In this category you will find articles about web design, web development and related topics. Here we also feature inspirational collections, opinions and articles about best practices.
by Patrick Cox
A huge, gigantic, humongously important part of web design and development is usability – the ability for your users to actually use your web site. Just as chairs need four legs that make them sturdy, usable and successful, web sites also need four legs to make them sturdy, usable and successful
by Patrick Cox
In design, rhythm is created by simply repeating elements in predictable patterns. This repetition is a natural thing that occurs everywhere in our world. As people, we are driven everyday by predictable, timed events. The sun comes up every day and sets every day, the seasons cycle in predictable patterns every year, and we all know that the World Cup happens every four years. Rhythm in design is just re-creating that, re-creating these predictable timed patterns, creating a sub-conscience relationship with ourselves and creating comfort or familiarity.
by Manoela Ilic
Making a web design with contrasty colors will allow for a better focus on certain areas of a web site. With a minimal color scheme, more contrast can be achieved and with the right complementary color, a unique and impactful visual impression is given.
by Patrick Cox
Lately I’ve noticed some great discussions in web design forums, on Linkedin and Twitter about the role of a web designer and what skills a web designer should have. The question that keeps getting brought up time and time again is whether it is necessary for web designers to have the ability to develop designs: should designers code?
Choosing the best way to display products is a really important step of web design, since the way you display your products can drive attention to it and make users interested in what you are selling, or can drive users away. It’s like when you are walking in a mall, the most creative, elegant or stylish window displays will get your attention while super colorful and busy ones will drive you away.
Wikipedia tells us that “thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words.” And as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words, so using an image in a nice and beautiful form can give your layout a very neat look.
by Patrick Cox
Designing and developing a web project is difficult enough, but adding project management, invoicing, hosting, file sharing, and staying on task to the mix? That’s exactly what freelancers do though. There are a ton of tools and apps out there designed to help freelancers complete projects and stay organized. Here is a few of my favorite apps and tools that I use on a daily basis.
by Patrick Cox
When I design landing pages I don’t try to cram everything above the fold and clutter up the top 500 pixels of my design, but I do like to design so that images, headlines or text teeter on the line. This creates a ‘teaser’ for the user to scroll down more and check out the rest of the page.
Following the recent trend of using big background images in web design, we decided to gather a list of websites using portraits in their layouts. So at this showcase we will show you how several designers are using portraits at their designs to make things more personal and to give a nice unique touch to their sites.
by Patrick Cox
Implied textural designs are not new to the interwebs. Most of the time texture is used as a design device to add depth, dimension, or just used to spice up a […]
by Manoela Ilic
The use of the parallax effect or parallax scrolling effect in websites can add a nice three dimensional depth illusion to the design and make the visit very interesting to […]
by Patrick Cox
The more comfortable users are with your website the more likely they are to enjoy their experience and come back for another visit. Make them feel at home with a […]
Designing the perfect navigation for a website it’s one of the main keys to have a good outcome, to have a website that gets users attentions and make them want to browse around to check every little information (tab, image, text, etc) you have there. Navigation menus, schemes, layouts, everything has an important weight and need to be carefully analyzed to form a nice layout.
by Patrick Cox
Kryptonite is to Superman as the browser is to the web designer. The lives of web designers everywhere would be much better if browsers would render their beautiful designs without […]
by Kayla Knight
For all websites, organizing content can be an issue. With poorly planned content placement, the visitor may not know where to look, or when. Disorganization can also look sloppy, and […]
by Manoela Ilic
Image sliders and sideshows have become an essential element in web design. They are a great way to display information and visual content in an interesting way. From the classical […]
by Patrick Cox
The problem with web fonts is that nobody wants to use the ‘safe’ fonts and you need as much live text on your site as possible. So what’s a designer […]
Of course we all love the basics when it comes to web design, we like columns, grids, organized and well disposed content… but that doesn’t mean we don’t like creative and interesting structures in web design. Here we will show some examples of websites chosen a little bit different approach to design their pages and had a nice result.