SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

Website designers are always looking for that extra piece of spark to liven up their pages. This often comes in the form of background images, vector artwork, and more recently popularized icons. Small icons give your user interface an extra boost in usability and clarity. It helps to categorize links and portions of your webpage without using text.

For those creative enough I’ve included 33 exclusive icon tutorials below. These are prominently targeted for Adobe software such as Illustrator or Photoshop. Adobe Fireworks can also be used for some, but can be more difficult if you’re not familiar in the tools palette.

Most web designers and developers do not need any instructions for dealing with character encoding. In general the process is done within the browser and isn’t often a topic of discussion amongst programmers. However the tools and regulations used to enforce such strict document types provides leverage for debugging and creating professional typographic aspects to a website.

Although the topic is brief I’ve gone over some of the quick highlights and important notations. You should be able to breeze through these topics if you have at least a beginner’s understanding towards digital documents. Basic HTML isn’t required although these techniques mostly apply to web files such as HTML, CSS, and PHP.

Typography is a very important part of web design. By using different types of typography like big headlines and bold fonts web designers are improving the look and feel of websites. So in this post we have compiled some beautiful typography for your inspiration.

Next Day Flyers has offered to give one lucky SpyreStudios reader 250 1/4 page flyers.

Next Day Flyers is an online printing company that delivers top-quality printed marketing materials with one of the fastest turnaround times in the industry. They specialize in full color printing of custom business cards, brochures, greeting cards, postcards, as well as specialty die cuts and other marketing materials. They believe all businesses, no matter their size, deserve easy access to custom promotional and direct mail material.

It wasn’t that long ago that you could only buy products by waiting in line at a store or go through tedious telephone ordering to get the latest and greatest gadget or widget.

eBay and Amazon changed all of that. Now, nearly any person or business can buy or sell products or services online. In this article, we’ll examine what we can learn from observing our favorite stores in action to make the online experience better.

Lately I’ve noticed a number of articles with gripes and groans about the Android user experience, the way interfaces are designed, the usability of Android apps, and a lack of satisfaction with the whole Android ecosystem.

As someone who works on day-to-day basis with usability testing and user experience design, my interest was piqued. Were these users just iPhone users who expressed dissatisfaction after a brief flirtation with Android, or was there something deeper going on?

I can’t honestly say I’ve had a lot of experience with Android – although I do own two iOS devices – so I couldn’t write off these concerns one way or another. But rather than basing it off a few, possibly biased opinions, it seemed the fairest way to compare the two was to set up a quick usability test.