Jared Spool talks about Calls to Action with Paul Boag: … you have to be clear on what clicking that link is going to deliver. You have to mitigate any risk, so you have to have message that says “look, we’re not signing you up to be trapped into something. This is safe.” And then [...]
Designing for User Experience involves much more work than designing User Interface. UX design begins by learning about the business model, doing user research and understanding how a service can fit into the users’ lives in a meaningful way. Thus UX design has a crucial part in defining the business strategy, providing baselines for business [...]
Hiding important stuff behind code words might cost you business. Navigation titles should be clear and that people use in daily life. Jared Spool beautifully explains this with examples and following DOs and DON’Ts: Don’t hide your most valuable assets behind generic links. Avoid copying the design of your site’s navigation from other sites, especially [...]
Though wireframes are very close to visual design but they have a purpose and very important one. Tanya Breshears at Zurblog explains: At the wireframe stage, we want to focus on structure and content, not the color of the text or the drop shadow on that sidebar. It’s far better to limit the possible variables [...]
Ever wondered why Google’s website are not-so-beautiful? It’s because they have a different design strategy. A lot of designers want to increase the line height or padding in order to make the interface ‘breathe’. We delibrately don’t do that. We want to squeeze in as much information as possible above the fold. We recoganize that [...]
SlideShare to slides is what Youtube is to videos. Lots of valuable content by invaluable presenters can be found there. I’ve rebuilt the SlideShare Player following Joshua Porter’s strategy of Metrics driven design.
We designers have affinity for details and love to dig deep to make pixel-perfect designs. We spend hours on those tiny details that usually go unnoticed by the target audience. Only our fellow designers and sometimes a few design obsessed clients notice those details. I’ve no doubt that details matter and must be taken care of, but what matters more is the overall User Experience.
I love 37signals products and their work strategies. In this video Ryan Signer – UI designer and product manager at 37signals – walked through the process of how they build web-apps at 37signals. Really impressive!
After digging deep into design, layout, grids, typography lately I moved my focus to another interesting field related to web design — User Experience Design. Recently I’ve been reading books and article about it. Here is another useful video I found today [via Aarron Walter]. Worth watching. UX Week 2009 | Jesse James Garrett | [...]
If there are few people who know what they are designing and know what they are talking about, then Andy Rutledge is one among them. Here is another useful article — The Design Lesson: 1 of 1. In graphic design, nothing is what it actually is. Everything other than content is representative of something else. [...]
Me: Hey, I want to say something.
CF (Comment Form): Wait, what’s your name?
Me: I’m Amrinder and I’m trying to say… [interrupted]
CF: What’s your email address?
Me: … it’s amrinder@xyz.com. So I was saying that… [interrupted]
CF: Do you have a website? If yes, what’s the URL?
Me: … yes, I have but… anyway it’s http://designbyanaami.com
CF: Now please leave your comment.
Me: Ohk, I was saying that… your article is… good. Actually there was something else in my mind which I forgot…
This was my conversation with a comment form.
While designing login page for Intel, I had an opportunity to think about reducing login inputs with intentions of making things simple. Though the login form is already simple with just few inputs, I was thinking if they can be further reduced. I believe, yes. 
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]