Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Free Keynote UX Stencils


In the light of Keynote as a recently popular tool for creating wireframes, here comes another emerging stencil for all to use. By Wireframes Magazine

10 Popular Design Competition Websites

>The irony of any website design is that the name of the designer is relegated right down to the bottom of the page and that too in small font sizes that are barely legible. And in some cases, the name of the designer is simply not there or is taken over by the client. By Dzineblog

Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides

18 in Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides

This article doesn’t cover “traditional” web design discipline as we know it, but goes a bit beyond it, exploring various writing, blogging and online publishing strategies. Apart from that, we present some useful writing style guides that may help you educate your clients on their copy for their upcoming project. By Jessica Bordeau

6 Link Building Tools for Better Online Visibility

SearchStatus for Better Visibility

Link Building Tools for Better Online Visibility has its own magical combination. When you create an authentic piece of content, it will bring value and worth to your company, and it will also attract many links over the course of internet time. By Tariehk Geter

Freelancers: How to Get New Clients For Your Web Design Business

You know how important getting new clients is for your business. Getting a constant new stream of clients is often the #1 challenge for most freelancers. By Darren

40 Creative Flash Preloaders for your Inspiration

Use of Flash in a website means heavy use of animation, images, videos and sound effects, this is why they take lot of time to load, therefore users must have abundance of tolerance and patience. By Taimur Asghar

Get Inspired: Beautiful Examples of Textures in Web Design


Whenever you visit website these days, every single one of them is trying to compete one and another. Despite the difference of products or services they offer, their mission remain the same: to engage their visitor or customer. By Ari Suardiyanti

5 Killer Ways to Streamline your Coding Efficiency


Apart from practice, how can you actually speed up your coding. Well there are plenty options out there to aid you in doing so. By Matthew Corner

Good Help is Hard to Find

Good Help is Hard to Find
One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. A person who has trouble using a website to accomplish a task will quickly grow frustrated. By Lyle Mullican

Apps vs. the Web

Pull the iPhone out of your pocket and look at the home screen. Likely, you’re seeing some well known brands on the web: Facebook, Flickr, and Google to name just a few. You’ll also see companies like Amazon, Target, and Walmart which sell a lot of products via the web. By Craig Hockenberry

Friday, August 27, 2010

In Defense Of A/B Testing

Abtests in In Defense Of A/B Testing

Recently, A/B testing has come under (unjust) criticism from different circles on the Internet. Even though this criticism contains some relevant points, the basic argument against A/B testing is flawed. By Paras Chopra

Defining Emotion, Personality and Relationship

Figure 4

As UX professionals, we strive to design engaging experiences. These experiences help to forge relationships between the products we create and the people who use them. Whether you’re designing a website or a physical product, the formation of a relationship depends on how useful, usable and pleasurable the experience is. By Trevor van Gorp

10 Free Website Chat Widgets to Make Your Site Interactive

Chatango

If you want to make your website livelier, then adding a website chat widget is perhaps one of the more effective solutions for increasing user engagement and growing your community. By Phong Thai Cao

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Minimalism in Web Design: A Guide

A Comprehensive Guide to Minimalism in Web Design
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. By Jason Gross

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. By Jake Rocheleau

Corporate Website Design: Creative and Beautiful Solutions

F Prologue Films in Corporate Website Design: Creative and Beautiful Solutions

What do corporate websites have in common with other people’s children? Three things: they have their charm, like finger-paintings on the refrigerator; they can be useful, if infrequently; they are usually admired only by the people who created them. By Bobby Foley

50 Best Websites 2010


From the helpful to the distracting, the big hitters to the unknowns, TIME offers a road map to the best of the Web.

Monday, August 23, 2010

A Design Is Only As Deep As It Is Usable

10k-screen in A Design Is Only As Deep As It Is Usable

There are well-known proverbs that imply (or state outright) that beauty is superficial and limited in what it can accomplish. “It’s what’s inside that counts” and “Beauty is only skin deep” are a few simple examples By Louis Lazaris

Sunday, August 15, 2010

8 useful web tools you would not want to miss



Online web tools are great because they can save your time and you do not need leave your browser. As our daily lives evolve into online sphere, having right web tools on your hand can certainly be convenient. By Desizn Tech

Recreating YouTube search form and other buttons using CSS3

CSS3 could not get here any faster. Lately, there has been a lot of post about CSS3. It’s wonderful features are too good not to use. By Desizn Tech

65+ free handwritten fonts for elegant designs

The Quiet Scream

Story of handwritten fonts (or we can say only fonts) starts from very old ages, when people was just realizing the need of communication between one and other. By Taimur Asghar

3 Advanced CSS3 Techniques You Should Learn

3 Advanced CSS3 Techniques You Should Learn

The latest version of CSS includes properties that allow you to style your HTML elements with rounded corners, drop shadows, and even color gradients. By Max Luzuriaga

25 Useful Videos and Presentations for Designers



With the huge number of design-related conferences and events around the world, the Web gives those of us who cannot attend them a great opportunity to listen and benefit from their great and talented speakers. By Otba Mushaweh

Cognitive, visual, and motor loads in ux design

You peruse the news at your favorite online news site. You watch the latest episode of your favorite TV show at ABC.com because you were busy last Tuesday. You pay your bills at your bank's website. Somebody (or a team of somebodies) designed the user experience of these three websites you visited. Did they concentrate on trying to engage you to read the next story? By Susan Weinschenk

The small print: writing ui ininstructions

Humorous UI instructions

A person's behavior on the Web is highly goal-driven. People have something they want to accomplish, whether it's making a purchase, finding a recipe, or learning how to do something new. By Connie Malamed

Fusing content strategy with design

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place. By David Gillis

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Designing Web Apps for the iPad



If you’re a web designer and you think that designing for the iPad is outside the realm of possibility — think again. By Stephen Vescio

The Art of Distinction in Web Design

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. By Alexander Dawson

A short domain name trick

With the traditional TLDs — top-level domains such as .com, .net, .org, and to some extent, locals like .ca and .co.uk — it’s getting more difficult to obtain short domain names without some creativity. By Arley McBlain

I Guest-Edit .Net magazine

Web 2.1. Zeldman guest-edits .net magazine.

In .net magazine Issue No. 206, on sale 17th August in UK (and next month in the US, where it goes by the name “Practical Web Design”), Jeffrey Zeldman examines how new standards like CSS3 and HTML5, new devices like iPhone and Droid, and maturing UX disciplines like content strategy are converging to create new opportunities for web designers and web users.

30 new free high-quality fonts

Fonts-131 in 30 New Free High-Quality Fonts

In this listing of fonts you'll see Piron, Nobile, St Marie, Code, Arcus, Crimson Text, Quadranta, Juice, Prociono, Mr Jones, Ibarra Real and various useful symbol fonts. Please note that some fonts are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts; they can change from time to time. By Vitaly Friedman

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Feature-rich, robust & professional CMS: Vivvo

Vivvo Admin

Vivvo is a professional and "commercial open source" CMS application that is built with PHP, uses MySQL for storing data and offers a "top-notch" experience. By Web Resource Depot

Learning to say no to bad ideas

No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas

No. One word, a complete sentence. We all learned to say it around our first birthday, so why do we have such a hard time saying it now when it comes to our work? By Whitney Hess

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Reductionism in Web Design

Reductionism in Web Design

Let'stalk about the idea of reductionism — a process that improves the efficacy of web designs as well as the time it tales to spend making and maintaining them. By Alexander Dawson

Thursday, August 05, 2010

10 Free Web UI Kits and Resources for Designers



As designers, we often recycle the same fundamental elements when wireframing or mocking up a design. However, by utilizing a library of reusable web UI elements, we can make the design process on each project more efficient, and cut down on research and design time. By Grace Smith

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

50 Useful Articles and Resources You May Have Missed

Styesheets in 50 Useful Articles and Resources You May Have Missed

When it comes to online tutorials and articles, you have to be very careful in choosing the right one from tens of thousands of articles you find as you are seeking help in the Web. By Noupe Design Blog

Better UI Design: Proper Use of Tables

Shopify in Better UI Design: Proper Use of Tables

When CSS became standard and table-based design was made obsolete, a lot of designers shunned them all together. Using tables in your websites, no matter what they were used for, became akin to using animated GIFs in some circles.

The problem with that is that tables are a vital part of good UI design. By Cameron Chapman

Showcase of Fresh Texture-Based Web Designs

22-textured-web-design in Showcase of Fresh Texture-Based Web Designs

This showcase presents thirty-eight fresh examples of texture in web design, from creative design agencies, modern restaurants and even plastic film packaging companies. By Callum Chapman

4 Usability Tools For Web Design

Web designers are no strangers to the principles of usability on the Web – in fact, a good web designer should be the best practitioner of the ideas set forth by usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen. By Alex

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

A Web Designer’s Guide to Linux Fonts

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. By Michael Tuck

A 6-Step General Process for Producing a Website

Bullseye

When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are just getting started as a web designer. Good guidelines can help you work better by keeping forgetfulness to a minimum. By Chris McConnell

Sunday, August 01, 2010

30+ Inspiring Website Navigation Menus

sushi and robots

For surfers, website navigation menu plays a crucial part in making the web experience fun and, of course, easy. It actually influences the viewer’s preference for a particular website if they enjoyed surfing through and browsing the site or blog. By Marvi Ocampo

Eye Tracking: best way to test rich app usability

Asthma site heat map

Eye tracking has recently been debated on many fronts, with a particular focus on the ways people misuse it, and how some use eye tracking only as a way to "wow" clients. By James Breeze

Is Horizontal Web Design Here to Stay?

Gavin Castelton

A year or so ago, anyone writing guidelines for designing websites would tell you that it was just not right to have a horizontal scroll bar on your page which your readers have to use to move from left to right on your page, and vice versa. Today however, horizontal web design is the new rage in the design business, but that’s not to say that the whole Internet is ready for this eccentric way of displaying your web site. By Barbara Williams

50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers

Useful-tool-122 in 50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers

An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. By Vitaly Friedman

Passing the holy milestone: How to meet deadlines

For too many projects, there comes a time when every action taken, every decision and sacrifice made, is spurred on by pressure to finish. By Ben Gremillion

How web designers can adopt a global mindset

Globalization is one of the biggest business buzzwords in the 21st century. The rise of the internet as the world’s dominant medium is largely responsible for the onset of this global mindset, as businesses of all sizes realize the potential of tapping into new or emerging markets afforded by the World Wide Web. By Christian Arno

The web's undead

The Web's Undead

For most people, the web looks and feels like things are all peachy — vibrant, alive, new, fresh. However for those of us in the know, below this facade exists a consistent cycle of death and rebirth. By Alexander Dawson

Making User Interface Elements Difficult to Use By Intent



In modern web interface design, no other principle has been heralded and pushed onto us as much as the concept of user-centered design. By Jacob Gube

Design apps for fun and profit

Josh, Williams, CEO of Gowalla. Photo: Keegan Jones.
Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin talk with Gowalla CEO Josh Williams about social media, being an entrepreneur, developer applications for the web and mobile, marketing a new business, and more.