80 posts tagged “design”
2007
The Rissington Podcast. Resize the browser window and marvel at the way the various background images seamlessly overlay each other—Nat and I cooed at it for about five minutes.
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
Harry Potter and the Order of Typography. Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film.
In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon.
If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software. Interesting discussion about why enterprise software tends to completely suck from an end-user point of view.
Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. Fascinating results from an eye tracking study on the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons—one layout was a whole six seconds slower than the others. Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” book looks like it will be excellent.
About Mezzoblue. Dave Shea’s blog archive is really classy, in particular the way bundles of posts around a single photo share a colour scheme derived from the image.
The logo is still evolving, say designers. The Olympics logo is designed to be “hackable”—which is actually a great idea, but lawyers advised against unveiling that concept at the same time as the abstract shapes.
Poll results: 50.4% of respondents maximise windows. Interesting graphs that break down browser window maximisation by operating system.
factoryjoe: Design Patterns. Chris Messina’s collection of user interface design pattern screenshots, collated on Flickr.
Designing Google Reader’s trends. “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.”
Apple’s Next-Generation Themes. Cabel’s spotted an Apple patent with screenshots of their in-house tool for creating resolution independent user interface themes.
2006
Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. Common UI design patterns for web applications.
2004
Web design from Scratch (via) A tutorial that actually talks about design? Surely not.
2003
Web design and usability guidelines
Usability.gov’s Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines lose instant credibility for being available only as a 39.2 MB PDF file [ Update: this statement is incorrect—see my correction ], with all of the usability and accessibility problems that brings with it. I’m on a fast connection here so I downloaded them anyway to have a look. There’s actually a lot of good things I can say about them—the document is attractively laid out, the guidelines clear and easy to follow and each is backed up by references to academic research (hence the title). There are however some guidelines with which I completely disagree, in particular the ones in chapter 4, entitled “Hardware and Software”:
[... 431 words]Great liquid design example
I’ve started browsing the web at 1600x1200, because I have a nice big monitor and a tendency to browse with my font size set to large. At this resolution you really begin to appreciate the argument put forward by fixed-width site design advocates that liquid designs can end up plain unreadable on some setups. I could just reduce the size of my browser window, but I’m lazy. Instead I’ll point out that the Rocky Mountain Harley-Davidson dealership is a liquid site that manages to look great even at ludicrously high resolutions. It’s got some very decent CSS and structural markup under the hood as well.
Small design tweak, big difference
I’ve changed from using the day as the principle heading on the front page to using the title of each post instead. This is quite a minor alteration, but I expect it to have a relatively large impact on my blogging habits. For the past year I have treated my blog as a daily endeavour, thanks almost entirely to the way the site was layed out. This was intentional; when I orginally launched blog I made the decision to keep each entry as part of an ongoing narrative, with no individual entry titles and permalinks to entries in the context of the day they were posted.
[... 270 words]Top web design mistakes
Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. This is an astutely observed list, although I would add “relying on Flash for navigation” as one of the biggest modern mistakes (for some reason Jakob fails to mention Flash at all...). I particularly liked the following point about lengthy URLs, especially the (as far as I know) newly coined term social navigation.
[... 193 words]2002
Usability and interface design
This course covers HCI with a heavy emphasis on implementation. We will be developing the interface/interaction components of software using Java, in particular the AWT and Swing toolkits.
[... 441 words]SitePoint graphic design resources
I’ve never been any good at graphic design, but today I discovered a fantastic resource for Photoshop tutorials and general inspiration. This list of resources highlights the most useful threads of the past year over on the SitePoint Graphic Design forum.