I really enjoy being a web designer because it involves problem solving more than just adding colors. Couple of weeks back Dan Cederholm posted a rebound of a dropdown menu for trendy dribbble. While scanning the comments I found a UI challenge put up by Dave Simon. I accepted it gladly.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
Every designer is inspired by some other designer—better or more experienced. Inspiration is must to keep us moving forward and keep trying to produce better results. Without inspiration, sometimes we get stuck when ideas stop falling. Every designer should be prepared for such situation.
Last Friday I came back home from Canada after almost 4 long months. It is sooner than expected. My friends and family never thought I would come any sooner because people, here in Punjab, are crazy about abroad. But I have different priorities and prefer family, friends and comfortable life above money.
Ask the right questions, understand the problem, and explore lots of possible solutions.
Recently two big design community sites have been redesigned, Woorkup.com (earlier woork.blogspot.com) and Smashing Magazine, very popular sites among designers. Smashing magazine redesign has disappointed me but I am glad to see the new face of Woorkup.com. Design is really cool and clean. However I think there are some following usability issues.
Money drives most of things in this world. Everybody wants to start earning as soon as possible, without even being eligible. One must know when he has learn enough, and when his skills should reap the yield.
In a couple of weeks I’m going to India and need to take my beautiful iMac with me. But I am little conscious about its transportation. Whether to ship it via FedEx (very expensive) or take it as my luggage (better idea). Finally I decided to take it in my luggage.
In last couple of years I’ve discovered my love for webdesign books. I have learnt a lot from some really good books and blogs. Living in India, you don’t find any design workshops and good designers to talk to and learn from. One has to rely on books, rather than ebooks I would say, because Amazon doesn’t take online orders from my country :(.
I would love to attend a web conference some day. There is lots of stuff to learn, even from somebody’s notes. Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, has published some valuable stuff from invaluable talks from great speakers at An Event Apart.
Today I took interesting quiz: “So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?” hosted by Ironic Sans. It was great and I scored 19/20. I missed out at Kawasaki.
When I started designing for the beautiful web, I didn’t know where to start. Because in my country (India) you won’t find great designers, especially web designers. Luckily I got in touch with Klaus Komenda — a yahoo employee — who guided me on how to start learning web design.
Couple of years back when I started web designing after college I used photoshop as most designers do. I worked hard to learn everything about photoshop through video tutorials, blogs etc. Few months later I came to know about fireworks. I used it and it was easier to use than photoshop, plus it is designed for Web designers for prototyping and creating website/UI mockups.
Finally got Web Form Design. I have to order it from U.S. due to unavailability in Canada. After reading few page I knew I would have really missed it.
Wired magazine invited various designers to re-design Craiglist.org. Khoi Vinh’s design is amazing.
Every designer loves photoshop. I love it too. However sometimes we need it to perform better. Here’s Adobe’s article to optimize Photoshop (via) and a two-tip dedicated site by Dan Rubin.
Jason Santa Maria giving useful tips about preparing and presenting before audience.
Even though slides are what most people equate with “the talk,” depending on your presentation style, they are actually one of the least important aspects.
iTunes 9.0 came out this week. It has some really cool features but the design is not very cool. I think Tim Van Damme had better design idea of iTunes Store than designers at Apple. Apple iStore 9.0 design PS: There is some box showing up in top right corner. I don’t know what it [...]
Note & Point: A gallery by Cameron Moll hosting nice presentation made with Keynote (Mac) and Powerpoint (PC). Second and Park: A beautiful design by Things that are brown. Cardobserver: Gallery featuring beautiful business cards. Sushi & Robots (redesign): A beautiful redesign by young SF based designer, author and speaker. Biggest Apple clean, simple design. [...]
This week I started with jQuery. I know, I know I’m very late to it, but thankfully I am onto it. Starting with an essential jQuery book: Learning jQuery 1.3 and few tutorials. Here are few links I found useful: 15 Resources to get you started with jQuery from Scratch 10 tips for writing better [...]
Hello there! This is first post of its kind and there will be lot more in coming time. I’ll be posting links of what I’ve read, learned, saw during the whole week. Useful articles & links: 12 business tips from Simon Campbell of Erskine Design, UK. Behind the Typedia Logo Design by John Lagndon (Da [...]
Finally I managed to re-design my portfolio (http://designbyanaami.com). And yes, I agree it is one of the toughest design I’ve ever done so far. Waiting to know your comments on this design.