Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’
50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials
Photoshop’s text and layer tools can be used to create some really awesome effects. We’ve put together a list of 60 of the best tutorials we could find to help you stay up to date on the latest trends and techniques. You’ll find some really cool grunge and glass styles (plus a few surprises!) and learn how some of the best designers create their unique effects. Read the rest of this entry »
40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box
Over the last months we have seen a strong trend towards more individual web designs. These designs use realistic motifs from everyday life, such as hand-drawn elements, script fonts, pins, paper clips, organic textures and scrapbooks. That’s not a big surprise as they serve the function that faceless, shiny, glassy 3D-buttons completely fail to deliver: individuality and personality. “Personal” designs appear more familiar and more friendly. Used properly, such elements can give a human touch to design and communicate the content in a truly distinctive manner.
Free Typographic XHTML/CSS-Layouts For Your Designs
In May we announced the Typographic Layout Design Contest that aimed to collect beautiful typographic (X)HTML+CSS-based layouts created by the design community and release them for free as a gift for the web design community. The response was overwhelming and we really had a hard time going through the designs, analyzing them and deciding which templates deserve the awards. Unfortunately, many templates were just copies of the current designer’s blog and some weren’t related to typography at all. So in the end many templates didn’t make it to this post.
However, we did receive a number of brilliant typographic templates that we are happy to release for free download and personal and commerical use as the gift for the web design community. We hope that these templates will help you to improve the quality of typography in your future designs!
10 Ways To Make Your XHTML Site Accessible Using Web Standards
Without argument, one of the most important things to consider when creating a website is that it be accessible to everyone who wants to view it. Does your website play nice with screen readers? Can a user override your style sheet with a more accessible one and still see everything your website has to offer? Would another Web developer be embarrassed if they saw your code? If your website is standards-compliant, you could more confidently answer these questions.
Let’s take a look at 10 ways to improve the accessibility of your XHTML website by making it standards-compliant. We’ll go the extra mile and include criteria that fall beyond the standards set by the W3C but which you should follow to make your website more accessible. Each section lists the criteria you need to meet, explains why you need to meet them and gives examples of what you should and shouldn’t do.
Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions
A module tab is a User Interface (UI) design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content’s corresponding tab control.
Module tabs are seeing an increase of use as websites and web applications push for optimizing web page screen areas without sacrificing the amount of information presented at once. For example, in weblogs, they are used in secondary content sections (such as the sidebar) to present relevant and interesting information such as a listing of blog posts which users can interact with to get to web pages quicker. This inevitably allows for an unobtrusive and compact manner of presenting content.
This article discusses the use of the module tabs design pattern for use in websites and web-based applications. We share with you some best practices to consider when using module tabs, a listing of real-world examples of websites the take advantage of module tabs, as well as tutorials and free downloadable scripts for building and deploying module tabs in your sites.
Anatomy of a Module Tab Area
It’s worth a few moments to identify the key parts of a module tabs for the purpose of standardization of the terminologies used in the discussion.
- The tab control area is the location of the tab controls.
- Tab controls are the interface component for navigating through the module tabs panes.
- The tab control text is the text that describes the tab control. It should be short (one to two words) and should effectively depict the corresponding pane information.
- The active tab control refers to the tab control that is presently selected. Only one tab control should be active. The first tab control is the default active tab control when the web page first loads.
- Inactive tab controls are the tab controls whose panes are not currently showing.
- A pane is where information is displayed; it should have a corresponding tab control so that panes that are not displayed are accessible by clicking its tab control.
- Pane content is the content being presented inside of a pane.
- The active pane is the pane that is currently being shown; it is paired with the active tab control. The pane that is displayed immediately when the web page first loads is the default active pane.
- Inactive panes (not shown in the illustration) are the panes that are currently not being shown. An inactive pane becomes the active pane when its tab control is clicked.
10 Useful CSS/JS-Coding Solutions For Web-Developers
Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them. Being busy with our own projects, we sometimes try to grasp the intuition behind (probably) complex and cluttered code of other designers to understand how they manage to implement particular design ideas. In fact, by just observing the code of other developers we can learn a lot from them; we can find interesting ideas and improve the quality of our work.
Over the last months we’ve been paying closer attention to interesting design techniques and coding solutions and tried to understand how each of these solutions work and how they can benefit other designers and developers. Such designs are often hard to find, so it would be great if you could suggest some solutions that are worth exploring in detail – we’ll certainly cover them in our next posts!
So let’s take a closer look at 10 useful CSS & Javascript techniques and coding solutions that can turn out to be useful for your next project. You should have at least a basic knowledge of CSS and JavaScript before you read the entire article.
53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without
CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts – and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actually, it is.
Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time – of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. Links checked: June/11 2008.
40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS
Web users love informative clues. Whatever questions and misunderstandings might occur – delivering precise answers immediately is the primary task a responsive user interface should be able to cope with. To do that, developers have to consider subtle and well-thought tooltips – used correctly, they can greatly improve user experience and help users to get things done. In Web such “responsive” hints can be provided by tooltips. E.g., unclear input fields in web forms are perfect examples of a situation you might be willing to use a tooltip for.
Most of solutions are JavaScript- and AJAX-based, however we’ve also managed to find some lightweight CSS-based solutions. To install and use the script, it’s often enough to include the JavaScript library in the source code and provide the hint as plain text within the “title”-attribute. Sometimes you can also insert URLs, images, tables and further elements – basically, it can be almost everything you’d ever wanted it to be.
We’d like to thank Jurgen Koller for compiling an extensive list of tooltip scripts we’ve stumbled upon during our search. It gives many useful pointers, but we’ve managed to find some more. You might be willing to use Koller’s post as a quick reference for your search.
Let’s take a look at 43 handy tooltips scripts for intuitive and well-designed visual clues. It’s nice to have them all in one place, once you need them. It’s nice to be able to find them, once you don’t have time to search for them.
