“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.
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest and greatest in web design, you’ll probably have heard of the Responsive Design (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/) trend that’s been picking up steam the last couple of years. Personally I think it’s a great concept, and I’ve been looking forward to the day it becomes standard practice in web design for quite awhile now. However, each time I express my enthusiasm to fellow web designers, I am greeted with blank stares and total apathy.
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.
Google’s home page, iGoogle, Google Docs, and other apps are offering users a new look recently, changing the day-to-day just slightly for millions of people. These are mostly cosmetic changes, the kind that could be missed. I first noticed the unlikely dark grey with orange accents and generous white padding this summer at the introduction of Google+. Google ran with it and we expected “Try the new look” prompts to move across its vast suite.
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!
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.
Before the invention of movable type and printing, simple grids based on optimal proportions had been used to arrange handwritten text on pages. One such system, known as the “Villiards Diagram,” was in use at least since medieval times. Interior designers arrange rooms based on a grid system, and city planners work on a grid too. It’s a wonder what took web designers and developers so long to show interest in a system that has been essential to the printed word since the ‘30s.
Toll Free (866) 889-1906 local (204) 889-1906
