Posts Aboutdesign
Welcome to the Club, Verdana!
As a designer, I've always had a love of fonts since I can really remember. Its become quite the obsession lately and I find myself acting giddy when I come across a beautiful font such as Mrs. Eaves or misjudging a business that uses fonts such as Comic Sans or Papyrus. So, you can imagine my excitement when I found out there is a so called 'Fonts Hall of Fame' at The Museum of Modern Art. On March 2nd, MoMA acquired 23 digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design Collection.
Surviving Mission: Revisions
For most (okay, maybe all) designers, "revisions" is a dreaded suicide mission that often leads to creative carnage and sub-portfolio worthy work. You just invested all of your creative juices into this award-worthy project, presented to the client and now they are asking for a classier font, a warmer blue and something, you know, swooshing + guttural sound + beep, beeping across the screen. What?!? What are you talking about??? Surely some designers know how to avoid this arbitrary mine field. I mean, amazing, un-compromised websites come out all the time - how do those designers avoid revision quicksand?
Studies Show Designers Who "Sell" Help Prevent Creative Cancer
As a designer I love the website Clients From Hell. If you're not familiar with it, it's essentially a collection of the crazy things clients say that make designers want to beat their head against a sharp pointed object. I will go there sometimes just for comic-relief. It's therapeutic knowing other designers are hearing things even worse than what I am dealing with. Here are a few of my favorites:
“Make sure you tell the Googles of the world that the site will be launching soon so it places high in their results.”
The Bounty Bev Logo Design Process
When we were approached by Bounty Bev to design their logo and initial web presence, I was beyond excited. Distributor of Fort Collins Brewery and Caldera Brewing Company, Bounty Bev is small, willing to take chances, passionate about what they do, and ready to receive creative and branding direction. My favorite type of client to work with.
Having just wrapped up the logo design, I thought it would be fun to share with you an overview of the process.
"That was Awesome!" Understanding the Key Components of Experience Design
When was the last time you had a really enjoyable experience with a product or service? Do you remember how it made you feel? Do you remember what about it made you feel that way? What about your experience stuck out most in your mind? If you are like me, some of these questions can be fairly difficult to answer, while others may be incredibly obvious. On top of this, the answers may seem clearer in one case than they do in another. Welcome to the world of experience design. This post is primarily taken from the first part of a presentation I made a BarCamp Nashville in 2009, entitled "Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences".
Slide from Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences
Cross-Browser Normalization
If you work in a web design or development firm, then you are probably already very (if not too) familiar with the various idiosyncrancies across the major browsers. Even before you start to apply the stylesheets you can spot noticable differences in the way the browsers render the html. This is because the major browsers come with a default stylesheet they use to render html when nothing else is available. It is a very simple stylesheet, mainly affecting paragraphs, headings, links, and fonts. This is why, without any styling, unvisited links appear blue with an underline, among other things. While using links is a trivial example, small differences in font sizes and paragraph margins can become a headache and can cause you to start adding unnecessary fluff to your well crafted stylesheets. There are some techniques you can utilize to minimize the damage, or what we in the industry refer to as browser normalization.
The Niftiest of Corners
Nifty Corners Cube is a javascript library written by Alessandro Fulciniti that enables you to easily implement rounded corners on your page. There are many different utilities out there on the web that do basically the same thing, but you'll be hard pressed to find one that does it any easier.
If you have ever attempted to implement rounded corners in your markup and css, you'll find that your markup quickly becomes riddled with presentational divs, loads of images, and the css seems to be playing the role of a bar bouncer. It's even worse if the content box you have rounded needs to be fluid in any direction.
