SpyreStudios

Web Design and Development Magazine

Applying a Clean & Imageless Design to an Article – Part I

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For Christmas this year, my beautiful wife gave me a copy of The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Volume 2. Obviously, I have been perusing the book, and I am finding that there are tons of awesome web designs to take in. I’m super happy with the gift and I expect that it will prove to be a highly valuable resource throughout 2011, and beyond.

Yet, even just a quick perusal of the book reveals the prevailing influence of Photoshop (or other graphics programs) on the industry at large. Today, the web is full of beautiful, rich and colourful graphics that continuously amaze and impress us in all manner of very legitimate ways. But just because we can include all of this incredible imagery, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we have to. Sometimes, the simple use of colour, shape and typography can create an attractive and elegant design all on its own.

Clients, the Web and the Big Misconception

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Pretty ambiguous title isn’t it? That’s entirely intentional, because the topic of this particular article is something that a lot of web designers seem to hate talking about.

But, now that I’ve got you here hopefully you’ll stick around, so I’ll let the cat out of the bag (so to speak). In this article we’re going to be talking about Web 2.0. Don’t run away just yet!

Rockstars, Ninjas, Gurus and Other Hipsters

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You’ve seen it before – perhaps you’ve even dabbled in it yourself. There are all kinds of designers, developers and other freelancers out there in the community who like to refer to themselves as rockstars, ninjas and other such fanciful names. The reasons, I think, are obvious. People are looking to set themselves apart, or […]

Capturing Customer Data on the Web

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Data – for some reason when I hear the term, I still tend to think of the almost, but not quite human android from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As cool as good old, white-skinned Data might have been, though, in the real world data is a much more immediate entity that drives much of […]

The Anatomy Of A Great List Post

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Wait – what? The anatomy of a great list post? What’s this all about? Well a few weeks ago I published an article titled “The Anatomy of a Great Tutorial” in which I presented an outline of some of the elements that I think best exemplify a really great instructional post. I wrote that article […]

The Anatomy of a Great Tutorial

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A few months ago, I wrote an article here on SpyreStudios, entitled “Content Mosaic: The 6 Most Common Posts on Design Blogs”. The title makes it clear that I outlined what I perceived to be the six most common types of posts that we see published on design blogs all across the internet. One of […]

5 Reasons Why Autoblogging Sucks

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Recently, I read an article promoting five of the “best” autoblogging plugins for WordPress. I normally don’t write response type posts, but I just felt that I had to chime in and offer my two cents on this one! For those who don’t know what autoblogging is, it’s basically exactly what it sounds like – […]

A Coder’s Journey

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As a web designer, coding is an important part of what I do. Recently, there has been some discussion in the design community about whether or not designers should know how to code. I’m not going to get into that debate in this article. Suffice it to say that I do my work both in […]