Posted in Design on Thursday, February 3rd, 2005
Ryan Singer from 37Signals shares a great method for solving an interface design challenge, given the myriad of possibilities that the layout of an interface can have.
His method works first by listing elements and then grouping related ones together, after which the groups are prioritized, mocked up and then joined together into a unit before being drawn up for real.
There are some good links at the bottom and don't miss the link back to their blog for the ensuing discussion.
Posted in Design on Friday, October 14th, 2005
Some great tips from Garrett that really ring home here at Fiftyfoureleven. As more of a programmer, I have come to learn a lot of what Garrett offers here for people who aren't from a design background.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 | Via
Richard Rutter, aided by Steve Marshall, takes the book The Elements of Typographic Style and will step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS
.
This should be an excellent resource for people who design websites.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 | Via
Just gotta say wow. A window into someone elses creative mind and process, always good for some design inspiration.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 | Via
A design gallery for logos and another great stop for inspiration. Also has a forum with a marketplace and areas to dicuss logo design and resources which includes books and links to helpful articles.
Posted in Design on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 | Via
An a-z listing of famous brands, their logo thru time and a short history of how the logo came to be what it is. Many of the examples also include a downloadable .eps file of the logos.
The website also features some comments on logo design trends and don't miss the The Big Page of Branding & Corporate Identity Design, which features a huge list of Corporate Identity Manuals & Guides and also The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | Via
Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication
, the last principle in the list but one that I can appreciate when I see it.
Joshua Porter provides five simple design tips that could help many designers (and wanna-be designers like me). I would only add that a sixth principle would be to stop and review a design based on these principles at different stages of the process. It can be easy to over design.
Don't miss the comments for some healthy debate on the principles that Joshua presents.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 | Via
Another excellent article that covers an eye tracking study, and in this case research found that by working over the content of a page in addition to the layout of the content, readers would spend less time on the page and yet retained 34% more about what they read!
Three different short case studies are reviewed, each with it's own lesson.
Posted in Design on Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Garrett Dimon wrote up some details about the evolution of the header area on a couple of screens for his webapp Sifter. It provides a very nice overview of the stages of development (with sketches and images) and we get to see how the decisions were made. I find these articles a good way to bring some focus back to what they are discussing, and in this case I feel compelled to examine how I handle meta data in our CMS and on my websites like 5411.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
Khaled Abou Alfa offers up a list of several online printers that he has run into. If you are looking to make a business card, online printers could be your answer.
Posted in Design on Monday, April 17th, 2006 | Via
Some interesting eyetracking research done by Jakob Nielsen's Nielsen Norman Group. Some things to keep in mind here, be it for writing style or for advertisement placement.
Of course there are exceptions. Take Jacob's site, for instance: if a user is interested, they may just read more then this study shows.
Posted in Design on Monday, April 17th, 2006 | Via
Some interesting notes on page design and longer pages with more information vs. shorter pages with information broken up. This study suggests that longer pages worked better, and that care should be taken with horizontal lines in page layouts.
Posted in Design on Saturday, February 4th, 2006
If you've ever wondered what fonts ship and install by default with Windows XP (and I know you have), Web Page Design for Designers has you covered. Microsoft has the full list.
Posted in Design on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 | Via
Over 90 screenshots of different typography used in headlines from various websites. The main difference beside the font being used (color size etc.) is some of the creativity seen with meta data such as dates and categories. I've always felt that data should come after the title in the markup, not above. But as seen here, not everyone feels this way.
Posted in Design on Thursday, January 20th, 2005
Mike Davidson introduces siFR to the world with a lenthy, well researched history lesson about typography on the web.
Scaleable Inman Flash Replacement = "Custom typography for the masses" made possible thru CSS, Javascipt and Flash.
Posted in Design on Saturday, March 19th, 2005
Joe Clark boils it down to basics in these presentation notes that weren't given at SXSW 2005.
From the notes: So the relationship of graphic design to Web success is the same as the relationship of standards compliance to Web success: You only find it on sites that are visited solely by people who really understand the Web. We don’t have any proof that mainstream success requires good design, or even good code, for that matter
Posted in Design on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005
The preface to what looks to be a great series on designing grid systems, written by Mark Boulton. Before we even begin to tackle designing grid systems we need to have a basic understanding of what they are, why we use them and where they came from.
