There has been an increasing and sincere interest in typography on the web over the last few years. Most websites rely on text to convey their messages, so it’s not a surprise that text is treated with utmost care. In this article, we’ll look at some useful techniques and clever effects that use the power of style sheets and some features of the upcoming CSS Text Level 3 specification, which should give Web designers finer control over text.
Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine
Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go.
Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine
“Mathematics is beautiful.”
This may sound absurd to people who wince at numbers and equations. But some of the most beautiful things in nature and our universe exhibit mathematical properties, from the smallest seashell to the biggest whirlpool galaxies. In fact, one of the greatest ancient philosophers, Aristotle, said: “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”
Because of its beautiful nature, mathematics has been a part of art and architectural design for ages. But it has not been exploited much for website design. This is probably because many of us regard mathematics as being antithetical to creativity. On the contrary, mathematics can be atool to produce creative designs. That said, you don’t have to rely on math for every design. The point is that you should regard it as your friend, not a foe. For illustrative purposes, we created a couple of web designs that present mathematical principles discussed in this article. We are also giving away a couple of PSDs that you can use right away in your next design.
Layouts featured in this post were created specifically for the purpose of this article. During the design process we made sure that all of the designs shown in this article are essentially mathematical in nature; that is, they exhibit order, symmetry and limitation.
Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine
We all have shortcuts that are essential to our daily workflow. A majority of them are staples such as Copy (Command + C) and Paste (Command + V), but occasionally we stumble upon a shortcut we wish we’d learned years ago. Suddenly, this simple shortcut has streamlined our process and shaved quite a bit of time off our day. Collected here are some lesser known but extremely useful shortcuts. Many of these are not documented in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” menu, and some of them don’t even have equivalent menu options.
Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine
Finding the right typeface or font for a design can be a tricky process. So it’s good to have a nice selection of fonts at your disposal. With this article, we’re tying to help you out with that and give you some typographicenjoyment. Here are 20 free fonts that are super clean and would be great to use in your next minimal style design.
Read the full article over at Web Design Ledger
The Web is evolving fast: new features, formats, user needs, continuously change the way we interact with websites. In this post I want to suggest you some interesting emerging techniques every web developer should know in order to build modern web applications.
Read the full article over at woorkup.
The web development scene is moving forward at a lightning-fast pace, and it’s imperative that developers continue to keep their skills fresh.
If you’ve been involved in front-end design or development in any form over the past five years or so, then it’s very likely that you’ve experimented at some point with one of the popular JavaScript libraries, many of which have become quite prominent and are now used on a number of large commercial websites.
Read the full artice over at Six Revisions
I am a huge fan of the work of Dieter Rams, there will with no doubt be more posts soon outlining some of his specific works.
As head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, Rams emerged as one of the most influential industrial designers of the late 20th century by defining an elegant, legible, yet rigorous visual language for its products.
Rams developed the 10 Design Principle of Good Design:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Copyright Dieter Rams, amended March 2003 and October 2009
I love beautiful things.
There’s very little in the world that takes my breath away quite like an object that was lovingly crafted, built with care and passion, and presented with the sort of pride that befits a marvelously well-made item.
That which is beautiful is increasingly difficult to come by in a world where a premium is placed on speed, and things are made to be disposable. We often sacrifice real craftsmanship at the altar of expediency. While we are still capable of recognizing the value of something that has been expertly constructed, we often choose the cheap and easy option instead.
Read full article at Design Informer
Happy new year to all Design Grid readers.
I wish you all the best for 2010!
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