Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
May
07
2009
at 3:28pm
I finally got around to reading ALA’s In Defense of Eye Candy article from a few weeks ago. Yes, I’m behind! Anyway, while I somewhat disagree with the author’s use of the term “eye candy”, the bulk of the article is very interesting.
I first read about this in James Kalbach’s Designing Web Navigation (p. 45) just last week. The point is that people have better experiences with visually attractive things, making them easier to use. Emotions are a central part of any user experience:
“When you felel good it is easier to make decisions, brainstorm, and be creative, for instance”
Read more…
Posted in Design | 4 Comments »
Nov
30
2008
at 11:24am
Today I wanted to find and replace colours in a vector graphic. The greens weren’t quite what I wanted, but the image was full of gradients that I didn’t want to have to change by hand. Can any vector program search and replace colours? I wasn’t sure, but instead of searching around for one my husband helped me come up with this SVG solution:
Replace colours in a vector graphic
- Save your graphic as an SVG. You can use Inkscape, Illustrator, or pretty much any other vector program to do this.
- Make note of your “before” and “after” colours as hex values.
- Open the .svg file in a text editor. You’ll see some mark-up that looks much like HTML (that’s because SVG an XML specification).
- Search for your “before” values and replace with the “after”.
- Save.
That’s it! Now, if only Internet Explorer would support SVG so I didn’t have to export these as png’s…
Posted in Design | 2 Comments »
Sep
12
2008
at 1:56pm
The “chunky footer” is becoming a big trend in web design. This is a footer that is much bigger than what was traditionally used, often containing several sets of links and other information. Take a look at this flikr set for some examples.
Do you find these to be effective? I think from a design perspective they solve a lot of problems. Get a lot of links on the home page without cluttering the main interface.
The problem I find is that as a user I often miss them entirely. On Jason Santa Maria’s site it took me several visits before I even noticed it was there. Why? Because I didn’t scroll that far (on the actual articles there are often many comments, making the pages quite long. Most users wouldn’t read all those comments.)
What about my home page? Will people notice the Recent Posts block at the bottom? Will they think to scroll past the white? Granted, I was intentional in what I put there vs. what I put on the sidebar. It’s not exactly essential stuff.
Usability experts have found that users have learned to scroll (early usability research found that users wouldn’t scroll past the fold). But, do they scroll the whole page? Prioritizing Web Usability, Jacob Nielsen points out that users often won’t scroll further if they get the visual impression that there is no more content on the page. If users assume that the navigation ends with the top or left navigation bar, will they try looking further down for more links?
What do you think?
Posted in Design, Usability | 2 Comments »
Aug
17
2008
at 10:06am
Well, it’s finally here. After months of work my new design is ready for showtime. I don’t have time to say much about it right now. As with the A Padded Cell/the Webmaster Forums design this was a joint effort between Liam and myself.
I also upgraded my photo gallery from Gallery 2 to Zenphoto. Liam ended up having to write a complicated sql statement to convert it, but I’m much, much happier with the new system. I’ve been using zen for a work project and find it to be much easier to work with than Gallery 2.
If you notice anything that doesn’t look right please do let me know. I haven’t tested the new design much in IE 7 and I know it doesn’t work right in 6 (too bad).
Posted in Design, Wordpress | 4 Comments »
Jul
06
2008
at 11:55am
Most of my recent layouts have been em based. That means that they scale when the font size is adjusted. This approach seems to make more sense than simply allowing the text to resize while keeping the layout the same.
Well, browser manufacturers have caught on to this. Following in Opera’s footsteps, IE and Firefox are now implementing zoom as the default method of resizing text.
If this is the case, then do we still need to code layouts in ems or can we go back to using pixels? I’m currently coding a new layout for this site and I’ve decided to code it in pixels. It’s so much easier not to have to do grid calculation in ems and worry about what the current font size is. My grid unit is 24px. That’s it. Much better.
So, do you think it’s still worth it to code layouts in em’s? The non-zoom font resizing functions are still there. Will people prefer to use them over zooming?
Posted in Accessibility, Design | 1 Comment »
Jun
03
2008
at 2:54pm
I published an article over the weekend on creating graphic mock-ups. This is really a tutorial meant for beginners who may not have attempted to do this before. I do think that creating a graphic mock-up is an important part of the design process. I find that it helps me to come up with a more coherent, creative design.
Today sj at 37 signals posted an interesting counterpoint to my position. They don’t create mock-ups because, in short, they feel that it slows things down too much and just doesn’t make sense. I think this really depends on the context. If you’re creating something highly interactive then, sure, maybe it doesn’t make sense to do a static proof. On the other hand, if you’re creating a static web site then maybe creating a visual proof and getting your ideas together first is a good idea.
Read more…
Posted in Design | 3 Comments »
