Notes Design

It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.

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When used correctly, jQuery can help you make your website more interactive, interesting and exciting. This article will share some best practices and examples for using the popular Javascript framework to create unobtrusive, accessible DOM scripting effects.

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When designing a custom theme or deciding on an already-existing theme, bloggers have a lot of factors to consider and there is no shortage of options, particularly for WordPress users. A growing number of blogs are moving away from traditional blog layouts in favor of magazine-style themes; however, the layout and presentation of content has a major impact on visitors and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

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Many e-commerce sites these days tend to be loaded down with too much information on their landing pages. The reasoning for cluttered e-commerce sites is simple: the more information you can cram on the page, the more the user will buy. Unfortunately, web buyers are a finicky bunch.

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Being a designer in an environment where most people adhere to a strict path of logic can be challenging. There are few logic-centric people who understand the value design has to a product or service. Instead of beating your head against your desk, do something to get the company on common ground.

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Some companies have made a living creating a sort of “virtual classroom,” allowing members to learn at their own pace when they have the time using video tutorials. The advantages of the classroom setting stem from a one on one experience and the ability of the instructor to show the ideas and theories rather than simply explain them.

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If you close your eyes and think back to the first design fundamentals class you ever took hopefully you remember the instructor saying,"When beginning a design ask yourself who is your audience? If you don't know who you are designing for then how can you design anything at all?"

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Is time kickin' your ass? Well, learn to defend yourself! Master these killer Photoshop keyboard combos and you'll find yourself with more time for the important things (e.g. Facebook trivia questions). These combos assume you're using Photoshop CS3 on Windows platform with default keyboard shortcuts.

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From working with wide range of projects, I have learned one thing: designers are lazy (sometimes myself included). Most often it comes from our desire to get a quick signoff and move on with the next project. While several posts could have been written on this, I offer here a few suggestions guaranteed to make things at least a little bit easier in the end:

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Look at what you've made. Beautiful, isn't it? But does it work? For whom does it work? Of course you can use it, but can anyone else? In short, is it functional?

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Last week we presented the first results of our study of top blogs. As promised, this week we publish the second part of the survey, including further findings and problem solutions we have found out during the study. In the first part we discussed layout design and typographic settings. What remains to be covered are the navigation design, information architecture, advertisements and functionality (RSS-feeds, tag clouds, pagination etc.).

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We are quite curious; particularly when it comes to design and web-development we want to know just everything. Therefore, following our web form design survey, we have decided to take a closer look at blog designs, analyze them and find out which design solutions are common and which solutions are not used at all.

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You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a "backlash" against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such cirlces unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You'll hear ideas being thrown around like "design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1" or "we are not worried about the design, we'll outsource it or use a free Wordpress theme, let us focus more on the product".

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Last week we have presented first findings of our web forms survey. The main objective of the survey was to provide designers and developers with some intuition of how effective web forms are designed; we also presented some guidelines of how an effective and user-friendly web form can be achieved.

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If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience. We need to invite them, describe to them how the service works, explain to them why they should fill in the form and suggests the benefits they'll get in return.

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No, they shouldn't. At first glance the decision to open links in new windows or not depends on the given site and the preferences of its visitors. Visitors of the sites with heavy linking are more willing to have links opened in new windows than open dozens of links in new windows manually. Visitors of less-heavy-linkage-sites are more likely to open some specific link in new window to remain on the site and continue to browse through it afterwards. However, this is not true.

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The new generation of web browsers — Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Internet Explorer 7 — provides a feature which seems to save a lot of work for web-developers in the future, namely the Full Page Zoom. Instead of allowing users to increase and decrease the font size on a given web-site, browsers now enable users to literally scale the rendered layout including visuals and background images.

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Effective web design doesn't have to be pretty and colorful — it has to be clear and intuitive; in fact, we have analyzed the principles of effective design in our previous posts. However, how can you achieve a clear and intuitive design solution?

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Getting creative is part of our job. Whatever project we are working on, at some point we need to come up with some nice starting point — some fresh idea which we could explore further, build upon and refine until we have a polished, perfect result. Although having an idea is at least as important as implementing it properly, without inspiration and innovation you just can't get anything done.

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Web design-related forums are a place where you interact with other designers, exchange ideas or discuss your first drafts. When you have a problem, you can post the issue, and then receive feedback on possible design or coding solutions from community members. This interaction is a great way to establish contacts and build relationships. Forums are used for networking and marketing purposes. They are practical places to solve problems and can serve as a form of social diversion.

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