What have you been up to?
What have I been up to? The last few weeks have been quite busy. Some of you might have seen I’m currently enforcing ogilvy’s interactive team for serveral projects. To wrap things up; cool people, with great knowledge and lots exiting projects.
Besides “work”, I haven’t been busy with other projects worth mentioning, at least not yet!
So my dear blog readers – what have you been up to?
- Geschreven op Tuesday 18 November 2008
- Al 1 reactie
My Beliefs
Andy Rutledge on “the web and the economy we’re entering”.
Those designers who also understand front-end development, CMS integration, and scripting will do best. Unprepared and unprofessional freelancers will do very poorly during this time.
Yes – I design websites & I slice them. I care about every detail, every pixel. Being the designer & slicer at the same time is something I strongly believe in.
Note; by slicing I mean “front-end development; xhtml, css, javascript, …”
- Geschreven op Tuesday 11 November 2008
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Design problems and their solutions
Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most difficult skill for a designer to develop.
Being process-oriented means:
- Seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after solutions
- not force-fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems
Every time I start designing a new website and it’s not working out the way I want – my first thoughts are always “quit it, start over, this ain’t right”. At that very own moment it would feel right to trash your design or not to finish it, why put more effort in it?
But, even it is not working out, you should try to finish the design with the same thoughts & energy you started it. Don’t trash it, just look at it as your first idea that didn’t work out. Ask yourself the question “why isn’t it working out” – which elements are making this design crappy?
When you’ve anserwed these questions, you can start working on a solution. (startover, realign,…)
- Geschreven op Wednesday 5 November 2008
- Al 1 reactie
Don’t touch that input element
Repeat after me: input elements should look and behave like input elements – that sounds easy, and yet so many websites are doing it wrong. Wrong as in; design overkill.
Fine by me if you want to design a submit button, textfield or any other input element – as long as it still looks & behaves like one. Visitors instantly need to recognize that textfields are textfields and that there is a submit button at the end of the form.
Lets start with two bad examples;
* Funky shapes but the <textfield> looks more like
a design element instead of something functional.
* Notice the oversized submit button on the right
To conclude everything, here’s a good (belgian made) example;
* Plain & simple – very usable.
It appears that with all the different CSS goodies we have, people start designing/styling almost everything – and that’s not always a good thing. Try to keep it simple – focus on the user and the way they will use your web form.
Don’t be ashamed to use browser default styled form elements – they’re here to help you & your visitors.
Some interesting read on form design:
- Geschreven op Wednesday 22 October 2008
- 2 reacties