Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

27 Must-Have Starter Kits For Web Designers | Graphics

27 Must-Have Starter Kits For Web Designers | Graphics
Starter kits are great timesavers for web designers and they are particularly useful for those who often create mock-ups for project pitching on daily basis. If you are a designer-cum-programmer think of it as your code snippets

So what’s in a starter kit? We think it varies – depending on what each designer routinely worked with. For GUI designers, keeping a copy of form elements (buttons, checkboxes, tab, drop down menus, etc) helps speed up the process of creating screens and layouts; on the other hand, browser (IE, Firefox Safari) templates with web safe area keep web designers reminded how/where they should prioritize their contents. Experienced designers will usually customize and keep a personal version of starter kit, some might have few too!

In today’s article, we attempt to show you some of the best design starter kit we’ve come to know. You can download (for free) and use them right away, or customize your own copy that will come in handy in future, your choice. Full list after jump.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

All the Small Icons You’ll Ever Need | Web Design Ledger

All the Small Icons You’ll Ever Need | Web Design Ledger
Big highly detailed icons make great eye candy, but small icons can be very useful when designing websites. They are great for styling lists and giving links visual flair that is eye catching and meaningful. It’s amazing what can be said visually in a 16 x 16 pixel area. In this post, you will find a large collection of small icons that should fit most of your design needs.

Laura in Graphics, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts? | CSS | Smashing Magazine

Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts? | CSS | Smashing Magazine
Fluid web designs have many benefits, but only if implemented correctly. With proper technique, a design can be seen correctly on large screens, small screens and even tiny PDA screens. With bad coding structure, however, a fluid layout can be disastrous. Because of this, we need to find ways to work around most, if not all, of the cons of fluid design.
If you as a designer are going to go through all the extra work of creating a functional fluid layout, why not go a bit further and make it compatible with all resolutions, instead of just most? You can use a few techniques to create an incredibly versatile, adaptive layout that will stay perfectly functional with the constantly changing screen sizes.
In this article, we’ll discuss effective techniques to create 100%-functional adaptive CSS-layouts, and provide details on other tutorials and practices.

Laura in Webpage Design § Comments Off

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Font Embedding Now

Nice Web Type Suggests: Graublau Sans with Lucida sanserif

How to demonstration page. Works in Safari and beta Firefox 3.5. IE requires a different file type.

Laura in Typography, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Minimalist jQuery: 11 useful plugins under 4K

Minimalist jQuery: 11 useful plugins under 4K | jQuery Plugins | TRIF3CTA | Austin, TX

jQuery makes our lives easier. So much so that it’s tempting to use it all the time, inadvertently slowing our page load times (cue YSlow and Hammerhead). Combining, compressing, and delivering scripts at the end of your page helps in the HTTP request department. On the file size front, below are jQuery plugins that give solid bang for your performance buck.

Laura in Javascript, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine

Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine

Laura in Webpage Design § Comments Off

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

10 Creative & Rich UI interfaces & How to Create Them | Noupe

10 Creative & Rich UI interfaces & How to Create Them | Noupe

Laura in Javascript, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

Texturise | Free Textures » Seamless Textures

Texturise | Free Textures » Seamless Textures
Seamless Textures

Laura in Webpage Design § Comments Off

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Photoshop and Illustrator Grid Templates | Konigi

Photoshop and Illustrator Grid Templates | Konigi
I moved the Photoshop and Illustrator templates for the Blueprint Grid System over from my personal blog at urlgreyhot to Konigi’s Tools section. So now you can make the most of the system I use here and go from sketch to wireframe, to visual design comp.

The complete tool kit now includes:

printable graph paper
graph paper notepads (temporarily oversold)
wireframe template
Adobe Photoshop template
Adobe Illlustrator template

Laura in Webpage Design § Comments Off

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

A List Apart: Articles: Fluid Grids

A List Apart: Articles: Fluid Grids

Grids are a great way of laying content out on paper but until now they haven’t played well with the fluid methods of web design.

Laura in Cascading Style Sheets, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design

9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine

By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them.

Laura in Webpage Design § Comments Off

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Cufón

etc: a stream of geek consciousness

Cufón aims to become a “worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” How cufon is different …

• No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
• Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
• Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
• Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.

Laura in Javascript, Typography, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Fluid 960 Grid System

Fluid 960 Grid System | 16-column Grid

The Fluid 960 Grid System templates have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the Mootools JavaScript library. The idea for building these templates was inspired by Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, who advocates a content-out approach to rapid interactive prototyping, crediting Jason Santa Maria with the grey box method.

Laura in Webpage Design § Comments Off

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

IE NetRenderer

IE NetRenderer – Browser Compatibility Check -

IE NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high speed datacenter located in Germany. Just type in a URL in the field above and try it out – it’s free!

Laura in Online Services, Webpage Design § Comments Off

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

sIFR Vault: repository of sIFR fonts

sIFR Vault: repository of sIFR fonts: etc: a stream of geek consciousness

Fans of the flash image replacement technique sIFR have a great place to grab sIFR -ready fonts. sIFR fonts has a ton of fonts ready to go, sourced from various web font libraries. A great resource, worth bookmarking.

sIFRvault is a resource primarily for Web designers who wish to easily add custom embedded fonts into their Web pages. sIFRvault is a collection of pre-generated Flash SWFs that can be used with sIFR.

With sIFRvault, you don’t need Adobe Flash™ or the the actual fonts installed on your machine.

Laura in Typography, Webpage Design § Comments Off