Category: design

  • A Missive to the iPad Haters 30 January 2010

    I wouldn't call myself an Apple fanboy, but I like to think that I've mellowed a little bit in my old(ish) age. The face melting vitriol which I normally reserved for shiny Web 2.0 sites in beta invitation mode has ...

  • Small talk with a web designer 12 August 2008

    After reading Jason Santa Maria's blog post on occupational titling I figured it deserved a response, so I present mine here: an interpretive visual narrative delivered via the medium of animated GIF . ...

  • Handwritten Typographers 08 July 2008

    Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: ...

  • Accidental Clicks 03 April 2008

    When you start trying to click on your Photoshop mockups, that's when you know you've got a good interface. When you start trying to click on your Photoshop mockups, ...

  • The graveyard of E 23 August 2007

    Here lies "e". Faithful letter, loving vowel, and caring brother to "a", "i", "o" and "u" ...

  • Putting the "client" in "team" 12 May 2005

    Have you ever had a client that you felt bad for charging, simply because it was so enjoyable working with them? It's always fun to read quotes from the bad clients , and if you took those quotes on ...

  • The robots will destroy us all! 29 March 2005

    After Andy pointed out the rather spiffy looking site Styleboost I did what any conscientious web developer does and viewed the source. Even though the site generally separates content and style, it got me to wondering whether ...

  • Positive feedback 09 March 2005

    The other day when I was doing the usual post-entry ping run on the extremely useful Ping-O-Matic , I noticed the subtlest interface touch that struck me as a great example of how to educate your users about a system's behaviour. ...

  • The gentle art of persuasion 10 January 2005

    The customer is always right ... sometimes. It's an inescapable fact that when you're designing for money, it's always subject to someone else's approval. If they don't give your design the go ...

  • An Internet divided 02 December 2004

    On the one side, you have Flash. On the other, you have HTML. And in the middle is the Internet, slowly being carved up. It's been the title fight on the Web now for about five years. Which ...

  • Page differentiation 29 October 2004

    Users prowl the Internet like lions on the savannah, hunting for information morsels, assessing prey for suitability before casting it aside. That's why we have navigation – it helps those predators navigate their ...

  • What's your favourite blip? 11 October 2004

    The default is "-". The one I most use is ">". One of the weird ones is "§". It's that little marker/divider/blip that appears in the title of most web pages. On the homepages of ...

  • Resolution dependent layout 21 September 2004

    » Varying layout according to browser width « Updated: 19 January 2006 (See the new entry for details) A few weeks ago I thought that I might try out ...

  • Designers vs. The Real World: Favourite colour results 16 September 2004

    .colourTable { margin: 0 auto 2em auto; border: 1px solid #CCCCCC; } .colourTable td { width: 12em; padding: 2px; text-align: center; } Note: Because I'm a popularity whore, this site will shortly be ...

  • Designers vs. The Real World: Favorite color 30 August 2004

    » Vote for your favorite color « Designers like to get people to worship our superior aesthetic sensibilities; which is easy given the revolting taste in color, shape, font, ...

  • Ordering from the menu 19 August 2004

    This question can only really be answered by a room full of lab rats, but my lack of time or money to perform user testing means its easier if I just write about it. As I'm about to design the ...

  • Design your own way 17 August 2004

    Last week I was depressed. (Don't worry, this won't be an angst-ridden LiveJournal entry; I was just at an imagination impasse) It was around about 3AM on Thursday that my frustration reached its peak. I was ...

  • CSS, printing and user expectation 09 July 2004

    While recently working on a large web site that contained a lot of written articles, I had cause to think about the use of print stylesheets. Eric Meyer told us about the joys of print stylesheets using the ...

  • !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Unrestricted 02 July 2004

    There's so many things you have to worry about when you're making a table-free web site: box models, 3-pixel mystery whitespace, relative font sizes, cascading rules, floats ... but really, none of it matters. ...

  • Evolve to design 01 July 2004

    Design, like many things, relies more on history than you might expect. The well worn path created by the footfalls of those before you represents the evolution of years of experience. For every web site that has ...

  • Drop Shadows 13 May 2004

    Maki has expressed some bemusement at the proliferation of drop shadows on every site that gets released nowadays. JZ pointed it out a bit earlier . People are definitely influenced by what they ...

  • Less than 1% 07 May 2004

    In my role as part of an awards body it's been my pleasure to award some great sites, and read the ensuing discussion from likeminded developers or detractors alike. But one thing I can't get over is how some ...

  • Framed 22 April 2004

    I was having a look around Alex's tutorial for replacing frames with CSS divs, and I couldn't help but be curious as to "why?" Frames (and even their preferred counterparts, iframes) have ...

  • Love/Hate 11 April 2004

    I'm sure that you've hated something. The Spice Girls , Cherry Coke , the new VW Beetle . And I'm sure that you've hated something, but found two years later that you love it. The Smashing ...

  • Technicolor 04 March 2004

    » Technicolor web colour designer « In that grand tradition of me going one step further than is necessary, I present the Technicolor web colour designer. Inspired by the ...

  • Balanced branding 26 February 2004

    Design, particularly Web design, is all a matter of balance. Form vs. function, whitespace vs. text, load times vs. content. Then there's a new struggle: code vs. branding. I've noticed ...

  • Accessible, yes; usable, no 19 February 2004

    It's always helpful when an anonymous reader sends you a message saying your site "fails miserably". In this case, it was my "claim" to Bobby AAA approval that they took umbrage to. It's best not to rebuke such ...

  • Too many steps 02 February 2004

    Even though I read all the usability books, browse all the usability web sites and meditate to all the usability mantras, I still forget about usability. This was brought home during my latest "referrer crawl". ...

  • Information, 75% OFF! 19 January 2004

    People are embarassed of information: when you're designing something for them they always feel like they have to make up for the information by putting in pictures of smiling people, a rainbow of colours, ...

  • Knowledge vs. perception 30 December 2003

    Hope you had a good Christmas break. Holidays don't mean rest to me, they just mean I'm reduced to browsing the Web at 56kb, instead of using work's 2Mb line. Whilst downloading web pages at ...

  • Iconoclastic 21 December 2003

    While designing my latest desktop wallpaper , it got me thinking about how personal someone's computer desktop becomes. It's really the only (non-case mod) part of your computer that truly becomes your own. ...

  • And the winner is ... 15 December 2003

    If you want to eat up a lot of bandwidth and time, it's always fun to go to some of the high profile web site awards sites and click on this week's winners. ( FWA , Ultrashock ) You'll be ...

  • The good, the bad & the ugly 12 December 2003

    Look around your local shopping centre and you'll find plenty of businesses that seem to rely on the ugliness of their identity to create brand recognition; you know, the sort of people that use comic sans in ...

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