Is the type on your site legible? Is it readable? Do people have to put in a lot of effort to read your prose or does your type get out of the way so that your words are easily understood?
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For the last few months I’ve been writing some posts for other sites. For whatever reason I keep forgetting to let you know so you can read them if you’re so inclined. Here are 6 of those guest posts, 2 each for 3 different sites.
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Sen no Rikyu desired to learn The Way of Tea and so visited the Tea Master, Takeno Joo. As a simple test of whether to accept Rikyu or not Joo ordered him to tend the garden.
Rikyu raked the garden until the ground was in perfect order. When he had finished he surveyed his work. He then shook a cherry tree, causing a few flowers and leaves to fall randomly on the ground. At that moment Takeno Joo knew Sen no Rikyu would be one the greatest example of wabi-sabi way of life.
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To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
—Jane Austen
How often have you heard the advice to take a long walk in order to overcome writer’s block or to focus better on a problem you’re trying to solve? Human beings have an affinity for nature. In most cultures throughout history a fondness for nature is easily observed and nature is often prescribed as a healing therapy.
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Symmetry is beautiful. That’s how most of us see it. Symmetry leads to a sense of harmony and pleasing aesthetics. Symmetry is also often associated with being formal and static and even a little boring. Asymmetry, on the other hand, while lacking in inherent beauty is often seen as more interesting, more dynamic.
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There’s no such thing as information overload, only bad design.
—Edward Tufte
The internet is a great source for finding information. It works so well that for most topics there’s far too much information than we know what to do with. In fact there’s often so much information that it’s hard to know what is and isn’t true. Sadly most of the information we encounter is noise. It’s useless or untrue and mostly makes it harder to find the signal, the information we want and trust.
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According to tv legend Zsa Zsa Gabar once appeared on the Tonight Show holding a cat in her lap. She is said to have asked host Johnny Carson, “Would you like to pet my pussy?” to which Carson is said to have replied, “I’d love to, but you’ll have to remove that damn cat.”
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The point of visual design is to communicate. You have a message you want to convey to your audience and your design should take part in that communication. Not only do you want your visitors to receive your message, you want them to understand and remember it. Fortunately we have some principles at our disposal to help our readers comprehend our message and recall it later.
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What do you feel when you see a circle? A square? A triangle? Are you affected the same when seeing an object with soft gentle curves as you are when seeing another object with sharp jagged edges? Much the same way that lines have meaning, shapes have meaning and are an important building block in the visual grammar and visual thinking we have at our disposal as designers.
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If you moved to another country (where they don’t speak the same language as you), one of the first things you’d probably do is start learning the language. You might even start long before you move in preparation for being able to communicate with the people you’ll soon call neighbors.
Communication is an essential part of life and as web designers it’s what we do with every new design.
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