Navigation design is one of those things you simply cannot overlook. When looking for specific information on a website, a lot of people will look at the main or sub navigation or use the search bar (if present).
When done right, adding visual cues to your main menu can prove very useful in making things just a tad more appealing to visitors. Let’s have a look at some sites that make great use of icons in their navigation menus.
One trend I noticed while looking for sites to include in this post was that a lot of them used monochrome/greyscale icons – subtle but very effective.
Many new social media companies are launching and becoming successful. However, their services are built around ideas that have been around for a while, all they give the idea is a twist, and users love it.
To prove this point exactly, we go through five companies that made it big with service ideas that we all knew about, but we still prefer them to others.
Now, not all these companies started with a goal in mind to become successful, many of them started up to share and communicate with friends, co-workers, and family. However, the ideas are general ideas that have been made into services well before they have; all they offer to the game is a twist to the idea.
This article/tutorial is the third in the series. Please take a look at the first and second “chapters”: Document Basics and Master Pages and Working With Text and Graphic Frames.
In the third part of this Getting To Grips Series we will be covering the following topics:
- Creating and editing text
- Creating a headline
- Text alignment
- Flowing text (automatically and manually)
- Working with and applying styles
- Loading pre-existing styles from other documents
- Finding and changing
- Spell checking
- Drag and drop text editing
- Using the story editor
- Adjusting vertical spacing
- Viewing and using baseline grids
- Fonts and type styles
- Creating a drop cap
- Adjusting letter and word spacing
- Adjusting kerning and tracking
- Working with tabs
Have you ever seen those small grey descriptions in Google search results below the title? If you’re curious on how to get them, then the answer is embedded metadata.
With the words embedded metadata we refer to a way to add invisible information in an HTML/XHTML document. These informations will be machine readable, by Google or Yahoo for example, but will not be seen in the browser. Basically we’re going to add some properties to our HTML elements that will say to Google: “Hey, this h1 title is my name, and this h2 title is my work title, I’m a web developer“. As a result Google will show in the search results, under our page title, a little line with our name and our work title.
There are three main embedded metadata specifications that are struggling to become a standard, and probably none of them will be 100% standard like it’s happening with HTML5, so it’s better to have a basic understanding of how all of them work. The projects are:
- RDFa: a specification strictly connected with XHTML, supported with the XHTML1.1 doctype
- Microformats: the most diffused specification till the arrive of HTML5
- Microdata: the HTML5 specific set of instructions.
Ever since the web began to evolve out of its infancy from the mid to late 90′s online communities in one form or another have existed and flourished. Today we’ve taken the very same fundamental concepts of our ancestry and we have managed to build socially thriving networks that cater to a variety of individuals.
Sites such as Wikipedia have taken the words online community to a much higher level of freedom, while social networks such as Twitter have taken them to a new interactive high. This is all part of the web’s evolution of course, and as we continue to expand so will the technologies we utilize.
Online communities can be a variety of virtual endeavours dispersed in several entities that are obviously beyond the geographical. In today’s Internet we can build an online community in minutes using applications such as Ning, however, no matter how you decide to build your online community there is still a good “chunk” of things (both technical and theoretical) that have to be addressed.
This article is the second part of the Getting To Grips With InDesign Series. We will be covering the following topics:
- Creating, editing and resizing text frames.
- Creating and editing graphic frames.
- Placing graphics into an existing frame.
- Resizing frames.
- Converting graphic frames into text frames.
- Converting shapes.
- Working with frames and the Pathfinder Tool.
- Wrapping text around a graphic.
- Aligning multiple objects and scaling grouped objects.
Don’t forget to take a look at the first “chapter“: Document Basics and Master Pages.
