webdesign

As I’ve covered in a few previous posts, adding some motion to your website is a great way to create visual attention. This could be created in a low-tech way by using animated gifs, or it’s possible to use CSS trickery, Flash, or video backgrounds. Regardless of the method, it’s important to employ motion in…

While a serious tone is often seen in most professional design, it’s largely a result of demographics and targeting. A business application targeting IT professionals is likely to maintain a simplistic, serious and straightforward style. However, for freelance designers, social apps, and niche retailers, it’s often desirable to project an atmosphere of fun or playfulness.…

These days, it seems as though websites are becoming more and more complex. With galleries, multiple pages, blog posts, forms and other pages, many users are finding that it’s hard to find the content that actually matters. To combat this, designers and developers have begun using some neat tricks, such as tabbed layouts, and single…

Biking is one of the most popular pasttimes in the world, and it’s also still a widely used mode of transportation, particularly in underdeveloped areas and also in big cities. There are tons of sites devoted to biking, and also plenty of bike shops, so to stand out from the crowd, biking companies and teams…

These days, most websites are following the same structure. Header navigation, a lightbox, some content with a sidebar, and a footer. Although the familiarity does help with usability, familiarity also breeds contempt and the common structure is getting a bit tedious. For some web designers, they have decided to break the mold. With a bit…

One of the ways to add a creative, original or personal touch to a web design is to use illustrated elements. Illustrated elements work great for websites for personal artists, as well as children’s websites and more. Illustrated elements can be hand-drawn, or they can be floral, or simply creative styling for the site structure…

Brown is a great color for web design, because it is relatively neutral and plays very well with other, more vibrant colors.  Brown often signifies earthiness, rustic, and influenced by nature.  When paired with another color like green or blue, you can create a beautiful visual style that communicates using colors. Check out these beautiful…

Having a custom 404 page for your website is one of the subtle ways that you can create an incredible brand and memorable style for your website. Although ideally a 404 page should not be seen, it can be shown off for great design qualities, and sometimes it is unavoidable that it will be shown…

Single page websites are growing in popularity, as users are moving more quickly on the web and the bounce rate for many websites is upwards of 50%.  Thus, it becomes important to convey the information easily and quickly to the user and to not require them to click links on your site in order to…

Getting started as a web designer using Photoshop can be a daunting task, as it requires time, patience, consistent styling, proper spacing of elements, and an overall eye for design.  Luckily, designers can quickly get started and be off and running making designs within a few minutes of getting Photoshop, and it helps a lot…