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How to Hire
Design & Coding So you need a designer, but don’t know where to start? Well here we go. Step one. Figure out what you need and what you want. Knowing is half the battle as they say. Once you know what you want and need you can better assess potential designers while helping you get a better idea of where the project should head yourself. But keep in mind the difference between need and want. Being able to tell the designer what you need will help him or ...
Continue readingStop with the Tables.
CSS I’ve been working on a project for a jeweller, bringing their online catalog into the 21st century with some help from oscommerance, unfortunately the application still suffers from a 20th century relic. Tables. Tables are for data, not layouts, it should be as simple as that. But I still come across far to many site put together with tables, and not just sites from 5 years ago but sites being constructed today using tables for layout and ...
Continue readingDealing with designers.
Design & Coding It’s a strange dichotomy with clients, one of the best parts of being in the design business is the clients, but the clients are worst thing about it as well. Here are some tips on how to work with a professional designer to get the best results for your project, and not end up giving them an aneurysm. More often then not you’ll call on a designer because, simply, you are not. While many think having photoshop or illustrator makes ...
Continue readingWhitespace is nothing.
Design & Coding White space, despite it’s name, has nothing to do with colour. Whitespace is elegant, whitespace is excess, whitespace is nothing. Whitespace is the space between graphics, margins, space between columns, space between lines of type or figures and objects. But whitespace is not just ‘blank’ space; this balance of negative and positive space is key to design. Content needs room to breath, otherwise it appears crowded, feels ...
Continue readingJPG, Gif, and PNG oh my.
Design & Coding In most cases you’ll use JPG for compressing images for your website, but there are other formats that are useful for certain applications. Here are a few formats and bit about each of them. GIF GIF is one of the more common image file formats in existence. Gif is a lossless compression process that supports only 256 colours and is more suited for simple images with few colours and small text; it also supports animation, and transparency. ...
Continue readingTypo Tips
Design & Coding Here are a few tips on how to make your typographic style a little more solid. Alignment Aligning your type properly goes a long way to influence readers perception of your site. Justified gives a more “official” impression due to the fact that newspapers use this alignment. However, ragged right (Left Align) is more common in the online world due in large to the fact that properly setting blocks of type justified, adjusting for the ...
Continue readingWeb Safe Typefaces
Design & Coding There are really not a lot of options to chose from when selecting a typeface for your site. In fact there are 6 fonts that you could consider safe to use, fonts that are installed by default on the majority of computers since the late 90′s. Arial Arial is a good sans-serif typeface, and though it’s no Helvetica, Arial is appropriate for a variety of applications and is designed for screen display. While it might seem dull at times, ...
Continue readingWeb Typography
Design & Coding “Web Design is 95% Typography” Oliver Reichenstein Blogs should take heed of Oliver Reichenstein’s words. Good typography in your design is good readability, usability, and balance. Sadly, though, typography is a much ignored aspect of design online and designs fall victim to measure being too long, narrow linespaceing, low contrast, and poor grid structure. But the problem I see most in blogs, especially blogs trying to ...
Continue readingInspiration
Design & Coding We all get our inspiration from various sources, whether it be movies and television, or nature and the outdoors. But Patrick Haney’s web design inspiration set on flickr is a resource that I continually come back to, and with over 400 of the web’s most beautifully designed sites it’s not hard to see why. Not only is Patrick not a sausage, he is a good friend of mine from back in the deviantArt days and a respected figure ...
Continue readingBan Comic Sans
Design & Coding In 1995 a font was created by Vincent Connare at Microsoft when he was shocked to see Times New Roman used inappropriately for it’s upcoming comic book styled Microsoft Bob application. Ironically it is now Comic Sans that is being used inappropriately all over the place. While its not the font itself that’s the issue, it’s the inappropriate usage and the scale of its misuse from government documents to restaurant signage. I ...
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