Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

If you’re not manually kerning your headlines and other important type, your designs aren’t as good as they could be. There, I said it. Kerning isn’t an overtly difficult skill to become adept at – however, it is a skill that is difficult to master (kind of like playing the bass). That said, there are a few basic terms to know, tips to apply, and resources to bookmark that will have you on your way to getting your black belt in kerning. Then you’ll be sure to impress everyone at the party your clients with your newly improved design work.

How to Kern Properly

What is Kerning?

Kerning is the adjustment of space between two unique letters. The best type designers out there test every letter pairing in their typefaces and adjust the kerning metrics to ensure the best overall experience – however, by and large, manual kerning adjustments still need to be made (especially for notably difficult letter pairings, like the uppercase AVA combination for example). Read the whole article >

Full-screen background images are nothing new in web design, but the ways in which we can achieve this effect have changed and improved as our industry has progressed. Additionally, the whole responsive web design movement has put even more emphasis on the need for dynamic websites – using dynamically resizing background images in your website designs can be a great solution to this need.

Let’s look at 4 different solutions for full page background images, starting with a CSS-only solution and moving into a few different jQuery-powered solutions. All of these solutions are free, well-documented and relatively easy to implement, too!

CSS3 Method

You gotta love when you can solve a problem solely by using CSS. The CSS3 spec has a new property, titled background-size. We can use this to our advantage when creating full-screen background image websites by setting its value to cover.

cSS3 background-size

Read the whole article >

On March 10, I had the privilege of presenting at BlogWest 2012. BlogWest is a blogging conference (obviously), to which end I ended up speaking on the topic of evaluating and improving one’s blog design. The talk didn’t include code snippets or any hands-on development, but rather introductory design concepts along with some tools & resources.

Click the image below to check out the slides from the  How to Improve & Evaluate Your Blog Design presentation.

Evaluate & Improve your Blog Design

As well, here is a handy PDF download of the resources & links mentioned in the presentation. Hope you find it useful!

My Web Design Workflow

March 5, 2012

A little while ago, I wrote an article on the steps to take before starting the web design workflow. The steps mentioned in that article ensure that a solid groundwork is laid for a successful web design project. The next logical step? Let’s chat about my web design workflow for a standard website project.

Before I jump into my process and the tools I use, let me say that this isn’t a case of “the right way” or “the wrong way”. This is just my way. Some designers design in the browser these days; some use frameworks, and so on and so forth. There’s more than one way to skin a cat (or carrot, for those attached to their cats like myself). So hopefully you can take from this article those pieces that will help you on your path, and perhaps make some suggestions in the comments too!

Web Design Process

Read the whole article >

Us web designers… we like to jump right into the creative ball pit sometimes, and get right to the fun stuff in Photoshop & CSS. I know I’m guilty of it sometimes, and I bet you have been too in the past. It’s not the end of the world, but it really isn’t best practice for design – and if you’re a professional, you should be paying attention and adhering to best practices. That’s why there are a few steps you should take before designing a website.

Steps to Take Before Designing a Website

Read the whole article >

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