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Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages

The "about me"-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites. In a world that's becoming increasingly connected through the Web, it's important that you engage your audience in a personal and friendly way, otherwise you risk just being another faceless web designer among a sea of websites.

We had to go through hundreds of sites to come up with the following list. It seems most designers and developers run out of steam by the time they got around to developing their about pages. Most designers we came across simply threw up a few hastily written words about themselves instead of treating the page as an important asset. Others, however, have truly taken the time to treat their about page as if it were important as the home page. In fact, some went as far as using their about pages as their home page.

We present 60 beautiful and effective about pages that engage users and neatly present their designers. We also examine the growing trend of Business Card Websites (BCW's).

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35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design

CSS-design is not easy. We need to find workaround across browser inconsistencies, not that easy CSS-concepts and quite counterintuitive CSS-solutions. However, there are effective and useful CSS-tools and Smashing Magazine reviewed many of them in our previous posts. Now it's time to present you with some fresh (or not mentioned earlier) tools that can assist designers in their work.

Today, we will look at 35 new and useful CSS tools, generators and resources that can significantly improve your workflow and reduce your time efforts for CSS-coding. Whether you're writing, compiling, refining or experimenting with CSS code – or all of the above – these tools can help you get the job done faster and better than ever before.

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

• 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools
• Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding
• 53 CSS Techniques You Couldn't Live Without

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10 Common Mistakes In Logo Design

With the power of the Web, and more eyes watching than ever, it's important for a business to communicate its unique message clearly. The easiest way to recognize a company and distinguish it from others is by its logo. Below, we go through 10 common logo design mistakes that you should avoid if you want to create a successful and professional logo.

A professional business should look professional. New business owners often invest a lot of time and money in property and equipment, but do not often match it by investing suitably in their logo.

The most common reasons why many logos look amateurish: the business owner wanted to save money by designing the logo quickly themselves, a friend or relative who claims to know a little about graphic design does it as a favor or the wrong people are commissioned or the business outsourced the job via one of several design competition websites, which are mostly populated by amateur designers.

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40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns

If there is a commonly reoccurring need for a particular solution, there is a great probability that someone has - by now - solved that need and has finished the legwork involved in researching and constructing something that resolves it. At the very least, you will find documentation on general solutions to related problems that will enable you to gain insight on best practices, effective techniques, and real-world examples on the thing you are creating.

A design pattern refers to a reusable and applicable solution to general real-world problems. For example, a solution for navigating around a website is site navigation (a list of links that point to different sections of the site), a solution for displaying content in a compact space are module tabs. There are many ways to tackle a specific requirement - and as a designer - the most important thing you can do is selecting the option that best reflects the needs of your users.

In this article, we share with you the best of the best, cream of the crop sites, galleries, online publications, and libraries devoted to sharing information and exploring concepts pertaining to User Interface design patterns. Use these recommended sources to gain knowledge about a particular UI problem or to gain inspiration and insight on best practices, techniques, and examples of exemplary UI designs.

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12 Tips For Designing an Excellent Checkout Process

Shopping online can be a great experience. You don't have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. But it can also be a little frustrating if the process isn't designed correctly.

Looking around for that checkout link, having to fill out registration forms and then being told the product is out of stock isn't going to make your day. Spend a little bit of time fine tuning your checkout process and polishing off the user experience and you'll be rewarded with happier customers and more sales. Here are 12 useful tips to help you do just that.

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Do You Want Fries With That Logo?

From low-budgets to rush jobs to piss-poor project management, every designer has one time or another faced the inevitable, "I need a logo (brochure, website, etc.) done ASAP" scenario. Depending on the designers' work situation, some can simply choose to decline these projects. But for many full-time designers, this “rushing creative” is a very real and necessary part of their job requirement.

So when asked to “just slap a design together” or “crank it out,” how do we as designers maintain our standards and integrity when a logo must be created in three hours? Or a website in a day? And for that matter, can we? In this article, Stephanie Orma, a graphic design herself, hangs her head out the drive-through window and shares her personal experience, tips, and advice on how to handle the “hurry-up and be creative” demands of the graphic design industry.

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Typographic Layout Design Contest: Join In and Win!

As web-designers, we shouldn't underestimate the power of typography. The content is the king and typography is an extremely powerful mean that can help designers to effectively convey their messages to the audience. Recently we presented an overview of useful typographic CSS-tools and 8 Simple Ways To Improve Web Typography. And now it's your turn to show what you are capable of when using these tools.

In this post we announce the Typographic Layout Design Contest, a contest that has the goal to collect beautiful typographic (X)HTML+CSS-based layouts created by you and release them for free as a gift for the web design community. And, of course, we have some nice awards for best designs submitted in the contest.

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Web Design Industry Jargon: Glossary and Resources

There are specialized terms referring to all sorts of aspects of web design. For someone just getting started in web design, or someone looking to have a site designed, all the technical jargon can be overwhelming. Especially the acronyms.

Below is a guide to industry terms that should get you well on your way to understanding what web designers are talking about. In addition, we've provided some resources for each term to give you more in-depth information.

Accessibility. Basically, this is the ability of a website to be used by people with disabilities, including visually impaired visitors using screen readers, hearing impaired visitors using no sound, color blind people, or those with other disabilities. A website with low accessibility is basically going to be impossible for those with disabilities to use. Accessibility is particularly important for sites providing information to those with disabilities (healthcare sites, government sites, etc.), though it is an important aspect to consider when designing any site.

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Business Card Design: Better Than A Plain Ol’ Business Card

Going to web conferences is a great opportunity to make new contacts and exchange business cards. Unfortunately, we have an industry filled with creative people who have no creative marketing for themselves. Sure, many have business cards, but one in a hundred have something really cool. These unique treasures, cards, items etc. get kept, talked about and usually photographed and shared. This post is an inspiration for all you creatives to step up your game, either by getting things made or by making them yourselves.

A note of warning though: interesting promotional materials almost always cost more per unit than a white business card or require a lot of prep work, so you're often going to have a limited quantity. Pick the people you give these treasures to wisely. Those people will feel more important for getting a limited edition, and you don't run the risk of spending an absolute fortune (in time or money) producing mass quantities!

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8 Layout Solutions To Improve Your Designs

The organization of content is probably one of the most important and influential aspects of any good web design. Organizing information into a well-built layout is the basis of a website, and should always come before styling concerns. Without a good layout, the website doesn't seem to flow correctly, and nothing connects the way it should.

In this article, we'll discuss 8 useful layout solutions and techniques that will help you create a clean and organized content layout. The 8 techniques include sliders, tabs, progressive layouts, structured grids, modal windows, rollover elements, accordions and mega drop-down-menus.

You may also be interested in the following related posts:

• 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers
• 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box
• Web Design Trends For 2009

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35 Examples Of Masterful Lighting Effects In Web Design

Using a light source the right way can add dimension and beauty to a website design. Strong light sources create a stark contrast between light areas and shadows in a design, making the elements look more realistic and dimensional and less flat. Some websites opt instead for a dim light source to create a soft glow around particular areas of the website, to attract the eye more subtly.

Lighting can also create a mood for a website. Some websites use bright swirls of light to show energy, while others use a dim glow to create a peaceful mood. In the examples below, you will see a wide range of lighting effects used, from subtle lighting effects to bold rays of light streaking across the page.

You can learn how to better use light and shadow to polish your page designs and make them stand out on the screen in our recent article 5 Simple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs.

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60+ Beautiful Logo Design Tutorials And Resources

When we talk about a famous brand, the first thing that comes to mind is its logo. The logo is the most essential component of any personal brand and also the hardest part to execute. A logo must be appropriate, aesthetically pleasing and a reflection of the company’s credibility. Furthermore, a logotype should be synonymous with the company or product it represents and should penetrate people’s minds as a selling agent.

An amateurish logo design can more likely make your business fail for a number of reasons. A logo is of great importance in creating brand identity, and you should be very careful in selecting one for your business.

Today, we present some outstanding logo design tutorials to give you a head start when it comes time to creating an amazing logo for your own business.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Drawing Inspiration From Creative Logos
• Beautiful And Creative Logo Designs For Your Inspiration

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5 Simple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs

There's just no escaping light and shadow -- it's everywhere you look. Everything you see reflects light and casts some sort of shadow. Visually, light and shadow help us make sense of what we see and help us understand texture, dimension and perspective.

So, as we try to make our designs on the Web more natural, moving and intuitive, a good understanding of light and shadow is pretty important. Here are 5 ways to better use light and shadow to polish your page designs and make them stand out on the screen.

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Beautiful And Creative Logo Designs For Your Inspiration

Last week we already presented our first selection of beautiful, clever and creative logo designs. This post presents the second part of our selection, featuring even more beautiful and creative logos that will hopefully inspire you or at least give you the idea of what the current logo design trends look like.

Just as last time, we focused on logos that use creative methods to represent the brand through color, shapes, and typography. Every design presented below tells you something about the company that it is supposed to represent. Also note the brilliant color palletes and unique patterns used in many of these. Finally, pay attention to the typography, especially font selection and coloring.

Below you'll find a collection of 40 more beautiful and creative logo designs to inspire you. Browsing through the showcase, you will notice many trends. Some of these include the usage of simple shapes to create something complex, origami shapes, coloring and transparency trends, and many more. You may want to take a look at the post Logo Design Trends 2009 for further reference.

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15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from your website. Some browsers pick up the favicon if you save it in your root directory as favicon.ico, but to be sure it’s picked up all the time, include the following in your head.

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Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

There are an extensive amount of roads you can take in web design, specifically in navigation. Here, we will talk about one specific navigation technique, tab-based navigation. If properly carried out, tabbed navigation can be very clean and organized within a web layout.

So what is tabbed navigation? Well, it is essentially a set of buttons most often set horizontally. Tabs generally follow numerous different styling guidelines. First, a tab set usually is attached to or slightly protrudes from a container, like in the example below. Also, notice how the open tab matches the background color of the container, and the other buttons are darker. This is another common styling guideline.

When you look at tabbed navigations, you will also notice many styling trends. First, many tabs will have rounded corners on buttons. This helps to create a clean look. Also helping to make a clean look is the use of separation between buttons. Most designs use space to separate buttons, but a bevel, single line, or background color contrast will also look nicely.

You will also see the use of hover effects, which is a common usability characteristic of the tabbed navigation. Gradients, radial and linear, help to achieve an impressve hover effect that brings dimension to the button that the user is selecting. Actually, you will notice that many tab buttons, selected or not, will use a slight gradient to add depth and demension to the button. This is a very simple detail often used to bring extra styling to many different user interface elements, such as buttons. The most important aspect in the design of tabbed navigation is that the active tab needs to be clear and obvious. This is what separates a tabbed navigation from an ordinary horizontal row of buttons or hyperlinks (thanks, Allen).

So, with all of that in mind, take a look at these 50 excellent tabbed-navigations shown below. Look for the trends, and follow the link to further inspect the usability of the tabbed navigation and how it looks with the rest of the design.

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Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren't enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. For example, a study on children showed that after being shown a Santa Claus cap, they were more likely to share candy with others. The cap embodied the concept of sharing and giving in their minds, and exposure to it primed them for regarding sharing more positively. The same study also exposed kids to a “Toys ‘R’ Us” logo, which had the opposite effect of the Santa Claus cap, making them less likely to share their candy.

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

• 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
• 5 More Principles Of Effective Design
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design
• 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques

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Showcase Of Beautiful Sports Websites

We recently showcased beautiful websites from the fashion industry, and in response to reader requests, we'll do the same thing here for sports websites. This article showcases the most beautiful website designs from the North American sports industry, including ones for news, teams and leagues, sports apparel and more.

As in any industry, sports websites have their own trends, as you will see below. However, because the websites showcased here fall into a number of different categories and serve different purposes, not all of the trends we discuss will be relevant or applicable to all types of sports websites.

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10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques

Complex design techniques are often time-consuming and, well, complex. Some of these advanced effects can add plenty of depth to designs, but when used in the wrong place, they do little more than distract viewers from the project's intended focus. These effects may be precisely what a design needs to have the impact it requires, but even in these cases, they should be complemented by simpler effects.

Simple effects and techniques are the building blocks of today's designs. For example, what good is a stellar lighting technique if you can't decide which colors to use or which text-based effects to use in conjunction with the effect?

With a "less is more" mentality, we've selected 10 very simple and impressive design techniques that can drastically improve the performance and appearance of your designs.

For more techniques, you may want to look at our previous articles:

• 12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface Design
• Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques

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Drawing Inspiration From Creative Logos

As designers, we are always in constant need of inpiration. Whether it be Web or graphic design, other work to fuel our creativity is essential. Logo design requires the most amount of inspiration, however.

Below we present a showcase of over 40 beautiful, clever and creative logo designs that will hopefully inspire you. If you take a closer look at the showcase below, you will notice many trends. Some of these include use simple shapes to create something complex, oragmi shapes, coloring and transparency trends, and many more.

Why are these logos so excellent? All of these logos use very creative methods to represent the brand through color, shapes, and shape typography. Look at how each of these logos can tell you something about the company. Also note the brilliant color palletes and unique patterns used in many of these. Finally, pay attention to the typography, especially font selection and coloring.

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