Category Archives: Design
Dec 5, 2012 by Matt | Posted in Design
I’m not normally one to agree with Jakob Nielsen, but he really hit the nail on the head with his fresh rant panning Windows 8. He has seven main complaints, from the “double desktop” inconsistency and low information density to the overly flat UI making it difficult to determine what is and isn’t an interactive element.
I’ve long thought that the split between the Desktop and Metro UIs would confuse newbies, though perhaps not so badly as the ARM/x86 issue. A lot of the people who ran out and bought the Surface tablet will probably be irritated when they learn that their x86 software won’t run on it, since the binaries are incompatible with the ARM architecture.
It’s an interesting read.
Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users [UseIt]
May 20
It’s been about four years since this site last had a design refresh, and it’s high time it did! Version five really hasn’t changed much over the four years since its launch, and it’s looking a little stale. So today I bring you, the…
Apr 24
Ever since the days of print, it has been common to style quotations and cover blurbs with oversized quotation marks floating along the left side. The practice is alive and well in the internet age, though the technique usually used is a background image.…
Apr 18
Since Twitter released their Bootstrap CSS framework, there has been some backlash among web designers. It tends to be used fresh out of the proverbial box, without any modification, an awful lot. The snide remarks about Bootstrap are largely unfounded, though. While some people…
Apr 3
For April Fool’s Day this year, I decided to do an amusing CSS trick instead of my usual fake news story. I turned the entire web site on its head, using a simple CSS3 attribute, and added a bit of JavaScript to jump down…
Feb 16
Back in 2003, a website called CSS Zen Garden was launched by Vancouver web designer Dave Shea to showcase what could be done with pure CSS. Back then, the internet was full of table-based layouts and large, text-filled images. The Garden was a pretty…
Nov 24
I’ve been working with CSS3 gradients a bit lately, and they’re the best thing in CSS since border-radius. It’s just so much easier to add a line of CSS and fiddle with a couple of color hex codes than to mess around in Photoshop…
Nov 14
Firebug is probably the most invaluable tool in my web development arsenal. (Well, aside from Photoshop. But that has a value: freaking expensive.) I’m not terribly picky about my text editor—after all, I used Notepad for years—though BBEdit is my tool of choice. I…
Nov 9
Traditionally, blog themes have placed the form to leave a new comment below the listing of existing comments. This still holds true in most WordPress themes to date. However, many sites now have the comment form above the comments. Notable sites include Mashable and…
Nov 4
If you do even a little bit of web or graphic design, you might have run into a cool poster or product label somewhere and thought “I like this color scheme.” ColorSchemer Touch is a neat iOS app that will help you out with…
Should Comment Entry Forms Be Above or Below Existing Comments?
Nov 9Traditionally, blog themes have placed the form to leave a new comment below the listing of existing comments. This still holds true in most WordPress themes to date. However, many sites now have the comment form above the comments. Notable sites include Mashable and…