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A Selection Of Design Tips - November 11th, 2008
- Redesigning the wheel: When you first visit a site, you will pretty much always want to know how to navigate it as soon as possible. You do not want to force the user into working out how, where and when they can navigate through a menu structure. It would be a really bad idea to try and re-invent a navigation structure that is already tried and tested in thousands of other sites. In short, keep menu’s or navigation across the top, or down the sides.
- Don’t use a start page, splash page or home page unless absolutely necessary. Think about your favorite online store.. I doubt very much that they have a home page that welcomes you in like an old friend, then insists you click somewhere so you can actually enter the store. By all means have a home page, but put something useful on it. New products, last purchases.. that kind of thing.
- We all like colorful sites, but most will work from a certain pallet of 3 to 5 colours. This is not a coincidence. Working to a set colour scheme improves branding, makes the site look professional, clean and stylish. That’s not to say that colorful sites are bad, but they are usually more suited to Children’s sites.
- Whitespace, the space on a site that is not filled with text, images or anything else is a fantastic way of making a site look a whole lot better. There are no real rules as to where and how to use white space, but generally, you should have a fair amount of a page empty. Your site will look a lot cleaner for it.
- Interior designers work a lot of the time in thirds. It somehow looks a lot better when there are odd numbers of ornaments on a fireplace, or the room it painted with 3 stripes instead of 4. This theory holds with web design as well. A page will look better if it is split into thirds instead of quarters,Web design in general works better in odd numbers.
Web Typography - November 4th, 2008
Typography is a thriving industry, Printing and Media have an absolutely massive base of different fonts and styles that are constantly being developed for various projects. So how come the Web has been left behind so much?
At the moment, if you want to choose a font for use on the internet, you are pretty limited. In fact, you are pretty much stuck with one of the following ‘web safe’ fonts: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Lucida Console, Times New Roman, Impact, Tahoma, Courier New or Comic Sans. Although this would have been fine 5 years ago, they have become more than a little stale and well over used.
I think its high time that this changed, and, it looks like with CSS 3 there is some progress:
@font-face {
font-family: 'The New Font';
src: url('http://www.example.net/newfont/');
}
The following line of code will tell your browser where it can get the font, so it will follow the link, download and use it to pull in the correct font. You will also have the ability to add shadow, emboss, add effects, stretch and smooth fonts. Sound a bit too good to be true? Well unfortunately it will be ages before we can successfully use this technique to import fonts, with browser’s typically slow uptake of CSS3.. You can imagine how long we are going to be stuck with IE7 and its already aging CSS engine.