It’s no secret that in order to build a successful website or web community you have to design with the users in mind. Of course you can’t forget about optimizing for search engines, but let’s focus on the visitors since they’re the ones who are using your site and interacting with it.
You probably visit tons of sites daily, and many of them you visit for the first time. Being a web-designer I find I spend more time on a new site than the non-webdesigner visitors. I’ll take the time to analyze the page layout, flow, typography and I often take the time to browse and visit more pages/posts.
I have to say, at least 15% of the sites I visit offer a poor user experience (yep I just made that number up, but it’s pretty accurate). Good thing the other 85% got it right though :)
So, let’s see what we can do to improve the user experience on our sites. Those are very simple tips but we sometimes forget about them.
With the major focus for web design lately shifting to the minimal designs, apple inspired designs and clean cut layouts, it’s about time someone stands up and showcases the awesomeness that is grunge! I guess I’ll have to be that person today :)
Grunge has undoubtedly become my favorite form of design and I know Matt Brett can say the same as well. I believe though that a lot of people misinterpret grunge as being sloppy and unappealing – which is the furthest thing from the truth. So today I want to showcase the best practices and examples of grunge in web design. Feel free to read the article over and leave your thoughts in the comments at the end of the article – we love your opinions here and value your input.
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about seamless patterns. Specifically, I’ve been working on various techniques for creating them. Obviously, there are a number of different ways you can go about this, and in this tutorial I’m going to show you how to take a single hand drawn element and transform it into a highly flexible and editable seamless vector pattern.
Before really getting into the details, though, just be aware that the actual process can be pretty intensive. In addition to the time I spent writing this tutorial, I also invested several hours just in sketching and drawing.
With the ever growing popularity of Twitter it’s no surprise to see that a lot of designers and developers have adopted Twitter and use it to connect with other designers and share links, quotes, ideas, etc…
So, since I’m addicted to typography, I thought I’d share my list of people I follow. This list contains only typography related Twitter users. Some are typeface designers, others represent type foundries and some exist to share news about typography and other related topics.
