BlogRUSH has been released with a tremendous reception. This new widget is spreading like wildfire across the blogosphere. We’ve placed the BlogRUSH widget on 2 of our blogs. I wouldn’t say it greatly increased on-line traffic but it’s still early in the game to know how well it will work. I’ll give it some time to see if it has any real potential.

BlogRUSH claims to be “The Fastest And Easiest Way To Instantly Drive a Flood Of Targeted Readers To Your Blog…Absolutely Free!”

“The ‘pattern’ book has become a familiar genre for frequent readers of technical manuals. The idea is to sift through mountains of architectural or design schemes and then to categorize and catalogue the most frequent ideas and present their strengths and weaknesses. This type of book has been a success in software engineering, but can it translate to website design, where designers have everyday and frequent access to other designs? At worst, these books provide a common industry vocabulary (assuming it was read by everyone in the industry). How many people knew what a factory method referred to before Erich Gamma’s Design Patterns was released? At best, as in the case of that ‘original’ software design patterns book, mountains of complex ideas are archived into a single reference and will sit within arm’s reach for the rest of your life. So, is the web design discipline full of patterns that evade common sense?”
Continue reading - The Design of Sites: An outstanding guide to Web Design.

One of the main considerations of designing a web site is the display resolution you plan on using. You’ll need to decide on which resolution is best for your site and your visitors.

Some web sites are designed with a fixed size, meaning they stay the same size regardless of the size of the browser window.

Other sites are designed to scale with the browser, in other words, the website will enlarge or shrink to fit the size of a browser window as it is resized by the user.
Continue reading - Here’s a Quick Way to deal with Display Resolutions in your Web Design.

So many fonts, so little time. Here a fantastic list of fonts from the Font Goblin. The people over at Typographica.org have scanned through the thousands of fonts that came out in 2006 and late 2005. They’ve filtered out the unusable ones and have come up with a list of their favourite fonts.
Continue reading - Font Goblin: The Best Fonts of 2006 and beyond!

Forms are an unruly bunch. They’re used each and every day for collecting all kinds of user input and information collection on the web. Unfortunately the design of the many forms on the web is not consistent from one site to another. There are forms I can get through without too much trouble and other forms that are a complete nightmare.

Here’s a good place to start understanding more about forms and designing them to work better for your users.
Continue reading - Little know secrets for designing killer forms!

A must read for anyone interested in the fundamentals of creative communication and conveying meaning in our designs. Useful across all areas of design and art, these fundamentals break down into artistic vocabulary (line, form, color, texture) and artistic grammar (contrast, balance, harmony).

An excellent article on contrast, it’s effect on the visual message and how elements in a design relate to each other.

Contrast and Meaning by Andy Rutledge

If you’ve ever been without proper copy for a web page layout you’ll appreciate this online tool. It’s an online generator of greek text also know as Lorem Ipsum. ‘Lorem Ipsum’ is the first two words you’ll see in a passage of greek text.

There’s more info about Lorem Ipsum on the site if you’re looking for more facts. There are also a few translations to english on the site if you’re curious to know just what all that jibberish really means.

It’s a simple, easy to use tool, and highly useful for those times when you don’t have the text you need in order to create your designs.
Continue reading - Lorem Ipsum: It’s all Greek to me!

Having the right image on your web site can add visual excitement, turn heads your way, enhance your message and inspire further reading of your content.

Finding the right image isn’t always easy. There are lots of fantastic stock photo sites out there that have a huge collection of professional images to choose from. Unfortunately going to each site individually in search of your images can take a lot of time.

Your worries are over. There’s a new breed of specialized stock photo search engines arriving on the scene. These new search engines can search more than one stock photo site at a time and save you a lot of time in the process.
Continue reading - Image Power Searches: Finding the perfect image fast!

Regular Column

Here is the first of a new series of posts that will feature a bunch of free fonts we’ve collected from all over the web. Our Font Goblin gets to go out (when he’s been good) to hunt and peck around for the newest free fonts. He brings back any free fonts deemed worthy of your web design font collection.

Here’s what we have for you today from the Goblin.
Continue reading - Font Goblin: Free Fonts for your Web Designs

Looking for some good inspiration for your web designs? Here is a great lesson on some basic design movements. You will definitly expand your creative scope and open new ideas and ways of thinking about your designs.

Larrisa Meek does a great job explaining 7 design movements, affectionately know as Design-isms, and how today’s web design relates to them.
Continue reading - 7 classic design styles to inspire your web designs