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I’ve always wanted to use a few depth layers with the illustrations on my website, but I’ve been waiting for technology to catch up a little.
In an effort to maximise the rendering performance of browsers, I attempted to used native CSS functions –
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I found a screen shot of the first client site I ever worked on back in the 90’s. It was tiny! Things have definitely changed. I’d go as far to say we now have to design 50x times more pixels to create a website.
My first commercial client ever was ‘Haslemere Forge’
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Over the last couple of years I’ve heard many people bemoan the fact that a lot of websites ‘are all starting to look the same’. There’s a certain amount of truth in this.
As we find the sweet spot for solving responsive problems,
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This post is simply a few examples demonstrating how much, or little the standard Twitter embed can be simply enhanced.
Standard Twitter Embed Theme
The basic twitter embed is full of linework and teeny, tiny fonts. It can look really messy and confused when placed into a similarly white page –
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I’ve rebuilt my site so many times, and will continue to do so I’m sure. It is usually a learning experience and a test ground to try new ideas and get used to theming new Content Management Systems
So I’ve spent the last 5 days burying my head much further into the intricacies of the Drupal CMS.
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There has been endless chatter in recent months about the changing trends of visual design in web and application interfaces and in particular the death of skeuomorphism.
While in the past I have myself ranted about ‘tired analogue metaphors’ (I didn’t know the word skeuomorphic even existed back then) part of me is now a little sad to see my wishes becoming a wide reaching design trend.
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During every big project I work on, I seem to spend a lot of time thinking through how the next one will be SO much better. It’s always going to be perfect, next time.
Designing in code
The project I’m working on at the moment is the first site I’ve designed completely in the browser using HTML/CSS.
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Co-what tools? I hear you ask. Okay, so I invented that word to categorise software such as Webflow, Adobe Reflow and Macaw (not available yet) as I didn’t know what to collectively call them. These new tools, and more like them,
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Do your stakeholders get obsessed with the details of a website design? Are they so busy thinking about button styles and drop shadows, that they aren’t considering their brand? If so, I have a solution that might help.
I thought I would share a little design workshop game that I dreamed up last year for a session that we (Headscape) ran with a new client.
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For a lot of smaller websites, responsive design can be a relatively simple case of dealing with different screen widths using media queries. For the average blog site, this may only involve adjusting a logo, shrinking the navigation, ensuring that images scale and any columns are stacked. These are usually the examples given in responsive tutorials,
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I am currently redesigning Buffer, an iPhone app for scheduling tweets without having to think too much. In the first part we got the ball rolling and looked at the overall process of app design. Now it’s time to get down to some real work.
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I’ve recently started work on redesigning an iPhone app called Buffer, founded by Joel Gascoigne. Although Buffer currently has a very polished web application, the iOS platform needs a little bit of help realigning its core focus and enhancing the user experience.
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Responsive design creates some enormous challenges, not just in build but also in layout and wire-framing.
I’m conscious that some people in the web industry, including myself(!) may be getting tired of hearing the word ‘responsive’ in everything they read. We shouldn’t be,
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Wire-framing is important. I don’t think I need to labour the point about this, Its something most designer folk involve themselves with at the start of the design process. If you don’t, you really should.
“Design isn’t just how it looks, Design is how it works”
Steve Jobs
Most of the effort in wire-framing is gathering together the outline of what will be on each page and where it will sit within a page hierarchy,
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I’m really keen on info-graphics at the moment. There are far too many words around and I feel the need to try and make some visual sense of all the complex, wordy ideas.
With more time this would have had more graphical ideas for the categories.
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Web sites are not posters, nor should we design them to be posters. I’ve heard this idea a lot recently, that we should be designing posters instead of web sites. But there’s an important difference here.
Posters are designed to be seen from a DISTANCE.
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OK, I admit it. I’m not really a proper designer. I have been bluffing my way through for the last 10 years as a professional and yet I have no design training whatsoever. I don’t even have a GCSE (OK, I should say ‘O’ level really) in art.
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Right. If I see another Polaroid image on a website I’m going to… well, I’m not going to do anything really apart from sneer a little, and possibly tut.
I remember the first time I saw a Photoshop plugin that produced a page curl effect.