April 20, 2009 — There’s just no escaping light and shadow – it’s everywhere you look. Everything you see reflects light and casts some sort of shadow. Visually, light and shadow help us make sense of what we see and help us understand texture, dimension and perspective. So, as we try to make our designs on the Web more natural, moving and intuitive, a good understanding of light and shadow is pretty important. Here are 5 ways to better use light and shadow to polish your page designs and make them stand out on the screen. Read more…

April 20, 2009 — “Lomography” is a term quite unknown to most of us, but many practice it. The name was inspired and derived from the Russian “LOMO” cameras. Lomography not only refers to photographs taken with the LOMO camera, but can also apply to casual photography taken with any ordinary camera. Read more…

April 19, 2009 — Although often used in the wrong context, the motif of ’70s Retro Rainbow designs seems to occur in many modern designs – from products designs to posters and web designs. The rainbow colors are particularly eye-catching and lively; they may provide the design with a dynamics and help to vividly convey the message of the graphic work. [Updated June/14/2017] Read more…

April 17, 2009 — Whatever country we live in, we’re probably all familiar with the well-known photography magazines available in our newsagents and bookstores. The UK has Practical Photography, France has Photo, the Italians have Zoom and the Americans have American Photo. What you may not know is that there are many more photography magazines that are only available online. And some of them are good, very good. Read more…

April 17, 2009 — This is our fifth installment of Ask SM, featuring reader questions about Web design, focusing on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this post we’ll cover how you can style only the text inputs, refreshing a content-block automatically, how to avoid some positioning problems and create and use transparent div-backgrounds; we also discuss further CSS-related problems and deliver answers to a couple of quickfire questions. Read more…

April 16, 2009 — Making the switch from print publishing to digital publishing is a big step. But as costs for everything from paper to shipping increase, making the jump to digital is becoming more appealing to publishers of both newspapers and magazines. It’s a complicated process, though, and if not executed effectively, it can leave readers feeling alienated and disenfranchised. Read more…

April 15, 2009 — Designing a beautiful, legible typeface is hard work and takes time and patience. The type family has to convey a message clearly and effectively, regardless of the setting in which it is used. Of course, thousands of freely available fonts are out there, and some free fonts are very impressive. Read more…

April 15, 2009 — One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software’s appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress’ power with hacks. Read more…

April 14, 2009 — Though we differ in the way we look and things we believe in, there’s something we all share: emotion. Human emotion is innate in all of us; it’s something we’re born with and something we die with. Happiness, sadness, love, hatred, worries, and indifference - these are things that constantly occur in our daily lives. Read more…

April 13, 2009 — Last week we presented 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – we discussed various rules and guidelines from marketing, such as subliminal suggestion, prevention of choice paralysis, AIDA-principle, attention guide and the Gutenberg rule. The main idea was to help designers and developers create a design that would help the site to grow and become a success the financial point of view. Read more…