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: Design BlogLearn Design From The Masters—First Up: Mark Boulton
Today we published the first in our series of SitePoint Community Interviews with renowned designers, entitled Mark Boulton’s Freelance Design Secrets.
In the interview, Andy Kowalik, one of our mentors on the SitePoint Forums talks to UK-based designer Mark Boulton about how he got started in design, how he made the leap from salaried employee to business owner, and picks Mark’s brains on grid theory, typography, and other peculiarities of design on the Web.
Go read it now!
Is there a web designer you’d like to see us interview? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll track them down and put them in the spotlight.
Why The 10 Commandments Of Web Design Are Complete Baloney
I read this morning in the SitePoint Industry News forum that BusinessWeek had compiled what is being referred to as The 10 Commandments of Web Design.
The experts who contributed to this list include widely read authors and speakers like Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman. Here it is:
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.
On the surface, this advice seems reasonably innocuous. However, dig deeper and you’ll see that it all falls apart. Allow me to explain …
Before I launch into why I think this list is baloney, allow me a couple of minutes to don my flame suit. It’s a little dusty since I used it last. Oh, and don’t forget to grab a pinch of salt from the kitchen on your way through — you might need it.
OK, here we go. Deep breath … I’m going …
Four Days Left To Win A MacBook From 99designs!
Our friends over at 99designs are running a competition to win a MacBook, and there are only 4 days left:
Just a final reminder that we are giving away a free MacBook to one lucky designer who submits a winning design to 99designs.com before June 20th. Any design that is selected as a winner before that date is in the running. The more winners you have, the more chances you’ve got, so get designing quickly!
If you fancy yourself as a hot-shot designer, check out some of the current contests, and get your submission in.
Good luck all!
Google Changes Favicon, Challenges You To Do Better
Last week Google tweaked their favicon (that little 16×16 pixel icon in your browser’s tab), changing it from an uppercase G to a lowercase g.
Now, a change like this is normally something that shouldn’t matter — it’s not like they changed their actual logo to begin with a lowercase g, or made any changes to their home page. They just tweaked the 256 pixels in the browser’s tab. But this is one of the strongest brands in the world, and tabbed browsing has become a standard feature in all browsers.
Favicons are no longer an optional “nice-to-have” — users come to rely on them as a usability aid, so those 256 pixels are an extension of a company’s brand. Add to that the fact that people generally don’t like change, and the result is hundreds of blogs complaining about how ugly the new icon was.
Personally, I don’t mind it. The new icon threw me at first — the big G was instantly recognizable, and being able to jump to a tab based on that visual aid is a crucial part of how I navigate. However, after a few days of getting used to it, I realized that change …
Adobe Fireworks CS4 beta released
Adobe have made the new Fireworks CS4 beta download available, and the good news is anyone with Fireworks CS3 — either standalone or as part of the web suites — can take it for a spin.
- You’ll need to have an account at Adobe and login.
- You’ll then be directed to the download page. The downloads are 336 MB for the Win version and 633 MB for the Mac.
- Once installed and launched, you’ll be asked for a serial number. Warning: This is NOT your current CS3 serial (which is what I tried originally). You’ll have to go to this page, enter your CS3 serial, and then you’ll be issued with a new Fireworks CS4 serial to enter into the app.
Maybe it’s just me, but when you’re told you’ll need your old serial number, and soon after an ‘Enter your serial here’ screen pops up, it seems perfectly logical to enter your old serial there — which, of course, failed and left me feeling silly.
I backtracked and figured it out, but I bet others are making similar mistakes — and flooding Adobe support. Perhaps issuing the new serial THEN offering the download would be a …
Are You User Experienced?
Last Friday I was lucky enough to spent an entire day at a web conference without seeing one line of HTML or single CSS declaration. In fact, I can’t even remember hearing the word “Ajax” once.
I learned a lot though!
There’s no argument that the Web is a relatively technical medium, so it’s with good reason that we all spend a lot of time thinking about, discussing and practicing the technical skills of the Web.
Nevertheless, when you boil it all down, the Web is really just one big, overly-complicated pipe that humans use to shout information back and forward to each other.
A cursory look at the millions of pages written on code, standards and other technical matters suggests we may be spending a little too much time thinking about how our shouting gets through, and not nearly enough time thinking about how we’re shouting.
The theories behind what makes good shouting are broadly referred to as the soft skills of the web — areas such as user experience design, information architecture, usability testing and research design — and that is exactly what Web Directions: User Experience was all about.
FREE PDF Download: The Photoshop Anthology
With thanks to 99designs, we’re very pleased to announce that for the next 30 days our book, The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques, is free to download (normally worth $29.95).
That’s right, the entire 278 page book, yours to keep, forever!
The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques is the ultimate Photoshop compendium for web designers.
It’s brimming with tried and tested real-world Photoshop solutions that will add impact to your next web design project. If you’ve ever been stuck for inspiration, have puzzled over just how to create a shiny aqua-style button, or wanted to create that seamlessly tiling background image you saw on a site recently, you need to download this book.
Download it now!
This book is free to download thanks to the generous support of 99designs. If you’re looking for a place to give your new-found Photoshop skills a run, why not earn some extra cash along the way?
The team at 99designs are giving away a shiny new MacBook for the best logo design or web design, so be sure to check them out.
Meet Richard the Designer. Richard Loves Design Contests.
The article that we published today on SitePoint is an interview I conducted with 99designs addict Richard Scott called Design Contests Made Me A Better Designer.
In the interview, Richard talks about why he chooses to enter design contests, how he uses contests to solicit follow-up work, the process he follows when tackling a brief and his thoughts on the NO!SPEC philosophy. Here’s a choice snippet:
I have to confess that quite often the follow-up work is not as exciting. If I’ve been given a brief, and it’s just for me… there’s no thrill of the win, you know? Of course, it’s a safer option, because you know you’re going to get paid. But it’s not really about the money for me. It’s become more about the competition, and the excitement of competing against so many other talented designers.
It was definitely interesting hearing an alternate take on the concept of design contests and how they affect a designer’s livelihood — in Richard’s case, in a positive way.
Read the interview and have your say. There are bound to be plenty of different opinions!
You can stick your em-dash up your dot dot dot
So once again I find myself intensely irritated by a growing wave of practice that is touted as correct when its correctness is entirely arbitrary. I’m talking about the finer points of typography.
A recent post by Christopher Phin, called Top Ten Typographic Mistakes Everyone Makes really exemplified that for me (sorry Chris, nothing personal!) with remarks like this:
there’s little chance that using a period instead of an interpunct will obscure or confuse your meaning – but they are nevertheless wrong
And this:
those aren’t proper quote marks; they should be sixty-six and ninety-nine quotes
The use of interpunct is not more correct than period, the use of straight quotes is not wrong, and (my personal bugbear) the use of three dots instead of ellipses is perfectly fine. Exactly as with grammar, the details we’re talking about here are not rules, they are conventions, and no more right or wrong than the collective will that made them conventional.
We see similar examples in grammar, for example over split-infinitives. According to the prescribed rules of grammar it’s wrong to split an English infinitive: to go boldly rather than to boldly go. But language is a living thing and it changes all the time. Really, the finer …
Real-world Gloss Effects in Fireworks
The internet — particularly its Web 2.0 version — is a very glossy place. In fact, I think if far-away aliens ever eavesdropped on our wireless internet transmissions, they’d conclude that humans must live in a hard world of polished marble, wet glass and high-gloss plastic.
While the gloss effect is probably getting a little ‘long in the tooth’, the main problem I have with it is the overall boring perfectness of the reflections. On the web, wet floors are always laser-cut mirrors, and glossy buttons always seem to exist in a perfect, evenly-lit vaccuum.
In the dirty, scratched and smudged real world, wet floors have dull spots and distortions in them and glossy surfaces warp, blur and reflect the patchy, organic world they inhabit.
Without wanting to wind the fashion clock back to the ‘distressed 90’s look’, you can give your reflections a bit more character without too much more work.
The Method
1). Let’s start with a rounded rectangle — it’s …
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