hello! This is the weblog of Amrinder Sandhu
— a freelance web designer from Punjab, India; who runs a small design studio.

I really love to do an extensive research before I design anything, may it be a simple search input box, my wedding card or a complex information dashboard. I’ve already expressed my love for reading books about User Interface Design, usability, typography, IA and HTML/CSS. Here is a video I found which I strongly believe is a must watch for every UI designer.

Couple of weeks back, I received a dribbble invite from Tuhin. It’s truly an amazing resource of design ideas and inspiration. I’m already in love with it. . It’s beautifully designed by Dan Cederholm but by using better font-stack it can be enhanced even further.

King of Web Standards Jeffrey Zeldman says, “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”, and very rightly so. Content is what (mostly) people use World Wide Web for and it can’t take back seat while we design a website. However, based on recent article by Jeff Croft, I believe, Context precedes Content, and ignoring the context is injustice to both content and the user.

Jeff wrote:

In my experience, I rarely want to serve up the exact same HTML to mobile users that I do to desktop users. That’s not to say it never happens. For example, a blog or simple news site may be a case where mobile users really are looking for the same thing that desktop users are — perhaps the same HTML with a screen-specific layout will work great. But, by and large, mobile users have different goals, and that necessitates different HTML.

Since users have different goals in different contexts (desktop and mobile), they need to be served with different content. Hence, Context precedes Content.

More on the subject:

• CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold
• More on CSS Media Queries for Mobile

I strongly believe that a freelance web designer must learn something, if not everything, about UX (User Experience).

For practicing User Experience Designers, one of the most important laws isn’t Fitts’s Law, which helps us understand how to design interactive elements. Nor is it Hick’s Law, which describes how long people take to make decisions.

It’s Sturgeon’s Law, which tells us that 99% of everything is crap. It’s easy to produce a poor quality result—anyone without the critical skills is capable of it and there are a ton of those people floating around.

— Read complete article at UIE.com

HTML5 has a lot to offer and I’m trying to get most out of it. Following are the few resources I’m using to learn HTML5:

HTML5 Live

John Allsopp is running this live course by Sitepoint which includes 2 weeks of live classes, hands on exercise, live Q&A sessions plus dedicated private forum. Seems very promising package.

HTML5 with ThinkVitamin

Last month, Carsonified came up with great video tutorial library covering all sorts of topics for web designers and developers. I opted in for HTML5, CSS3, design, UX and jQuery . With over 100 videos till now and 2 videos are added everyday, there is lots of interesting and valuable stuff to catch up with.

HTML5 for Web Designers

Nice folks at Happy Cog finally published their first book under A Book Apart and it is right on the money. Written by Jeremy Keith and beautifully designed by Jason Santa Maria, it covers huge 900 page specifications of HTML5 briefly (in just 85 pages) and it’s easy to understand. I’m really thankful to Jeffery Zeldman and crew  for shipping it the most remote web designer of the world.

Most companies spend large amount of money to come up with all type of plans and offers as to delight their customers. However, they rarely examine the real behavior of a customer.

Consumers’ impulse to punish bad service—at least more readily than to reward delightful service—plays out dramatically in both phone-based and self-service interactions, which are most companies’ largest customer service channels. In those settings, our research shows, loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be.

So stop trying to delight your customers and think about making your product solve their problems.

Even web design have different types. Luke Wroblewski mentioned about it in his notes on Jared Spool‘s talk: Anatomy of a Design Decision at An Event Apart.

• Unintentional design happens when you were paying attention to something else (like the system or process). It works when our users will put up with whatever we give them; we don’t care about support costs or the pain from frustration.
• Self-design works well when there are enough people like you to use your product, you don’t mind excluding others, and you use your product everyday like your users do.
• Genius design When we’ve previously learned what users need. Works when we already know user’s knowledge, previous experiences, and behavior of people; we are solving the same design problems repeatedly.
• Activity-focused design starts with the activities people need to do. Works when we can identify users and their activities; we need to go beyond our own previous experiences; innovations can come from removing complexity.
• Experience-focused design: There’s a difference between being usable and having a good experience. Experience is the gaps between the activities. Works great when we want to improve our users’ complete experiences, in between the specific activities; we can be pro-active about the designs; game-changing innovations are the top priority.

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I have an affinity towards looking into details for good design and markup techniques. Very often, I check popular sites to analyze their approach. Woorkup is one of the 10 blogs I check more than twice a week. It publishes some really nice articles and has an interesting layout. But I’ve never liked its navigation design. To me it feels that sub navigation elements are dependent upon main navigation elements. While I was checking this, something weird came to my notice. The site logo is not a unique element in header but. I’m sure you won’t be able to guess how they have marked up the logo! it’s a background image assigned to #nav.

#nav { background:url("images/logo.jpg") no-repeat scroll 0 0 transparent; ... }

That’s really weird! And Mr. Lupetti should notice that. I also wrote about Woorkup’s design last year.

Existing Woorkup.com header

Revised Woorkup.com header using Firebug

Earlier this year, I wrote a detailed article about CSS Font-stack which led lots of people to rethink about their font-stacks. I revised font-stacks of some famous websites in the article, I love typography was one of them . I tweeted @Ilovetypography about the font-stack issue, but, in disagreement they pointed me to an overstated comment under the article saying:

If John Boardley at I Love Typography specified Georgia before Cambria then I’m sure that was no accident. If a user has both Cambria and Georgia on their system then he wants them to see his site in Georgia. On the odd chance that the user has Cambria but not Georgia he’d prefer them to see it in Cambria than an anonymous sans-serif font that he has less control over.

After reading the following from the Six Revision’s recent article:

According to Web designer Amrinder Sandhu’s February 2010 article on A Way Back, the typography site I Love Typography had Cambria in its font stack, behind Georgia, which means that with Georgia’s near-99% market penetration among Windows users, virtually all of them would see it in Georgia, not Cambria. However, a check in May 2010 shows Cambria no longer in the ILT font stack.

I was convinced that some intelligent people are really giving a thought to what I have written.

Minimalism is often practiced to achieve simplicity in design. Dmitry Fadeyev of Usability Post beautifully puts down the true meaning of minimalism.

I can see how minimalism can have a clear meaning in art, where the artist is free to create their own rules and ideas. Minimalism is a style that can be characterized by that use of simple, basic forms and white space. But when we apply this term to everyday design, the term begins to lose meaning. Clear, clean and simple design isn’t minimalist. It’s just good, clear design.

And about simplicity, he says:

Simplicity isn’t a design trend, it’s an attribute of good design.

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FontFonter: Try Web FontFonts on any website using a new service by FontShop. It uses custom CSS and other techniques to temporarily replace a site’s font styles with Web FontFonts.

In the Indian sweet shops it’s common practice that people taste every sweet they want to buy. That gives them better feeling and idea of the real taste before they actually pay for it. On the web we have similar practice called Gradual Engagement, where we first let the users try the website/web application before asking them to sign up.

Being a self-employed web designer, I have to work on various aspects of a project along with Visual Design; namely, Information Architecture, User-experience design and Usability. More often I get projects where the requirement is more than just Visual Design and HTML/CSS. It feels good to solve problems than just adding color and pixels.

I love 37signals. I’ve read both of their books, Getting Real and Rework, and tried all of their web-based apps. Basecamp—a web-based project collaboration tool, is what I use almost daily. Last year, while signing up for Basecamp, I noticed that the sign up page required some alignment.

CSS3 is helping the designers get creative and save time spent in slicing images from crash-prone Photoshop. Just like web standards have helped reduce code from 30% to 60%, CSS3 is here to take this reduction to next step. But not everyone seems to be taking advantage of this.

It has been over an year now when I first thought of Relpost—a place where related quality articles and blog posts can be found. There are many good articles and blog posts that get buried as archives. Relpost intends to fetch those valuable articles (lost in the archives) and put them together where they could be easily found.

I looked up the page for the Get Started button but it was nowhere on the page. Soon I realized it’s the Sign-up they are referring to. Another thing which seems a little confusing to me is the Sign in link under Join Gowalla.

Serious efforts are being made to get more typeface choices on the web to enhance web typography. Still, most of us prefer web-safe fonts like: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman and Arial. Though choices are limited, yet the number can be increased by exploring other pre-installed fonts.

It feels awesome when you are featured among the best web designers, especially in the beginning of your career. Just like Oscar nomination, it’s more than exciting! In web designing, there are no Oscar kind-of awards, so getting featured in some of the best web galleries or good design-blogs with huge audience is more than enough to satisfy you.

With over 173,900 subscribers and 90,300 Twitter followers, Smashing Magazine is well known among designers as a source of high-quality content. Recently, it has been redesigned and Smashing Network has been introduced. But the site needs better Information Architecture and there are a few usability issues as well.