Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Reinventing the Color Picker

If you do any form of design work on the computer you’re probably familiar with the color picker.

8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces

There is a lot of information out there about various interface design techniques and patterns you can use when crafting your user interfaces and websites, solutions to common problems and general usability recommendations.

How to Listen to the User and Hear the Experience

When someone is speaking, do you think about what the other person is saying, or do you think about what you are going to say next?

Monday, July 13, 2009

Ten Simple Guidelines for Choosing the Perfect CMS

The content management system you choose can really make a huge difference in how much time you (or your clients) spend keeping a site updated and maintained.

Beautiful Gradient Effects On Web design – Research: Part 2

Here's a showcase of beautifully done gradient effects used effectively in web-design and logo design creation.

mike-precious-gradient-effects-inspiration

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Google Chrome OS: So What?

The new Google Chrome OS is the big news in the tech world today. For those of you living under a rock, the gist is that Google's coming out with an operating system, layered on top of a Linux kernel, that will power netbooks, and eventually desktop PCs. Applications will all be Web-based, accessible via Google's Chrome browser.

Introduction to RDFa II

Learn how to add properties to an image, and how to add metadata to any item—and we’ll add a few more rules to that list.

Content Templates to the Rescue

As an industry, we’ve mostly figured out that if we don’t want content problems to sabotage our web projects, we have to plan ahead.

50 Free High-Quality and “New” (X)HTML/CSS Templates

Here are 50 Free high-quality & New (X)HTML/CSS template (some of them include the PSD-source files). You will also find among these elegant templates a very well written step-by-step tutorials showing you how to create your own. Hopefully some of these will meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects.

IBM - Smarter Planet

IBM leverages its branding power and smarts to try to make the planet a better (and smarter) place to work, live and do business. If you are looking for new grid designs and graphs, you'll find clean pages, graphs-a-plenty, and a very snazzy set of colorful icons... And that's just what you see on the surface. It's all about the ideas and how they can help make things better for all of us.

Understanding JavaScript Closures

JavaScript closures are considered to be advanced stuff, reserved for the gurus of the field.

Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play.

Yahoo! sign-up form

Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up

This post is not about Adsense and its simplicity. This post is about understanding Adsense and all its rules, optimization and ad placement, but mainly it’s about maximising your sites potential earnings using the different types of ads that Google offers.

Google & AdSense

Search Me

Inside the launch of Stephen Wolfram's new "computational knowledge engine."

So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 1: Resources

Here's a list of resources covering — publications and blogs, books, local events, organizations, mailing lists, webinars, workshops, conferences, and schooling.

Covering the Walls

Martin Hardee from Cisco shares his office to reflect how to see a panorama view of what you're working on.

image

Meaning-Making in Landing Page Optimization

Trying to generalize universal truths from a single landing page test result is often a horrible idea.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

'Desktop View' websites

Some creative 'desktop view' websites to check out.

desktop

12 Excellent Social News Sites for Web Designers

Social news/bookmarking websites are a great for finding useful resources, tutorials, and information on the web. These sites typically puts users in the driver’s seat by giving them the ability to submit links, vote on other people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that they don’t like.

50+ Ultimate Collection of Glow and Light Effect Tutorials in Photoshop

Glow and Light effect is very popular now a day. You can see these effects sometimes on a posters or advertisements. Here are some tutorials on the subject.

Using Wikis to document UI specifications

How your design team can benefit from wiki collaboration while avoiding its pitfalls.

UI Pattern Documentation Review

To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization.

Wellknown.as Case

Here's a tutorial on using Fireworks when building a website.

Planning the perfect site



We all want to hit the ground running when we start a new project, but a little forethought can reap huge dividends in the long run.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages

The “about me”-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites.

Screenshot

25 Free Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity

There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap.

10 Useful CSS/JS-Coding Solutions For Web-Developers

Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them.

Handcrafted CSS

Video Edition

A new book by Dan Cederholm

15 Effective Tips and Tricks from the Masters of CSS

There are thousands of sites out there offering tips and tricks for using CSS. But how do you know where that information is coming from?

Web Marketers to Change User Tracking

Companies that track consumer behavior online for advertising purposes are vowing to make their practices more transparent and to give people a way to decline being shadowed.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

How to make an eye-catching logo

Maya Logo

Anybody can mock-up a logo but only good designers can make it stand out and make it a good branding tool. Here are a few tips on how you can be a better logo designer.

Introduction to RDFa

RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.”

Art Direction and the Web

Great article on principles and techniques of the art director — which relate closely to web design — and show how these can influence the overall effect of a website.

Visual Decision Making

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.

three stage process diagram

30 Creative Javascript navigation menu examples

Successful, eye-catching and mainly user-friendly site navigation sometimes is key to whole web design, because users usually search for navigation at first, when they visit website.

voll-website-navigation

Free Seamless Vector Pattern Resources

Patterns actually can be found almost everywhere – in print design, web design, graphic design etc.