Design: A Can of Inspiration
Bookmark this and come back to it when you need inspiration; there’s a lot to see here!
- 66 Websites which use Beautiful Illustrations – Sometimesjust one nice illustration can make or break a website’s design.
- Micrography: Text Art and Typography – Text or images? How about text that is an image?
- 24 Kick Ass Portfolio Designs – Don’t get jealous! Just learn from the masters.
- 50 Insanely Good Vector-based Web Designs – These will blow youaway! Vector has come into its own at last in the 21st century.
- Minimalist Typography Examples – More amazing art with the humble font.
- OMG-Posters! – There’s something especially inspiring about poster art. It seems to have somethign in common with web design art,really.
- 50 Beautiful Vintage Posters – Yet more poster art, this is the cream of the crop from the classic years.
Jakob Nielsen Speaks On RSS and Social Networks
It’s hard to believe that Jakob Nielsen is still in the game after all these years; he’s the first person many of us read when we got into web design. So he has observations to make about distributed content. And he still has the same good sense he always had about it.
The study is very comprehensive, illuminating several flaws in content usability. As always, the focus is on business. A summary of what to do with a Twitter feed, for example:
- - Meet expectations.
- - Don’t post too seldom or too often. Too often crowds out other messages; too seldom and users forget you exist.
- - Don’t hard-sell. We’ve seen spam clog twitter searches already.
- - Have something of substance to your content.
Somehow, We Knew the Cats Would Take Over in the End
You know those pictures of cats with the funny pseudo-textspeak captions on them? Well they made somebody a web tycoon. Advertising Age carries the interview with the one and only Ben Huh (yes, his real name), founder of “I Can Haz Cheezburger,” “Failblog,” “Engrish Funny,” “There I Fixed It,” “Roflrazzi,” and “That Will Buff Out.”
He’s building his web properties into a miniature media empire, with less of a gift for being funny (even though all of his sites are based on humor), than for knowing what is popular. And that’s all it is – funny sites with ads attached, where seemingly everybody takes a minute to goof off at their desk for five minutes to come look.
Which leaves us with the compelling question – why funny cat pictures? Why do they have such broad appeal? Not even a social psychologist with a Master’s in psychology could have dreamed that one up!
Peter Brittain
What Can a Bathroom Teach Us About Web Design?
This is going to seem very unintuitive to post on a web design blog, but bear with us. HowStuffWorks posted this Top 10 Mistakes in Bathroom Design, and all the way through, you can apply it to analogies in web design!
- Web designers can identify with “Small Budget for a Big Project,” right?
- “Improper Installation” can apply to having the wrong version of PHP installed on the server.
- Spacing is important in web design, too. For almost the same reason.
- “Lack of Storage” – or as the late George Carlin would say, “A place to put your stuff.” How many times have you tried to squeeze a section in as an afterthought?
- “Thinking Short Term” – Boy, can we ever identify with websites that don’t scale with the business! How many jobs have we had where we had to come back and restructure the site to handle increased volume?
- Trends can be dangerous in design, too. A design that’s too married to 2009 will look badly dated in 2012.
- “Choosing the Wrong Materials” – Also known as trying to make the whole site out of Flash, trying to build a shopping cart app using only Javascript, and trying to use tables to lay out the site.
- Environment has us stumped. “Ignoring the culture” would be the web design equivalent – you wouldn’t design a website for a mortuary the way you’d design a website for a nightclub.
- Inadequate lighting – Also known as “not enough contrast between text and background.”
- Aaaaaand: “Improper Ventilation” has the web design analog of having the page be too crowded, busy, and stuffy!
Web Design – CSS Lifesavers
Found this handy list of “10 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design”. It’s nice to have these all in one list occasionally. Even if you know them, there’s so much to keep track of that it’s good to refresh your knowledge.
One of the points addressed is an area that frequently gets ignored: font options! Sure, you can specify font and size – everybody does that. But so many designer fail to explore the other 80% of what CSS can do with typography. Indenting, spacing, first-letter and first-line properties, and even tweaking the font weight.
Determining and understanding your audience
Audience analysis is the key factor for writing a manual, user guide or designing a website. The web is a platform for people to show their skills and abilities and the specific information they have that may be of vital use for others. A website that is sensitive to audience inputs and feedback is well appreciated. The changes included after a thorough research of viewer feedbacks can greatly enhance traffic flow. This is the reason why many of the sites have included tools for rating their content.
Web Design Tips
Websites are the soul of any organization. It represents the entire company and makes a positive or negative impression on the viewer. A website needs to create a neat image. It may be easy to come up with a website, but to make it appealing is a challenging task. To stay in the competition, upgrade your websites frequently. However, make it easy for browsers to navigate through the site by being simple.
Advanced Web Design
Everyone surfing the net these days wants information to become available at the click of the mouse. Irrespective of Internet speed, users want pages to download quickly and expect to find solutions just by a mouse click. Keeping this in view you need to understand that you must make the home page of your website your point of sale. Viewing your homepage in this light, you must ask your self if it lucidly explains whatever you have on offer and also see that it provides easy links to pages containing detailed information about the product(s).
Web Designing For Your Audience
There is always been a reason to develop a web site and you may have to define your reason to a particular segment of audience. So, both reason and audience are interwoven with each other, which you see even in web designing. Until and unless there is a purpose, creating a web site is not just enough by creating a picture, but making your intent clear and that is to create the website for your targeted traffic.
Web Design Basics
Web designing is a complex subject and there is always an ongoing conflict between creating a web page for beauty and one for function. In fact, there should be no conflict between the two because with intelligent designing it is possible to create web sites that are both functional and possess high appeal.