Visual Design

by codepo8 | Your site navigation is what helps the visitors to find your content. Don't make it a technical portfolio but a helper tool. This article shows how the simplicity of real life navigational helpers can be applied to the web. Read More »

by ThomH | We all know that color can make or break a site. But beyond eye candy appeal, color choices also impact usability and accessibility. This can impact up to 1 in 12 people, roughly 8% of a site's potential audience. The solution is not to use only boring colors or do only simple designs. In contrast, by understanding better the relationship between color and accessibility, the designer can make inspired and creative choices for the multi-device Internet. Read More »

by ideahamster | Looking for a means to judge the quality of web design? A good place to start is with the US Federal Government, which provides more than 175 research-based guidelines. Read More »

by ideahamster | Even in the digital age, pen and paper play a critical role in creating an effective web site. Read More »

by notabene | With the expanding support for PNG in modern browsers, Internet Explorer's lack of support has become increasingly frustrating. Here is a way to try to bypass its limitation without javascript: PNG for recent browsers, GIF for the others. Read More »

by hgquinn | In this second article about Margaret Livingstone's Where and What vision systems, theory is put into practice. A real world design problem is analyzed and resolved using an understanding of how these two distinct vision systems work. Read More »

by hgquinn | Neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone researches human vision systems and art. With a little understanding of her Where and What vision systems, you can learn how to punch up your designs and graphics, and get a handle on elusive design problems. Read More »

by calimehtar | PNG was designed to replace GIF as the standard image format for lossless compression on the internet. It claims better compression than GIF, full alpha transparency, and gamma correction. All common browsers today support PNG in at least a limited way, and is a recommendation of the W3C.Given that IE for Windows does support PNG in all other ways other Is it time to switch? I tested out all the various claims of PNGs superiority, with mixed results. Read More »

by nileshch | The popular way of wrapping text along the irregular outline of an image is to use sliced images and float them around. If you don't want image slices, here's a clean standards-compliant alternative. Read More »

by aardvark | Because it is often necessary to reproduce the colors in identity materials when building a web page, it helps to know what to expect from the displays that will actually see the page you create as well as account for those users who may not perceive color in the same way. Read More »