A common entry you see on many web design blogs is the one where people are looking for inspiration when getting ready to tackle a new design. While I don’t advise looking at other sites before you begin to design your own, for some people this works really well. What I never see though is people recommending any Flash sites to look at. I wonder if most CSS/XHTML designers still hold a grudge (or whatever you wish to call it) against Flash sites because many of them still are nightmarish to say the least.
For example I love to look at 2advanced or Joshua Davis from an information design perspective (along with a visual design perspective) and see how I can learn from them. Granted most Flash sites I come across serve absolutely no purpose on the web, but I think if more designers open their minds to checking out the good ones then their designer inspiration toolbox will become that much more valuable.
The message. This will always be the most important element of any design that you do. The message that your design gives will resonate through the minds of your users. If your design delivers your intended message then you have succeeded. If your design supercedes your message and hides it, then the design has failed.
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It’s about time we clean up the blogosphere, it doesn’t have to be this ugly, and not everyone needs to hire me or my likes to get a pretty blog. There’s a lot you can do yourself, and most of it is related to your content.
Take a look at your average listing of posts, usually your front page but it could also be a category page or an archive. Post after post after post after post. Boring? Might be. Long? In most cases, yes. Too long? Yep, I’d say so.
I believe in using read more functionality, in other words, in just displaying some of the content (if the post is a semi-long or long one) in post listings. If you display a 20 paragraphs long post after a 30 paragraphs long post, but before a 50 paragraphs long post, then you have a very ugly page.
By using read more functionality, available in any good blogging software, you can show as much content as you like in your listings, and it shouldn’t be too much.
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Jon Tangerine, David DeSandro, Trent Walton have all come up with ingenious ways to create image-free logotypes by pushing the limits of CSS (Sean Martell made a mouth-watering CSS-based logo too, but doesn’t contain text) that one has to wonder: is this the next step in online branding and identity?
The simplest argument against this could be that a logo must be constant. In the absence of CSS styling, possibly even helper JavaScript, an image will not suddenly morph into a default browser style and render a brand generic. See the image above for how the CSS-based Opera logo degrades in different browsers.
Now that excludes the scenario where images are turned off, and where text—styled text—can come in. Instead of simple image replacement techniques, we now have @font-face embedding and other advanced effects to bring the text as close as possible to the original design.
Text is great because you can read it, as can search engines. Another thing text based logos have going for them is they’re easier to make bigger; that’ll win over a lot of clients.
But there’s a great deal of extra markup required to achieve the necessary look. Does this make sense for the notion of a logo, which is inherently more portable with an image than with a bunch of divs, spans, classes and IDs? Should logos always be images and nothing but, or can they be both text and images? Which should come first, designing the logo in the browser or in a graphics program? Or should all of this experimentation remain just that: experiments?
Me, I just love we could be on the brink of shattering print conventions, yet again.
Blame it on the need to express oneself in as many avenues possible, or the tendency for this community to navel-gaze out of narcissism or frustration, but you can’t deny how comic strips are a brilliant outlet for these designers. Each carries a different subject, sense of humor, and illustration style that you’ll want to subscribe to all of them.
Brad Colbow: The Brads
Brad’s also been tapped to create more informative strips such as Learning About Contrast in Design and Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5.
Kyle Weems: CSS Squirrel
I’ve mentioned CSS Squirrel when he announced his branching out to podcasting, but poking fun at the latest industry developments and insider info is where he shines.
N.C. Winters: Freelance Freedom
NC goes through the ups and downs of freelancing at Freelance Switch’s Freelance Freedom.
Business Guys on Business Trips
BGOBT tells the most awful office tales in detailed narrations but minimal line art.
Matthew Inman: The Oatmeal
The man behind Mingle2 and SEOmoz, Matthew has gone on to create humorous quizzes and infographic-style comics at the very viral The Oatmeal.
Phil Thompson: The FrontEnders
Phil does a front-end spin on the British soap The Eastenders.
Ricardo Gimenes: Behind the Websites
Ricardo creates a fleet of colorful characters to represent different websites, and now makes strips for Smashing Magazine’s The Smashing Cartoons.
Dribbble is a finely crafted community for designers, by designers. It’s invite-only in order to maintain high quality work on the site, but that doesn’t mean you can’t browse around for inspiration. Give it enough time to fine-tune the tagging and search features (color search is already there; UI patterns, textures, etc. would be great) and we may have the most useful, A-grade design reference out there from people who know their stuff.
There are several things that set it apart from generic portfolio and gallery sites, as it is also dubbed the “Twitter for designers”. From the tagline “what are you working on?” to its system of “rebounds” (basically a response to a “shot”) to uploads of 400 pixels or less, Dribbble is focused on brevity and the right now even when they could have entertained the whole spectrum.
Of course there’s the basketball metaphor working all around too, which when expanded even further can create some interesting activities and interactions for the community: think games, collaborations, meetups, leagues, merits. Think social games like Foursquare and BarStar, only more productive.
People have been complaining about the quality of a lot of things in the design community lately, whether it’s resource articles or the actual interactions within the community, and I see Dribbble as a partial solution to that.
This week, the Museum of Modern Art added the @ symbol to its permanent collection in the Department of Architecture and Design. Although it stands out because it’s intangible it carries just as much history and impact. For starters, did you know that @ has been around since the 6th or 7th century to denote a unit of measure? It’s been used for commerce since, made its way into the typewriter in 1885, then in 1971, Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first email system, giving it new purpose in the age of computing.
The story of the @ sign and its entry into the MoMA is also a fascinating lesson on what design can do:
The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol.
The article continues on its value as a different kind of design piece: “It does not declare itself a work of design, but rather reveals its design power through use.” Around the world, different countries have composed different mythologies for it, and its uses are still expanding both socially and technologically.
This is probably the greatest kind of design—the @ symbol is both ancient and modern, local and universal, practical and beautiful, by continuously evolving in its meaning.
Coming Together is a font consisting entirely of different ampersands designed created by 400 artists and designers to help the Haiti earthquake victims. It’s available for $20 from leading font distributors and all proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.
The “Coming Together” font contains over 400 glyphs and is supplied as a single, cross-platform OpenType font. All glyphs are accessible using OpenType-savvy applications, Unicode-savvy utilities, the Character Map utility on Windows, and FontBook on Mac OS X.
This is the fourth Font Aid initiative by the Society of Typographic Aficionados, the first one in 1999.
While it’s a bit late to write about this, it’s never too late to help Haiti out. What is unfortunate, however, is that another major earthquake has struck, this time in Chile. Tsunami warnings have been hoisted across the Pacific as well. I hope the Type Society and other groups extend their help for this particular disaster too.
I’ll get straight to my answer: very.
More specifically, I’m quite excited about what this league is doing for a branch of typography which seems almost mythical. We know about paid fonts and free fonts, but what’s buzzing big right now is the use of fonts on the web with the emergence of @font-face embedding, webfonts, and services like TypeKit. But what about usage and modification of fonts in general?
The open source debate is always tricky when creative works are in question, but the case shouldn’t be different for typefaces. The League is going beyond that debate, but still has some tough questions to be answered:
Is open source typography important enough to fight for? Are we all brave enough to do something to change the status quo? Is the status quo okay, do we really need to change anything at all?
What is the status quo? If this 3-year old post is any indication, it looks like a sleepy town that needs some jazzing up. The Open Font Library is more closely linked to the open source software community than with the open source design community, but they mentioned Lettercase being a Github-like tool, so it looks like they’re taking steps towards that already.
Should we fight for open source typography and change the status quo? It could potentially compete alongside the hosted font embedding services and create a fine alternative for web designers using custom web fonts. Options are good.
Sound off with your thoughts there!
Haven’t gotten into the holiday spirit quite yet? Perhaps these design and development focused advent calendars will do the trick. Come to think of it, it should do even more than that; you get a treat every single day for 24 days straight. Sounds even better than Christmas day? Almost.
This site may not have started the “geeky” advent calendar trend, but it has certainly built an excellent reputation and tradition for web designers everywhere. The design continues to be cutting edge and inspiring as well.
All PHP, all holiday season long. See also the Perl Advent Calendar. (There’s a Rails one too, but the original post seems to be missing now.)
Few things are better than a holiday sale, and this advent calendar themed bazaar by SitePoint looks great. The format is pretty clever too: each offer lasts for only 24 hours, and you won’t know what products come on next.
Here’s one for the WordPress lovers, made by no less than WP Engineer. I hope that next year this becomes a community-wide effort as with the PHP Advent Calendar. Archive here.
A great crash course, if you will, into everything about social media. Not quite for designers or developers, but a great resource nonetheless.
Lists done better?
Writing this article made me realize this could actually be a way to create better list articles. Instead of cramming everything in and bombarding your readers with one long, heavy post, create a series. Exercise patience and restraint on your part and theirs. Keep them coming back for more.
Once you’ve reached your quota, do a round-up, and store the past articles in a safe place. They can even be realigned or revisited (hopefully not like recycled fruitcake, mind you) when the holidays come around again. Of course you can write all year long, but the idea is also avoiding predictability and knowing when to make things special.
And speaking of which, may you all have a special holiday season this year!
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