Archive

Designer Richard Seymour explores our response to beauty and the surprising power of objects that exhibit it.

Now this is the best HTML/CSS framework till date. Something I’ve been waiting for quite a time now. Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more. Bootstrap is built with Less and was designed [...]

The part of the world using Latin script may have enough type designers. But for the Arab world or India it is very different. More designers are needed there. — Gerard Unger, Type Designer quoted in his interview with MyFonts Gerand might be referring to only type designers here but I strongly believe that India [...]

As usual Luke Wroblewski posted his invaluable notes for An Event Apart – Atlanta, GA 2011 talks. Following are the ones that concern me: Crafting the User Experience by Sarah Parmenter On Web Typographyby Jason Santa Maria Design Principlesby Jeremy Keith

Tom Preston-Werner cofounder of Github tells about his early (and some valuable) experiences with Github and 10 things he learnt on the way. For me, 2008 was the year that I helped design, develop, and launch GitHub. Creating a new startup is an intense learning experience. Through screwups and triumphs, I have learned some valuable [...]

Fundamental principles for designing effective User Interfaces. Effective interfaces are visually apparent and forgiving, instilling in their users a sense of control. Users quickly see the breadth of their options, grasp how to achieve their goals, and do their work. → Read the article at asktog.com

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 [...]

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!

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. [...]

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. — Abigail Adams Since I’ve started designing for web, learning for me has never stopped. And there is still lot to learn which I’m sure won’t finish till end. Every week I try to read 5-7 good [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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.

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.