Craftsmanship in Designing Websites
With high pressure from clients and crazy development schedules for web designers, it is easy to forget to spend the proper amount of time crafting a design.
In the interest of speeding things up, it’s tempting to skip over small details. This is an easy pitfall to which to succumb, but in the end, it can hurt your overall career.
This article will share methods and simple tools for building better portfolio pieces, having happier clients, and imbuing your work with more value.
How to Use Illustrations to Spice Up Your Web Design Work
Graphic illustrations have become commonplace in today’s web design. They can add a unique branding element into an otherwise bland world of templates and corporate logos.
Although just 5 years ago you would be hard-pressed to find many websites looking for illustrators, times have changed, and we’re on the brink of many new and exciting web design trends.
Minimalism in Web Design: A Guide
Minimalism is a word that gets tossed around in a lot of different contexts. Whether it be a lifestyle or an art form, saying something is "minimalistic" can take on a variety of meanings.
In the web design field, minimalism is carving out an ever-increasing niche among designers that are looking to convey important content in a new way. Like just about any trend or theory in the web design world, minimalism can be easy to get wrong.
Gestalt Principles Applied in Design
Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.
We do it in different ways — creating an organized layout first, writing text and content first, or even basing a design concept on an image, a color palette, or something that visually trips your trigger, whether it’s a sunset or a Song Dynasty painting.
The Art of Distinction in Web Design
One of the hardest tasks we undertake in the user experience field is trying to gain and hold a visitor’s attention in the right way. Distinctive design and the ability to focus eyes where they are needed in our web designs is a tricky task, but is something that we should have a firm grasp of.
Understanding the artistic traits of influence and distinction allow us to balance important details over our regular content and thus gives us the opportunity to have a great impact and influence on our consumers.
Reductionism in Web Design
In the field of design, the phrase "complexity is the enemy" speaks to how keeping things simple makes our work more functional.
With the modern crop of technologies that dole out increasing amounts of functionality, it’s important that we take the time to ensure a balanced level between oversimplification to the level that insults our visitor’s sense of competency and extreme complexity which endangers their experience.
A Web Designer’s Guide to Linux Fonts
"Many people find Linux to be an afterthought as far as target audience is concerned, but Linux is exponentially increasing in popularity as an alternative to other operating systems. … Web design should be bulletproof and your choice of type should be no different."
Linux Users and Web Design
One area in which few Linux users see any representation is Web typography. In 2003, Linux user and software developer Jeremy Zawodny howled about the dearth of decent fonts for Linux.
