Tag: WEB DESIGN

One of the most time consuming activities in graphic and Web design is the picking of fonts. It's basically a crap shoot: there's no way to see what text will look like until after you've selected a font -- and when you have a list of 200 fonts to get through, the process can be painstakingly tiresome. That's where Wordmark.it comes in; it's a Web app that scans your computer for installed fonts, ...

Back for its sixth year and as nerdy as ever, 24 ways gives you a delicious daily dose of design and development between the 1st and 24th of December. Almost every article has something to do with CSS or HTML, and it's definitely not targeted at beginners -- but if you work with websites, or you know someone that does, 24 ways is a must-read. The archives are fantastic, too, if only to see the ...

The folks at ZURB have just released Bounce, a nice little tool which lets you take notes on websites and then share the URL with friends or colleagues. Bounce is basically a dressed down version of Notable, ZURB's full featured website feedback tool for teams. The user interface for Bounce is dead simple. Just input the the URL you want to take notes on and in a few seconds Bounce will ...

Developing for the Web can get quite rough at times, especially when IE is involved. Even when you take IE out of the picture (which you can't really do), there are still myriad differences among browsers, particularly in the implementation of newer technologies such as CSS3 and HTML5. When can I use ... is invaluable for answering questions such as "Should I be using the new HTML5 video tag in ...

If you're part of the development team for a website project, it's important to keep tabs with all parties involved. It's necessary to get everyone's input, track progress to date, and synthesize the feedback so that the project can progress to completion. Some projects are straightforward and easy, while others can be insane at times. Either way, Notable is a great app to help streamline the ...

Did you know that color blindness is surprisingly common -- if you're male, anyway. You know how men are 'XY' and women are 'XX'? That little 'missing leg' in the male Y chromosome supplies women with redundant genes for eyesight. Yes, men are genetically weaker than women -- cool huh? Anyway, if you're a Web developer, or merely curious as to how the Web looks to color blind people, check out ...

DummyImage.com is a great time saver for web developers laying out a quick page. It receives arguments in the URL, and returns an image of the exact size, colors, and file format specified. The image at the top of this post is not a screenshot; I merely entered the following line into my editor: <img border="0" src="http://dummyimage.com/580x400/444/e0e.png"> As you can see, it's ...

The folks at BaseKit think that the process of website creation is due for an overhaul -- and boy do I agree! The time for writing code in an editor, creating artwork in another app and uploading it all bit-by-bit is OVER. The folks at BaseKit pose a good question: why don't we make websites online, in the browser? There are some nascent attempts, like the cheap-and-cheerful approach of Google ...

Freebie downloads are always welcome. By a happy coincidence, Tutorial9 is offering a 25Mb download until November 26th, 2009 which contains four Wordpress themes, three Tumblr themes, and a whole slew of icons. Better still, the whole package can be used for commercial purposes. There's plenty of good quality stuff inside, from the grungy sticker icons above to the clean, simple designs WP ...

Oh Idaho. We love your delicious baking potatoes, the mouth feel we get when we say "Boise", and, uh, whatever the third thing to love about Idaho might be. In any event, that third thing to love about Idaho probably isn't quality web design. Poor layout, dancing graphics, overuse of capital letters; I've learned to forgive quite a bit. What bothers me most about Bannock County Bluegrass ...

Last week I covered RogerART, but this week I'm going to look at a great source of ugly sites. Three sources, in fact. The first is known by millions of people: Fark. Yes, I picked Fark because it has, traditionally, carried a lot of links to local news sites or personal sites. And let's be honest: most local affiliate sites (like your local ABC/NBC/CBS TV station's site) look like crap. They ...

Some web designers have an uncanny ability to look past all the text and advertising on a webpage, directly at the structure of its design. Now one of them is letting you do it for yourself. Paul Armstrong's project "Web Without Words" started as a bare-bones blueprint of CNN, but is now an ongoing experiment. You can even submit your own site to be considered for the Web Without Words treatment. ...

Most Web designers make liberal use of CSS selectors, but that spec's sibling, descendant and child selectors can cause what designer/developer Shaun Innman calls a "significant, negative impact on page rendering." This is confirmed in tests done by UI Specialist Jon Sykes that are published on his blog. Fortunately for most designers, the performance impact is only in extreme situations. But ...

Browsershots is a free web service for viewing a website in about 50 web browsers among 4 operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BSD). This is helpful for checking your web design on multiple configurations without having to use virtual machines or extra hardware and software. You just enter your URL, check the browsers you want to see, choose extra output options like screen width, color ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/01/17/webnode-create-your-own-web-2-0-site/";Similar to Doodlekit, Webnode is a free (no ads) website creation tool aimed at helping web design novices get a modern-looking website online in minutes. Once you've registered for a Webnode account, you're asked to choose a title and slogan for your new site. Then you select a template and start ...