Jul 11, 2009 Comments Off
Print and Web are different. Traditional layout techniques from print, particularly an advanced formatting, aren’t applicable to the Web as CSS doesn’t offer sophisticated instruments to design such layouts (e.g. text floating around an embedded image; some “floating” techniques provide such results, however they produce bloated source code just as well).
Jul 11, 2009 Comments Off
News websites can be intriguing to examine from a design perspective. Regardless of what type of news they cover, they all face the challenge of displaying a huge amount of content on the home page, which creates plenty of layout, usability and navigational challenges for the designer. The lessons that can be learned from examining how news websites address these challenges can be valuable for designers who work with other types of websites, including ones with blog theme designs.
Jul 11, 2009 Comments Off
Minimalism, in the context of design, refers to simple, unadorned designs that embody only the most basic and fundamental needs. In art, it is a movement that has its roots in the post-World War II era, started by highly regarded minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. Minimalism today refers to a certain style (or even a certain attitude or way of life) that transcends different fields, such as architecture, philosophy, law and, of course, Web design.
Jul 10, 2009 Comments Off
A great article where the author goes through his experience of the various CSS Frameworks (960.gs, Blueprint, YAML, LogicCSS, YUI Grids, Tripoli, Elements and Hartija).
Jul 9, 2009 Comments Off
Since releasing BlueTrip, I’ve come across many a doubter who argue that CSS Frameworks are unnecessary, non-semantic, or sometimes just downright annoying and inflexible. I’ve fought this battle so many times that I’ve slowly gathered a response to all of these charges, and I’m going to stick them all here, in one place, as one big steaming billboard of I LOVE FRAMEWORKS propaganda.
Jul 9, 2009 Comments Off
Universal Cascading Style Sheets for web printing by uniting all best CSS printing practises into one.
Jul 9, 2009 Comments Off
CSS frameworks have grown in popularity recently, enabling developers to rapidly prototype designs. The idea of CSS Frameworks is to do all the heavy lifting of the repetitive tasks you do over and over again on each site, allowing you to get faster results and get to the fun stuff designers love.
Jul 8, 2009 Comments Off
Use this utility to compress your CSS to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth as well. You can choose from three levels of compression, depending on how legible you want the compressed CSS to be versus degree of compression.
Jul 8, 2009 Comments Off
Since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio — especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio. The rationale behind it is the belief that this proportion is organic, universal, harmonic and aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, being evident everywhere in the universe (in fact, many things around us can be expressed in this ratio), divine proportion (which is also called Golden ratio, divine section, golden cut and mean of Phidias) is probably the most known law of proportion which can dramatically improve the communication of your design.
Jul 8, 2009 Comments Off
Many designers, whether traditionally schooled or not, have trouble with composition. I’ve sat with plenty of designers who simply moves things around until they feel ‘right’.
Design is, in essence, communication (I know, I know, I rant about this enough, but this isn’t one of them) but the vehicle for communication is the design. One of the key components in the vehicle of communication is composition, and in design schooling it is something that is taught as something you should feel rather than create logically. This has always bothered me.
