I’ve never cared much for resolutions. Within a few weeks you’ve generally given up on them and as the days get further from the New Year an excuse excuse seems to exist for waiting until next year. In the end little changes and you are the person you were in the moments before the calendar changed.
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Home page design can be challenging for some. Should they look the same as the other pages of your site? What content should you include? What exactly is the goal of your home page? With all the different ways someone might enter your site is the idea of a home page even relevant any more?
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The goal of visual design is to communicate. How you organize and prioritize your elements conveys valuable information about their relative importance. Visual hierarchy aids comprehension, reinforces your message, and guides your visitor through your story.
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There seems to a great misconception amongst the web agency-employing-section-of-society as to what a web designer does and in particular what all the different disciplines in web design/development are.
—Phil Thompson
A successful website is the result of many different parts working together toward a common goal or set of goals. Those parts might be the product of one or many different people, one of whom will be the site’s web designer.
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Z-index is another css property that appears simple on the surface, but has some deeper rules that can cause confusion.
On the surface it may seem as simple as a positive z-index sits in front of a 0 z-index, which sits in front of a negative z-index. While that is true, there’s more to the overall equation about how a browser decides which elements display in front of others.
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When people are new to css layouts there’s a tendency to gravitate toward positioning. Positioning seems like an easy concept to grasp. On the surface you specify exactly where you want a block to be located and there it sits. Positioning is a little more complicated than it first appears though. There are a few things that can trip up a newbie and a few things to understand before positioning becomes second nature.
You can do some great things with positioning, once you develop a deeper understanding of how it works.
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When you come across posts and articles teaching web design the focus is usually on how to do one specific thing. A tutorial on creating an effect in Photoshop or a tutorial on how some specific css property works.
These posts are often helpful and I learn from many of them myself. However you usually don’t find a lot of good articles on the abstract concepts that drive a design and combine the various parts into a unique and successful whole.
Hopefully this post will help you with a few higher level thoughts and ideas behind creating a design for your site.
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CSS backgrounds are an important part of web design. The property is where you add the colors and images that sit behind your content, which controls much of the aesthetics of your site. Remove your CSS backgrounds and your site will probably be text on a white background.
While relatively easy to understand, CSS backgrounds often lead to some questions and confusion when it comes to pulling off specific techniques. Let’s see if we can clear up some of that confusion and then answer a few of those technique specific questions.
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You’ve heard the term, but do you know what microformats are? Do you know how to use them or even why you should?
Microformats are relatively easy to use. In fact if you can code a web page you already have the skills. The goal of this post is to introduce you to the what, how, and why of microformats and point you in the right direction so you can begin using them where appropriate.
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“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
— Thomas Merton
Balance is important in life. Work and play; diet and exercise; yin and yang. A beautiful face is often a matter of the right balance of features. Balance is also a very important design principle. It will help you create an aesthetically pleasing whole and help you better control flow in your designs.
I’ll leave it up to you to find balance in your life. You can read this post to find out how to create balance in your web design.
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