Category Archives: Design
Dec 18, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Design
An awful lot of websites have started adding these silly toolbars to the bottoms of their pages. Mashable, CNET, and many small WordPress blogs now have them, and I often wonder if they actually provide users with any real function. (TechCrunch had used the same Meebo toolbar as Mashable, but they seemed to have removed it.)
I find the toolbars to be pretty much useless, and distracting as I try to read. What’s the point?
Are there any users that actually utilize the functionality offered by the JavaScript toolbars? If you have one and don’t see a quantifiable positive reaction from your users, ditch it. If your users find it useful, by all means, keep it. Soliciting feedback would probably be a good idea with something as obtrusive.
Dec 17
Have you tried Smashing Magazine’s The Smashing Book yet? I haven’t, but the full-color 313 page paperback is very tempting at it’s $29 price. Most computer-related books are much costlier than that, and they’re not by an online publication notorious for “smashing you with…
Dec 14
Here is a basic, and easy to implement tip, that will do wonders to make your website easier to navigate: Link your logo/banner to the front page. If a user clicks on the logo, they should wind up on the home page of the…
Dec 10
Tired of messing around with image files to create tasteful (and expandable) button graphics? Why don’t you just use some CSS3 techniques to build them on the fly? Smashing Magazine’s Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3 describes how to use box-shadow, text-shadow, and border-radius…
Nov 30
Smashing Magazine certainly has no shortage of freebie themes, icon sets, and vector images. This particular one could be useful for designers/developers working in the iPhone arena. The iPhone PSD Vector Kit is a set of images that would work well for mocking-up iPhone…
Nov 27
AOL, in their effort to reimage themselves as a “new media” company, is rebranding. The bad news? They’re ditching the classic triangle-circle logo in favor of random imagery with the white text “Aol.” overlayed. That’s right, no more caps and an extraneous period. While…
Nov 26
Don’t miss this amazing Smashing Magazine article: The Death of the Boring Blog Post. What if bloggers published less articles, but spent a lot more time on them? This is something that has been recommended by blogging legends such as Vitaly Friedman and Darren…
Nov 17
Here’s an interesting and little-mentioned CSS property: white-space. With it you can prevent an element’s contents from line wrapping, create pre text, even pre text that wraps when necessary. The syntax is like this: The above example is fairly self-exaplanatory; it prevents the text…
Nov 9
The Brads is a weekly web comic about Brad Colbow and Brad Dielman, two web designers in Cleveland Ohio. I’ve been following it for a few months now, and it’s pretty good. The site’s design looks great–er, wait–this isn’t a Design Spotlight post… The…
Nov 6
What exactly is a sprite? It’s a CSS technique that can make your website load faster. Instead of having a dozen images that are included on every page of the site (one for your logo, one for an RSS button, a few fore social…
