The beauty of writing systems is that each has something unique from which to draw inspiration. Two weeks ago, in the first part of this article, we covered Arabic and East-Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) and a few Indic scripts (Devanagari, Thai and Tibetan).
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Web, industrial, interior… You name it and there are designers for it. We’re all trained in our particular areas (as we should be), but it would do us some good sometimes to look beyond our borders for new approaches to design problems. For a fresh perspective, here we’ll apply several principles of interior design to Web design and see what ideas would help change some of our stuck-in-a-rut design practices.
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In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn’t very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.
In this second part of the article, I’d like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones that I will carry with me for a long time to come.
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We have been publishing articles about CSS3 for a while now, and we keep receiving angry e-mails from some developers who complain that it doesn’t make sense to use CSS3 today. Yes, Internet Explorer doesn’t support most CSS3 properties. And yes, CSS3 vendor prefixes are bad for maintainability (and this is why we recommend extracting vendor prefixes in a separate CSS3 file).
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The old adage, “a picture speaks a thousand words” captures what user interface prototyping is all about: using visuals to describe thousands of words’ worth of design and development specifications that detail how a system should behave and look. In an iterative approach to user interface design, rapid prototyping is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a website or application, and validating it with a broader team of users, stakeholders, developers and designers. Doing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process, improving the final design and reducing the need for changes during development.
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Hacker attacks across the web are getting more sophisticated every day – after all, they have to. With the increased sophistication of anti-virus protection, firewalls, and application-based updates, hackers who want to stay in business have needed to get more creative. And they have, responding with increasingly sophisticated attacks that have forced the online security industry to scramble to keep up.
So how do the hackers stay ahead of the security experts? One reason is obvious – if they didn’t, they’d be out of a job. Another reason is institutional – a lone hacker working in a basement will be more innovative and faster moving than a large software company, thus more likely to come up with effective hacks.
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There comes a point in every website design when you simply want to give the website a little spice to impress the visitor and make it memorable. You want that sexy interaction to capture the user’s attention. In our previous articles, we showed you how to spice up your website with sexy buttons, practical elements and attractive visual effects.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to seduce your visitors with a little JavaScript action. In our examples, we’ll be using jQuery, a fast and concise JavaScript library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animation and Ajax interactions for rapid Web development. Ready? Let’s get things rolling!
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In this post we release a yet another freebie: a Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper, a desktop wallpaper that features most popular variables of the open source content management system Drupal. The wallpaper was created by Giovanni Scala for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
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I’ll start this article with a positive statement: Most people frequenting the web design community (whether they are casual readers or regular design bloggers doing research) understand that nothing is truly free (not even content), and appreciate the fact that many blogs, design resources, and tech news sites rely on advertising to keep them afloat.
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Propaganda is most well known in the form of war posters. But at its core, it is a mode of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Although propaganda is often used to manipulate human emotions by displaying facts selectively, it can also be very effective at conveying messages and hence can be used in web design, too.
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