Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

Mar 22 2007 at 10:38am

The Secret to SEO, Design Methods + more (link roundup)

The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (it’s not what you think) – at SEOmoz

In the old days, webmasters would compromise content and usability to fit in more keywords and better “optimize” their sites (see the first diagram in that aritlce). Now we are looking at compromising our content and usability to better target linkers and therefore search results. Is this a good thing??? (Check the long comment by “identity” towards the bottom). I have seen some sites that are obviously attempting to cater to the digg crowd and, to be honest, I find it really annoying.

Mar 09 2007 at 9:12pm

Great Websites: EDGE of Existence

EDGE of Existence is another example of a great website. Why is this site great? It is cleanly designed and has a very elegant feel. I think that some have taken the clean white look a little too far, but this site balances it well with deep colour accents. The colour choice suits the topic and coordinates with the animal photos.

Speaking of the photos, they are high quality and very engaging. I was immediately drawn to the slideshow on the home page. This is an example of user engagement on an emotional level - you feel the mission of the site when you look at those photos. You can’t help but become involved.

Posted in Design, Great Websites | No Comments »

Feb 26 2007 at 3:05am

Where are all the Women in Web Design?

Eric Meyer had a post last week about gender diversity in the Event Apart conference series. What he’s saying, basically, is that he doesn’t believe in recruiting female speakers just for the sake of gender diversity. They want to get the best people, and I totally agree with that. I certainly would not want to be part of any project or conference just because I’m a minority.

Midway through the article Eric asks: ”So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?”

Posted in Design, General, Web Culture | 3 Comments »

Feb 22 2007 at 7:56pm

Are Tools Making us Dumber? (to hand code or not to hand code)

Kathy Seirra has an interesting post about whether automated tools make us dumber. In the article she raises a number of examples, including web design:

But should a web designer need to be an HTML coder? Or can he just use a WYSIWYG tool? The debates still rage in the web development world, although the issue should be resolved soon enough. In desktop publishing, for example, you will never hear, “Oh, you can’t just use Quark or Adobe InDesign… you really need to tweak the Postscript by hand to do it right.”

Posted in Design, Web Standards | 6 Comments »

Feb 19 2007 at 10:48pm

Check out the Typography on Joe Clark’s site

I came across Joe Clark’s site today, rather randomly through a series of links leading to his Letter to Tim Berners-Lee about WCAG 2. Check out the typography on there. Gorgeous, isn’t it? I’m not sure exactly what you’ll see, since he is using the new MS fonts for his body text and headers which not everyone has installed. I must say, they look nice (does anyone know what’s up with the smoothing on those? That’s new – is it a MS thing or are all fonts able to handle that now? I actually think they’re a little too smooth).

Here’s a screenshot for those of you who don’t have Cambria and Calibri installed (I can’t get the names of those two straight!). Check out his typography stylesheet too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an interesting set of font specifications in a stylesheet before. So many elements are very specifically defined, with many more options than what designers normally include. He’s also got a very different set of fonts listed for various elements. His main body font list is Cambria, “Hoefler Text”, Baskerville, “Palatino Linotype”, Garamond, “Lucida Fax”, Georgia, “Book Antiqua”, serif. Hmmmm…. interesting.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look quite as good on my Linux computer where the first available font is Georgia. It still looks nice though – classic typographic principles at work.

His header also works perfectly with the rest of the design even though it is using different typefaces. Brilliant! (although I do think the home page has a few problems…)

Anyway, I don’t necessarily think that typography is the most important thing, but it can really make (or break) a design, as we see here. Do you know of any other examples of outstanding web typography?

Posted in Accessibility, Design | 8 Comments »

Feb 09 2007 at 8:59am

I’m the Guest Blogger at T&S Web Design today!

Tim, who is a moderator at TWF, asked me to guest blog at T&S Web design and the post is up today. It’s about logo design – specifically, How to avoid having a terrible logo. My original headline was “5 Things Business Owners Need to Know about Logo Design”, but I think I forgot to send that to Tim with my post. Too bad Those globe graphics at the bottom aren’t mine either. God, globe logos I’ll tell you a story about globe logos sometime