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.
Is it just me or is the popularity of mobile devices pushing a new minimalist movement in web design? Web design trends come and go from time to time: the dancing babies, suckerfish menus, rounded corners and ribbons have all graced the web with enthusiastic glee. But these are all more superficial things, style things. There is a movement growing in the web design community for a more minimal web, a user friendly web, a more semantic web where things have a purpose and reason for their existence. And the new mobile revolution is taking us there.
Developing emphasis in web design can be tricky in that it all depends on what you want to accomplish with it. For the most part, whatever the product is, is what will be our focal point and in most cases it’s not the picture of the product but how to get the product that becomes the focal point – the call to action.
Negative space is most commonly associated with logos or compositions where the empty space creates a unique shape or represents something – like the arrow in the FedEx logo. But negative space in web design may not be that cool or sexy, but its still very important to the over all design. Just remember that you don’t want your design to feel cramped or cluttered, you want your users to enjoy the experience. If anything, just add a little bit more padding.
Your design should be inviting and allow your users to sit down, relax, hang out and maybe look around a bit and the best way to achieve this is through visual balance. Visual balance is basically just balancing design elements off of each other – as if your design elements are sitting on a teeter-totter.
This article is about the importance of proper markup in a website. A great way to make sure your site works properly is to write your HTML first before you jump into the CSS and JS. This will allow you to focus on the content and the functions and test them before you start making everything pretty.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
