“It’s a little skinny, can we make it wider?”
More and more these days our clients are coming back to us after viewing a new design mockup on their modern high-res, wide-screen 16:9 displays, and have a common simple request. Make it wider. We are big fans of the 960.gs grid system here at Canada’s Web Shop, and often recommend against heading out into areas wider than 960.
My October read was Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. This brief design handbook is an excellent addition to any student of typography which boasts itself as “A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students”. This quick read, which I read in a couple hours on a flight home from Honolulu, covered many of the same bases my college course on typography covered. More than just a crash course, Thinking With Type delivers the basics, history, and techniques required for effective typesetting. The book is separated into three distinct sections.
We’re starting the new (fiscal) year off right at Canada’s Web Shop by establishing and holding each other to a clear set of measureable personal goals. I’ve made a commitment to put down my copy of A Game of Thrones for the next 365 days, and stave of reading fiction all together. I believe we live in an age where anybody can become an expert on anything through self guided research. To advance through the endeavour of becoming an expert in what I do, I’ve set a goal to read one book per month on the topic of Usability and Web Design. In September I read the still-relevant title Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
Every project that comes across my desk gets a wireframe layout right before I hit Photoshop. These usually take moments and establish a quick plan in my notebook before I create a polished layout.
It’s rare that a project passes by my desk at The Web Shop that couldn’t benefit from the use of external resources. Whether that might be inspiration, stock photography, an icon pack, or an interesting color swatch, I’m all for utilizing available resources. In this post I’d like to highlight my top 5, enjoy!
Your website is being viewed on a huge variety of resolutions, whether your design is ready for it or not. Every day mobile devices are becoming more connected and commonly used to browse the internet. In the past, website owners would strive to have their website displayed the same on as many screens as possible. As smaller and larger screens become more common, it’s becoming important to have your website display in a way optimized for the screen. The question remains: How do we give each size screen its own optimal user experience without creating multiple designs for each project? The answer is through Responsive Web Design.
In 7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization by Jonathan Mendez he recommends:
“Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate.”
We all want our call to action to stand out, but one colour does not fit all. I’ve always been in the school of thought that in order to make your call to action stand out, contrast is your best friend. This is best achieved by selecting a colour directly opposite to your websites main colour/s on a colour wheel. For example, on a Blue website, Orange stands out best. On a green website Red/Violet are your best bet.
I recently had a conversation with a fellow designer at a different shop, and we were discussing ‘The Design Brief’. Whenever we start a new project here at Canada’s Web Shop we always release a design brief document to be filled out by our clients that helps us get ‘into their head’, and their industry. My friend thought this was a novel idea; I thought it was a necessary idea. This is probably the beginning of the process for many professional web design shops, but I just wanted to outline the key areas that I find helpful to ask about in our design brief when starting a new project.
Not too long ago, I was finally provided access to ‘New Twitter’, a big step forward in functionality, layout, and organization. I suppose with such a large majority of Twitter users accessing Twitter via 3rd party programs, some inspiration for a new Twitter may stem from the desire to pull users back to the companies native web application interface. Either way, today we’re going to look at the impact that ‘New Twitter’ has on your Twitter wallpaper.
As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker.
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