the template was downloaded from. So before using these templates it might be useful to take a look at the license agreement the developer provides.

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CSS-Based Footers: Modern Solutions

Every design element deserves particular attention in Web 2.0. Navigation menus, forms, comment forms, comment designs, tables, typography, fonts, even more fonts and even download buttons are designed in more detail to make a good first impression. The smallest things can make a big difference - one of those smallest things are footers, used to visually close the content of a page; however, as you’ll see below, sometimes they also have some more functions.

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Best of December 2006

Every month we take a look at new tutorials, tips, articles and techniques presented in Web-Development-related blogs and magazines and collect them for you. Below an overview of the best tools and articles, which have become popular or were published in December 2006.
Colors, Palettes, Textures etc.

Color Theory for Developers
A brief overview of important aspects […]

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Colors Reference Cards: Green

Sometimes we just don’t know what color to use. Sometimes we have no idea which colors to combine in order to create a beautiful color palette which would attract the visitors of our web-sites. That’s why we’ve decided to create some kind of visual reference cards or cheat sheets for the most popular colors […]

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