May 2013
7 posts
2 tags
The importance of content marketing for Search... →
“Google, along with other major search engines, are now holding authors to higher standards. Their belief is that visitors aren’t browsing for the websites that use the best traditional SEO tactics, but the websites that are the best authorities on a given topic. Content Marketing is a qualitative sector of Search Engine Optimization that may very well continue to evolve over time with one...
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Designing for the reading experience →
“We are often eager to try the latest OpenType feature, prettify our copy with discretionary ligatures, slap on partially executed CSS hyphenation, and then stare at our masterpiece in awe, unaware that anyone other than a typography geek couldn’t care less.”
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Why being in web development is the best job in... →
”[…] the internet has become a – maybe the – globally dominant force in little over two decades. It is at once the ultimate communication technology, sharing portal, and discovery device. And it was built by web developers – people who, together, built and maintain the technologies that power the whole thing. It’s a rare career that you get to contribute, daily, to the most powerful...
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The future of iOS design →
“Another trend is the removal of button frames from apps, leaving only the icon as the tappable indicator. Although this could be seen as a mimicing of Android, I think it’s fair to say that the idea of needing a button frame to contextualize tappable icons is getting outdated now.”
Though I’ve seen these ‘new buttons’, I never conciously noticed the change.
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“People that take responsibility are often given responsibility.”
– Seth Godin.
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March 2013
7 posts
2 tags
Still making noise →
“Even as data moves to computers and the cloud, staplers continue to help people keep it together. On the computer, we can file copies in folders and send messages to mailboxes. We can cut, copy and paste text and files. But which computer activity is similar to stapling? Sure, there’s the paper-clip icon that attaches documents to e-mail. But nothing, really, comes close to the satisfying...
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“Good typography does not look nice to please type nerds. Primarily, well set...”
– Oliver Reichenstein, Designing for the Reading Experience.
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Foursquare: how you can check in at supersonic... →
“When you tap the check in button and see a list of places, just press and hold the place you’re at. You’ll see a green bar glide across the top of the screen and… voilà! We’ll check you in instantly.”
Works great!
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Build a school in the cloud →
Catching up on TED Talks.
This one by Sugata Mitra is a real nice one. His idea is to teach children by asking them a question and letting them figure out the answer by themselves.
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How search works →
“Search starts with the web. It’s made up of over 30 trillion individual pages and it’s constantly growing. Google navigates the web by crawling. That means we follow links from page to page.”
A nice HTML5 website, made by Google to explain how search works.
February 2013
27 posts
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HTML5 color picker →
This is so cool.
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“What sets a designer apart from a ponderer is the will to affect change, to...”
– Morgan Knutson in We’re not unhappy, we’re designers.
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Using white space for readability in HTML and CSS →
“How can we use white space in development code to ensure that our files are as readable and maintainable as possible? Well, we could consider a number of options.”
A few great tips on how to keep your code clean.
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23 years later, Adobe releases the source code for... →
“It’s interesting to note that Photoshop 1 in 1990 is far more powerful than Microsoft’s Paint in 2013.”
You can download the source code over here.
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You're good, get better →
“I’m going to let you in on a secret. Maybe a few secrets. The sort of things that you find out by yourself through long and painful processes, and endless, horrible clients. Let me begin by telling you the single most important thing you can do for yourself — recognise your fucking self worth. If you can’t value your own work, then who the hell will? Confidence is half the battle. You need...
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Why Facebook should stop charging to increase the... →
In February of last year, Facebook announced to businesses that an average of only 16% of the members on their Page actually get exposed on their newsfeed to the content that they upload. This caused quite a shock amongst companies that until then weren’t really sure how Facebook’s news feed algorithm really works nor how much visibility they were actually getting, however, they were certain that...
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Justifying responsive site designs →
We took a popular ecommerce store (O’Neill Clothing) that we’d recently redesigned and monitored conversions, transactions and revenue for three weeks. Then we quietly deployed the responsive conditions to the already live site and monitored for another three weeks.
Here’s what we found:
iPhone/iPod: +65,71% more conversions, +112,50% more transactions, +101,25% more revenue.
Android Devices:...
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Whitespace: the (amazingly) underutilized design... →
“By using large amounts of it, you’re saying that your content is far more important than the screen real estate that it rests on, and you can afford to sacrifice that space in order to better present your message.”
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Blokk font →
“Blokk is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin.”
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“People ignore design that ignores people.”
– Mark Kimero, found on this website.
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Stately, the map font →
“Stately is a symbol font that makes it easy to create a map of the United States using only HTML and CSS. Each state can be styled independently with CSS for making simple visualizations. And since it’s a font, it scales bigger and smaller while staying sharp as a tack.”
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How to create a simple collapsing header →
Didn’t know it was that simple.
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How Oreo's rapid-response team lit up Twitter with... →
“Oreo Cookies took a novel approach to its marketing during the big game last night by keeping its advertising team in the office, ready to respond to any unusual events during the match. Such an opportunity arose when the power inside New Orleans’ Superdome went out, and the marketing minds quickly set to work on producing a poster ad for their product that played off that anomalous...
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“There’s very little talk of flat design as anything but a surface treatment —...”
– Cole Peters in his blog post Flatliners.
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Against the Lobster font abuse →
“The problem is that even when we designers are often behind the establishing of new tendencies and art expressions, we are susceptible of getting absorbed by the market and thus end up employing the same thing that everyone uses just because it’s the trend. This has happened to Lobster sadly, reaching a point where some designers have gone as far as calling it the new Comic Sans.”
I...
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Flat UI is not the only way forward →
“Some would say a flat look is truly digital, but I think the flat style is just that; a stylistic choice. There isn’t really anything to be true to, except the user and helping them understand the device and its apps as easily as possible.”
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Usability mistakes to avoid when using photos in... →
“Why are width and height attributes important for usability? Images that don’t have defined width and height attributes can cause shifting in the position of the web page’s content because the browser doesn’t know how big the images are supposed to be.”
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How to build user confidence in your UI? →
“Your purpose should be to design something simple and invisible — but memorable — so that the user can access what they need to access without being bothered. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked.”
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10 habits to help you master graphic design →
“Try to be scientific in the way you observe other people’s work, and derive some conclusions concerning principles and rules behind their looks. To this end, it’s useful to know graphic design principles so you can recognize them at work, but just thinking things through will give you great results.”
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What is flat design? →
“A flat design looks good on screens irrespective of size and resolution, thus having the essential quality of doing miracles for online interactivity. Often praised for its usability, apparently it does work miracles for developers and designers too, as covering several platforms can be an exhausting task.”
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The fold →
“The fold is not as important as you think. Users do know how to scroll. If you squish everything towards the top of the page in an effort to get all your content in front of the user, you will only succeed in creating an overcrowded messy page and turning your user off your site altogether. A better approach is to use the top part of your website to lead the user in to your site and make...
January 2013
31 posts
3 tags
Mobile shopping on native and web →
“Almost 80% of smartphone owners in the United States have used their phones for shopping-related tasks. But while the mobile Web was a key driver of mobile commerce before, native apps may be catching up.”
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Your browser as a notepad →
A tip from @thetechblock:
“Copy and paste this in a new browser window and turn your browser into a notepad: data:text/html, <html contenteditable>”
Cool, right?
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Show me your cart →
Need some shopping cart design inspiration?
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Bold and beautiful websites →
This is a nice collection of a few beautiful websites. Sadly, most of them are amazingly slow as well. These are my two favorites: Chris Boddy Copywriting and Joan Pons Moll.
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Grids in Illustrator →
“In Illustrator, the grid setup process is a little different. You don’t create your grid during the initial document creation period. In Illustrator, you create your document as usual, select the text tool, and draw your text area by clicking and dragging to create a text box. The difference in this method is that you will want to set up guides to determine your margins for the document....
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How to make sliders not suck →
“Don’t put vital information in a slider. […] One slider, one content type. […] Don’t stack more than one slider on top of each other. Actually, just don’t have more than one on a page. Don’t use sliders that have more than two buttons. Don’t use a slider that has a transition more complicated than fade or slide left/right. In fact, don’t use sliders that move in more than one...
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Sliders suck →
“Sliders, in my opinion, are only valuable for display purposes; they are not good for action taking. Think about how you use the web. Do you load a web page, and watch a slider scroll all the way through every item, and wait to click on the thing you like best? I hope not. Most of us want to be able to quickly and easily get to where we want to go.”
How to make sliders not suck?
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“I don’t wanna fuck up my filmography. I wish so many directors...”
– Quentin Tarantino, while being interviewed by Empire Magazine. 