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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Information graphics (or infographics) are used to display information in ways that are more creative than plain old text. These days, they surround us in the media, published works, road signs and manuals. Lately, the Internet has been flooded with infographics on various topics, ranging from science and technology to society and culture. In this article, we’ll look at the process of designing an infographic about programming.
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In any industry where the people behind a company are as important as the company itself, you’re likely to find a kind of expanded “about” page that includes information on individual employees. “Meet the Team” pages are popular among web design and other creative firms, but are also found on sites within various other industries. These pages are a valuable addition to any site where human contact is an important part of the industry. It adds a personal touch to the company and can lend trust to visitors.
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Modern Web-building technologies allow designers to realize their most daring and creative ideas. Enhanced interactivity and a remarkable visual appearance can be achieved by means of such tools as Flash, JavaScript and Papervision3D, to name just a few. These strengths usually impress and entertain visitors and thus are often used for conceptual artistic presentations and promotional campaigns.
In this post, you’ll find a collection of amusing websites that, by combining unconventional (and sometimes bizarre) ideas and clever JavaScript and Flash effects, will entice you to play on them for an embarrassing long time.
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The archive is one of those often-overlooked parts of a website that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Too often it’s thrown on a page that’s no different from any other page on the website, or it’s ignored altogether. The archive offers a lot of room for creativity, though. Whether you opt for an abbreviated one in the sidebar or footer or devote an entire page to it, the archive an opportunity to make your design stand out.
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In our earlier article about Web design trends for 2010 we covered the strong influence of print design techniques, keypress navigation, horizontal layouts, rich typography and aesthetically pleasing designs. Web design today is developing rapidly, breaking the limitations of conventional approaches and exploring the possibilites of upcoming technologies. Designers are not only experimenting with new techniques and design approaches, but they are improving the quality of their designs in both technical and conceptual respects.
Modern websites have great strengths, such as flexibility, cross-browser compatibility and personalization, but they are also becoming increasingly simple and intuitive. This is being done through the application of subtle usability enhancements, drawn either from the Web itself or from offline interactive systems. The Web today is increasingly complex, while usage of the Web is becoming increasingly simple.
In this article, we’ll explore some new design approaches and techniques that you may want to develop for your own projects. We’ll present rather unusual or unconventional design approaches and try to understand what’s actually interesting about them and how we can apply them to modern Web design. More specifically, we will discuss the following: real-life metaphors that are applied to the Web, hidden complexity, subtle interactivity, context-sensitive navigation and rapid CSS3 adaptation.
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The beauty of typography has no borders. While most of us work with the familiar Latin alphabet, international projects usually require quite extensive knowledge about less familiar writing systems from around the world. The aesthetics and structure of such designs can be strongly related to the shape and legibility of the letterforms, so learning about international writing systems will certainly help you create more attractive and engaging Web designs.
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With all of the buzz going on in our Web community about HTML5 and Flash, I’ve decided to dive into the fray and offer my thoughts as a 10-year veteran of both Web design and Flash development. Let me preface by saying that this article is opinion-based, and that information is certainly out there that I am not aware of, and that none of us truly knows what the future holds.
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In this article, Cameron Chapman presents a number of principles of minimalist design, as well as an exploration of current trends and additional examples.
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In our past articles, we’ve experimented with better ways to engage users on web pages with CSS3. We love getting into the nuts and bolts of web design by showing off some nifty coding tricks. In this article we’ll take a step back to provide some reasoning for designers to embark on that next redesign.
Great web design happens with sound user needs, solid business goals and focused metrics. Learning how to deconstruct a website is an important step in building a plan that aligns the company vision with the needs of users. A good review will put the focus on the profitability of the business.
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