September 10, 2010 — Mistakes are made every day in the design and development world. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it happens. In fact, mistakes are one of the most powerful learning tools at our disposal. Our mistakes impart important lessons that we carry with us as we continue to hone our skill set. Own your mistakes. Never shy away from them; they are the milestones in our development. So often we view mistakes negatively and let them get us down. We believe they indicate failure and that our otherwise perfect record will be forever marred. No one is perfect; we all make mistakes. They indicate failure only if we fail to learn from them. The online design and development community is a wonderful resource in this respect. Not only are members open about their mistakes, they share their experiences as learning opportunities for others — this is helpful for those of us who have not yet suffered through the same bumps in the road. With this in mind, we turned again to our Twitter followers and Facebook fans to find out about the worst design or programming mistakes they have ever made. Now we share them with you, our readers, so that we can all learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. Read more…

September 8, 2010 — I never tire of repeating this to anyone who will listen. Don’t base your business card design on the fact that your printer has a special limited-time offer on round corners or metallic inks. Think in terms of what the design will add to your message. Tempted to use rounded corners just because the cool kids are doing it? Maybe your card would stand out more by not using this technique. Read more…

September 7, 2010 — Everyone is always looking for interesting and effective ways to organize their website and allow users to move about and find things. But there’s a fine line between unexpected and unusable. Read more…

September 6, 2010 — Lately, Apple Keynote has been gaining popularity among designers as a wireframing and prototyping tool. Features like multiple slide masters, styles, grouping, animation and hyperlinks make it ideal for crafting interactive prototypes and UI narratives. Today’s freebie, Keynotopia, is a free set of interface elements for Keynote that makes it possible for anyone to create these prototypes in minutes. Read more…

September 6, 2010 — In-house teams face challenges that can be overcome by handling internal stakeholders and the department’s image. Find here techniques to help you lessen the load and enjoy managing your website again Read more…

September 5, 2010 — One of the great advantages of creating interactive websites is being able to dynamically hide and reveal parts of your content. Not only does it make for a more interesting user experience, but it allows you to stuff more onto a single page than would otherwise be possible, but in a very elegant, non-obtrusive way, and without overwhelming the user with too much information at once. In this tutorial, we’ll create a sliding menu using the jQuery framework. You will find the downloadable source files at the end of the tutorial if you wish to use them on your website. But the main goal of this article is to show you some basic techniques for creating these kinds of effects and to provide you with the tools you need to realize your own creative ideas. This tutorial is aimed at beginner jQuery developers and those just getting into client-side scripting. You’ll learn how to progressively build this simple effect from scratch. Read more…

September 3, 2010 — The business of building websites is one of constant change, adaptation and strategy. The way designers and developers build websites is often informed by the methods of others and their own trial and error. In light of this, we can draw a number of parallels — some philosophical, to a certain extent — between Web professionals and one of the oldest and most popular board games of all time (counting traditional and digital games). This game is chess. Read more…

September 2, 2010 — They say the first bite is taken with the eye. If so, these appetizing restaurant websites succeed in whetting our appetites, inviting us to a savoury next bite. In these designs, color scheme and introductory copy show vastly different aspects of the restaurant experience. Moody warm tones create atmosphere, vibrant greens underscore freshness, and earthy colors communicate a relaxed, friendly attitude. Read more…

September 1, 2010 — Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. Read more…

September 1, 2010 — The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on. Read more…