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.

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!

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

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

Part 1

What’s holding this thing together?
Developing the ability to see the underlying structure of a well designed web site can help you to create better web designs. It can also help you to understand the thinking behind why web sites are designed one way instead of another.

There are many factors to take into account when designing a web site. We’ll be looking at one factor; the layout; that is the glue that holds your site’s design together.
Continue reading - See How Easily You Can Learn to Design web sites like a Web Designer.

Here, there and everywhere!
Almost everyone has an LCD Monitor these days. Very few of use are still working on a CRT monitor anymore even with the incredibly attractive price tag.

The best thing about LCD monitors is you’re able to work on a fairly big screen without getting a headache or the need to slap an anti-glare or anti-radiation screen on it. The extra desk space is nice too.

Another great thing about LCDs is the nice crisp image and colorful displays, especially in the newer models that have hit the market in the past 6 months or so. With all these great features come a few set-backs that a few of us unfortunately have to experience. The most common of these are dead pixels and screen burn-in.
Continue reading - 3 ways to breathe new life into your LCD Monitors Dead Pixels!

There’s something here for everyone!
The folks over at CSS Showcase have put together a smashing collection of CSS Menus and CSS Navigation Tabs. It’s a nice visual presentation with a screen shot of each CSS Menu or Tab to help you pick out one that just right for you.

The first few links are from ALA which offer some CSS basics to get you started on the road to CSS menu and tab mastery. Further down Alsacreations has a nice gallery of 16 CSS Menus that follow the standards as defined by the W3C. You can even send in your own menu if you like.
Continue reading - CSS Menu and Navigation Tab Mania!

When is Web Design not really Web Design?

I’ve been noticing a lot of HTML, CSS talk falling under the heading of web design.

This is all well and good but I’ve always failed to understand what HTML and CSS has to do with Web Design. It’s nice to think you’re designing a web site when you’re tagging content with HTML code or making an inline list in CSS, but once you’re at this stage of a web site project the web design work has already been done.
Continue reading - Web Design from a web designers perspective

Signs, Signs, everywhere a Sign.
Bitbox has put a list of signs together designed to help you find out whether you are a hardcore web designer. Even if you’re not, it’s a fun read and you’re bound to get some good insight in the world of us creative types.

Here are some of the signs I’m guilty of:

• You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
• You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
• You consider meals interruptions.
• You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.

Continue reading - Are you a Hardcore Web Designer?