- Why Research-Directed Website Design Will Make Your Website Better
- Nov 9, 2009
- Sarah Horton presents a case for using design research to reach informed design decisions. It's not enough to rely on your own opinions or those of your clients; she posits that instead, decisions must be based on an understanding of real user needs.
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- Designing a Custom YouTube Channel
- Oct 5, 2009
- Kris Hadlock explains how to customize your organization's presence on YouTube, with some relatively easy settings changes to make you stand out from the crowd.
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- Designing for Interaction: Design Research
- Aug 19, 2009
- If only a small bit of the typical time, money, and resources used to make and market a product or service were put towards design research—observing, talking to, and maybe even making artifacts with customers and users—the products and services we use would be greatly improved. Dan Saffer explains.
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- Modular Web Design: Combine
- Jul 22, 2009
- This chapter will show you how to assemble components into page layouts, appreciate how components fit into variations of a single page as well as across the context of many different pages, take advantage of component relationships, including duplicates, bundles, and page shells, formulate page regions so that components can be more simply explained and consistently applied, and appreciate the relationship between components in layout and code.
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- 'Form Follows Function' Revisited
- Jun 23, 2009
- Curt Cloninger, author of Fresher Styles for Web Designers: More Eye Candy from the Underground, discusses the concept that 'form follows function,' with particular focus on web design.
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- Beyond the Medium. Toward the Goals.
- Jun 17, 2009
- As designers, we should be willing and able to move fluidly from medium to medium. In order to do this, however, we must first identify the overarching conceptual goals of our design practice. Curt Cloninger asks, have you considered the purposeful development of a lifelong design practice?
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- Flash Essentials for After Effects Users
- Jun 17, 2009
- Flash baffles After Effects users as often as it makes them feel comfortable. This chapter from Rich Harrington introduces you to Flash’s interface and core animation techniques.
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- Working with Panels in Adobe Illustrator CS4
- Jun 2, 2009
- This chapter will help you become more intimately acquainted with the Illustrator interface features that you will be using continually as you work: the panels.
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- Adobe Flash Catalyst: A Designer's Ticket to the Interactive World
- Jun 1, 2009
- Andrew Faulkner and his team at afstudio have been designing with Adobe products for decades. Though they're quite comfortable with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, they have had to look to professional programmers for help with creating Adobe Flash presentations for online projects. Now that he has had the chance to scope out the Adobe Flash Catalyst beta, however, Andrew is excited about the power that this new Adobe program will put into the designer's hands.
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- Using Layers for Transparency and Clipping in Illustrator CS4
- Jun 1, 2009
- Do you think of layers strictly as a selection tool? You're missing out. David Karlins points out a number of ways in which layers can be used to edit artwork in Illustrator.
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- Video with Adobe Flash CS4: Delivery and Deployment Primer
- May 20, 2009
- Learn the differences between distribution file formats and protocols for Flash-based video, along with their advantages and disadvantages.
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- Creating Transparent Video with Adobe After Effects CS4
- May 19, 2009
- Transparency plays a key role in the success of animation and interactivity. By embedding transparency into graphic elements, you can composite together different elements created at different times, allowing for true flexibility.
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- ppk on JavaScript: Context
- May 14, 2009
- JavaScript is used in the context of a Web page. This is obvious, but it has a few consequences that haven’t always been properly appreciated. Peter-Paul Koch discusses the standards-compliance CSS revolution that has changed Web development, starting with a quick summary of the CSS revolution and its impact on JavaScript.
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- Neuro Web Design Review: VillageBanking.org
- May 4, 2009
- Susan Weinschenk analyzes the website of an international charitable organization. By making a few changes in the site design, she suggests, the group could increase the amount of good they're already doing for the world.
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- A Project Guide to UX Design: Project Objectives and Approach
- Mar 21, 2009
- This chapter talks about forming project objectives and offers some questions that will help you as a UX designer solidify those goals. Also learn some common project approaches (or methodologies) and how they may influence the way you work.
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- Flexible Web Design: Types of Web-page Layouts
- Feb 17, 2009
- Web-page layouts can be grouped into three categories based on how their width is set: fixed-width, liquid (or fluid), and elastic. Zoe Mickley Gillenwater discusses the characteristics of each type of layout.
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- Flexible Web Design: Dynamically Changing Images’ Screen Area
- Feb 16, 2009
- There are lots of ways you can dynamically change the screen area that an image takes up. Zoe Mickley Gillenwater explains how.
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- Using the Liquid CSS Layouts in Dreamweaver CS4
- Feb 5, 2009
- Liquid layouts, based on a percentage of the size of the browser's window (or viewport), are one way to create flexible sites that work for a variety of users. In this chapter, learn the pros and cons of creating a liquid layout.
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- Fresher Styles for Web Designers: Psychedelic Minimalist Style
- Jan 21, 2009
- Curt Cloninger discusses the Psychedelic Minimalist style, a style that intentionally straddles the fence between minimalism and psychedelia, achieving surprisingly fresh, purposefully paradoxical results.
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- Neuro Web Design: Invoking Scarcity--If Something Seems Unavailable, We Seem to Want It Even More
- Jan 16, 2009
- Susan Weinschenk explains why invoking scarcity can be an excellent marketing tool.
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