Notes Design

Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale. When applying "old-style" elements to their works, designers produce creative and appealing designs that make their websites stand out and look really different.

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The Web is changing along with the weather outside the window, adopting bright autumn-inspired makeovers for seasonal fall sales and special offers. The autumn (or fall) season is primarily associated with harvest (most cultures celebrate one of various harvest festivals this season), bright, hot colors (ranging from yellow to red) reflecting autumn leaf colors, falling leaves, etc.

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Over the last months we have seen a strong trend towards more individual web designs. These designs often use realistic motifs from our regular life as visuals. However, apart from visual design elements one can also get creative with the layout of the site – its structure and the way the information is presented and communicated. To provide you with some ideas of how exactly it can be done, we have collected examples of creative design layouts.

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Game websites are a little bit of a mystery. You won’t find them in the popular CSS-showcases since they are seldom fully CSS-based; however, they also rarely show up in sites that collect best Flash sites. The FWA, for example, has added only a few game sites this year. This is odd, because there are usually roughly hundred quality titles released each month, each with their own website.

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Times when online-shops were boring and unattractive are over. To attract customers' attention designers tend to design online-shops according to the atmosphere it has to create. An online-store in which retro-products are offered is designed in a retro-look. And shops which are aiming to attract young customers are designed in vibrant colors and modern style. Furthermore, interactive browsing through the store, implemented with Flash and JavaScript, gains on popularity as well.

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By using vivid images designers can draw user's attention, communicate a message quickly and effectively and leave a memorable first impression. Practically all websites use images in their design, but few use vivid images to achieve maximum results. What is a vivid image? A simple definition is an image or photo that is striking, shocking, intriguing, interesting, beautiful or sexy (we'll be looking at plenty of examples below). It causes a reaction from the senses of visitors that an average image would not.

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Textures and patterns are used more often than one may think. The reason why we don't see them is because they usually remain in the background, supporting the overall design, replacing a standard background color and creating a more inviting atmosphere. But they almost never stand out. Used primarily for background images, they need to fit to the overall design making the content easier to perceive.

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Three weeks ago we have announced the Style Switchers Design Contest where we've presented some ideas for style switchers design and encouraged our readers to create a style switcher for their own web-sites. One of the participants was to be awarded with an Apple Cinema 20 Flat Panel Display. Over 60 designers participated and — as in all of our earlier contests — the results are indeed pretty smashing.

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Every now and again we showcase beautiful favicons — tiny pieces of art you’ll usually find in your browser's address bar or when searching through your bookmarks. Favicons are important as they provide visual indicators to visitors and help them to easily associate the content with a bookmark in their browser. Besides, favicons are just nice to look at and there are way too many sites which don't make use of them. We like to change things. Which is why here is the 7th episode of the favicons series.

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When it comes to web design too often perfect, colorful and boxy designs make the cut; however, the reality is different as it is hard to find objects with a perfect shape and a perfect color in our daily routine. To achieve a unique and communicative design we need to consider more creative approaches. For instance, we can draw sites by ourselves — or at least some parts of it.

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Quotes are used to emphasize excerpts of text. Since users almost never read but scan we need to provide them with some focus anchors to fix their attention to the most important parts of our articles. Furthermore, quotes are always used for testimonials and sometimes for blog comments. They can be styled using graphics, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. Sometimes, creative dynamic solutions can be applied as well.

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Design a style switcher and win an Apple Cinema 20 Flat Panel Display with 16.7 million colors, 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.258 mm dot pitch, 16 ms response time and 170-degree viewing angles. Yes, that's that easy. Style switchers are used to provide users with a choice of layouts, fonts, colors and views they can use to adapt the design to their personal needs. Designs with style switchers are more flexbile, more adaptive and more user-friendly as different visitors can quickly modify the design for their personal convenience.

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In Web typography doesn’t have to support the overall design. It can dominate. It can be loud. It can be bold. And it can be everywhere on a web-site. In many situations it’s reasonable to give the typography the prominent position it deserves, leaving visual cues in the background or removing them at all. Doing that, you have to risk large font sizes surrounded by a generous amount of white space. What comes out of it? Elegant web sites with a unique form, style and sense of precision.

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Designing blogs is easy. Designing blogs in a unique way is hard. Whatever blog engine you are using, there are literally thousands of templates available which you can apply directly, without any significant code modifications. That's efficient, but it's not creative, because using a default blog-template you risk to end up with some wide-spread look which has actually nothing to do with you. To convey your personality effectively, you need a design which reflects who you are and what you are doing.

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