How Developers can Take Advantage of Social Media
Working in the field of web development has a much different feel than graphics design. The work is more task-oriented and requires a higher level of concentration and detail. Not to mention bug fixes, maintenance, or getting sites running live on a web server. It seems the job of a designer is more creative and freeform. This holds true for development as well, except in a different ideology. The open…
10 Evergreen Website Layouts (that will never go out of style)
Few professions demand greater talent, experience and flexibility than web-design. Not only do you have to deal with constantly evolving customer demands, you have to deal with constantly evolving aesthetic norms and design standards. What was popular six months back may already be falling out of favor. Website layouts, once standardized and scarcely trifled with, are now the focus of extensive experimentation. While it helps to break the mold, in…
Four Design Lessons From Shopping Carts
You see them every time you go to the supermarket. Chances are, you’ve used one recently. Shopping carts have been a matter of course for supermarkets, grocery stores, and many retail outlets for decades, but did you know that Sylvan Goldman, their inventor, struggled with some of the exact same problems you yourself face as a designer? Today we’re going to explore the history of the humble shopping cart, taking…
Learning From Hackathons and How Not to Fail at One
Collaboration and education are two key words intrinsically associated with hackathons (the third being ‘free pizza’!). Hackathons promise a chance to meet other coders or designers, network with influencers and industry experts, and even find recruitment opportunities. It isn’t surprising that, with the spread of startup culture across geographic boundaries, hackathons too have started mushrooming in the likeliest – and the unlikeliest – of places. There are certain rules –…
Coding the Digg v4 Layout with HTML5 and CSS3
The social news community Digg has been online since 2004 and rapidly grew in popularity leading up to the 2008 elections. Come 2011 the Digg team performed an overhaul on the system and completely revamped the site layout. This also broke the friends system, allowing big-name publishers to game the front page. This upset many powerhouse users who were furious with the major changes. Over time the site has slowly…
20 More CSS3 Tutorials and Techniques for Creating Buttons
It has been well over a year since we last took a look at some of the latest CSS3 buttons techniques. And what a difference a year makes. No longer satisfied with just using the basic CSS3 properties (border-radius, box-shadow…), many developers have progressed to using @font-face icons, animation and 3D effects. All with only CSS. Hope you enjoy this selection: You might also like… 20 CSS3 Tutorials and Techniques…
Six Common Web Programming Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
The ubiquity of technology in our daily lives has made programming an indispensable DIY skill for the digital age. The ‘learn to code‘ movement, kick started by the easy availability of free interactive coding lessons on platforms such as Codecademy, combined with the inevitable shift of talent towards entrepreneurship in a depressed job market, has introduced thousands of people to programming. Programming is difficult. Even the simplest of coding languages…
Creating Content that Sells
Content is the most essential aspect on web, as it is for offline magazines and newspapers. It doesn’t matter what kind of website you own, it should carry content. Content is the difference between successful websites/magazines, and not so successful websites/magazines. Promotion and marketing of sites and magazines are equally important to make them successful, yet content is far more important, simply because it is the basis on which websites…
Responsive Design 101
It wasn’t too long ago that designers didn’t really need to worry how websites looked on mobile phones and tablets. Phones weren’t yet really practical for web viewing, and before the iPad, tablets were more of a novelty than an essential. Obviously, all that has changed and most tech experts predict that in the next few years, likely sooner rather than later, mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing as the…
Dealing With Your Ego as a Designer
A fundamental difference between programming intensive web-development work and graphic-focused web-design is that everyone – client to business associates – has an opinion and an alternative vision for the latter. The technically-steep learning curve of coding, whether it be the front-end or server-side configuration, tends to elicit few opinions and observations, simply because only a handful of clients actually possess the technical skills to analyze and interpret such work. Not…
Presiding as Editor over your own Design Magazine
WordPress has made it easier than ever for a web designer to setup their own blog. This system allows you to add content into your website and publish in a number of different ways. But with the ever-advancing Internet we are seeing posts transform into articles and webblogs are slowly turning into online magazines. In the realm of design we can find tens of hundreds of different design magazines. It…
Footer Design Trends
The humble footer – long ignored by web designers – has become a site of a sudden burst of creative energy in the past few years, as designers realize the flexibility of the footer as more than a mere placeholder for contact and copyright info. Facilitating this change has been a gradual move away from a fold-centric design ethos, which focused on concentrating major design and navigational elements ‘above the…
CMS: Useful Wins Again
It’s been almost twenty years since the first branded Content Management Systems (CMSs) hit the market. They were an unbearable kluge back then, and didn’t work well; but hey, if you had a bajillion dollars to toss at MarchFirst or any one of hundreds of other pre-dot-bomb era consultancies, you could have a half-baked Web CMS, delivered by a team of twenty dot-commers living large on VC funds, and talkin’…
