Published March 31st, 2008 in Design
Grid-based design is obviously a popular approach in modern web design. Ford designers that use grids, this post includes links to useful tools that can improve your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as some articles for advanced techniques. For those of you who are not as familiar with the details of grid-based design, there are plenty of articles and learning resources here.
Articles:
Grids Are Good – Presentation in a PDF document
Grid (page layout) – Wikipedia
Why Use a Grid – Mark Boulton
5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Preface – Mark Boulton
5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Part 1 – Mark Boulton
Published March 30th, 2008 in Competition
Thank you very much to everyone who participated last week in the first round of our Blog Design Madness tournament. Today round two begins, with 32 blogs still remaining. The voting will close Monday night at 9:00 PM Eastern (US). As always, please take a moment to vote for your favorite designs (if you’re reading in a feed reader or email you will need to click-through to the post to vote). The rest of the tournament will be completed within the next 10 days, so be sure to come back and see how your favorites are doing. If you want to make sure you don’t miss a chance to vote, please subscribe to the feed if you haven’t already. Thanks for voting!
GROUP 1
Freelance Switch
Vocino.com
[poll=34]
Published March 29th, 2008 in Links
Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I used to do a roundup of the best links from each week. A few weeks ago I decided to change that from every week to every month (you can read my reasoning here). So, here are many of the articles that I have really enjoyed this month.
Web Design and Development:
5 Most Common Web Standards Misconceptions – from CSS Globe.
11 Accessibility Tips – from CSS Globe.
Create a Digg-like FAQ Page Using mootools – from Six Revisions.
How to Create an Effective Web Design Questionnaire – from Six Revisions.
How to Completely Test Your Website – from Digital Inspiration.
5 Useful URL Rewriting Examples Using .htaccess – from Roshan’s Blog.
Published March 26th, 2008 in Design Process
Earlier this week I posted a group interview with several established and successful designers. One of the questions that was asked to each participant was “What do you feel are the most important skills for a designer to have/develop?” By far the most popular answer was “communication skills.” While this is not technically a design-related skill, I was really pleased to see those responses, because I feel the same way. Communication skills can make or break any design project that you’re working on, so I thought I would cover the topic in more detail.
Published in Competition
Here is the second half of round one in the Blog Design Madness competition! If you haven’t been with us the past few days you can check out this post that introduces the competition and you can see the blogs that competed two days ago.
Today we have another 32 excellent designs to decide on. Below each pair you will see a poll. Please vote on the design that you like the best. You can see the results from the other day at the end of this post. Next week we’ll move on with round 2 and beyond.
Thanks for your participation!
GROUP 3
Web Designer Wall
Instigator Blog
Published in Competition
The Blog Design Madness competition is now officially underway! There are 64 blogs that have been chosen, and the participants are all listed in this post. Because each competition requires a separate poll, I decided to break up the first round into 2 parts. There are 16 matchups in this post involving 32 outstanding blog designs, and the second half of round one will come in a few days (but I did list the other 32 participants at the end of this post for those of you who are curious).
Each matchup includes a poll, links and a screenshot of both blogs. Please vote for as many of the matchups as possible (if you’re reading in an RSS reader or in email, you’ll have to click through to the post to be able to vote, as you’ll see below). Voting will be open for 24 hours (until 9:00 PM Tuesday, Eastern time – US).
Published March 23rd, 2008 in Design
Recently I had the privilege to do a brief interview by email with 10 excellent designers. I asked each designer the same five questions, and all of their responses are included below. You probably are familiar with most, if not all, of these people, and I’m sure there is plenty that we can all learn from these interviews.
The participants are:
Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe
John Phillips of Freelance Folder
David Airey
Matt Griffin of Liquid Design Media
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks
Connor Wilson
Thord Daniel Hedengren of Splashpress Media
Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design
Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design
Dejan Cancarevic of StylizedWeb
Published March 20th, 2008 in Competition
Tonight I’m sitting at my desk wishing that I didn’t have work to do so I could be on the couch watching college basketball. I know many readers are from various parts of the world, so if you’re not familiar with American sports, March Madness is a huge event for college basketball fans. There is a tournament involving 64 teams that takes about 3 weeks to determine the national champion.
You may be wondering what this has to do with web design, and quite honestly the answer is nothing, and that’s part of my problem (and something I’ll attempt to change). Since I’m stuck at the computer most of the time and I won’t be watching many of the games, I figured it would be fun to have a similar type of tournament here to coincide with March Madness. Since the games started today and I just now got the idea I’m a little late, but that’s ok, we have enough time.
Published March 19th, 2008 in Design Process
Freelance web design can be an ideal part-time business. Starting on a part-time basis allows you to gain valuable experience and ease your way into full-time status rather than taking the plunge and the risk that comes along with it. During a stint as a part-timer you can learn volumes about what it takes to be a successful freelancer and you’ll probably find some things that you want to do more of and some things that you want to do less.
15 Tips for Part-Time Designers to Improve on the Experience:
