Lately I have found that I have been lacking in design inspiration. I tried css and design galleries, but those didn’t really work. I saw a lot of sites I liked, but the style was so much different than what I wanted to go for. A few days ago, I thought of trying music as a form of design inspiration (particularly music by the band Muse). It worked with stunning results. It may seem hard to believe, but give it a try.
Let me know if you try this out, and it works for you too.
Everyday I run home to my computer, and check out the 20+ css and web galleries I am subscribed to. There is no doubt all the sites that are featured are nice sites, but most of them just aren’t memorable. So I decided to try and figure out what it actually was that made these few sites stand out.
The first thing I noticed was color scheme.
To me, I tend to forget most of the “organic” colored websites. By organic I mean dark shades of green, browns, and possibly desaturated shades of blue. I’m not saying these are bad colors. I’m just saying that these seem to stand out much less than websites which use other colors. Besides organic colors, almost all other colors stood out the same to me. The only variation in this pattern came with erraticwisdom. This site uses a black and white color scheme with one very bright accent color (yellow). This use of colors definitely made erraticwisdom stand out much more than any other site I saw that day.
The next thing I noticed was the use of typography.
Most sites use the same exact typographic patterns. Again, erraticwisdom is a perfect example of a site that varies from this pattern. Erraticwisdom uses large post titles that grab your attention very quickly. Another example of good typography is BienBienBien. They used an organic color scheme very effectively here, and backed it up with very nice typography. They use almost newspaper style fonts, but the titles stand out because of their boldness. Also, on rollover, the titles are emphasized with a red background. This makes the design “pop” even more.
Over the past few days, I made a lot of changes to the site. The only design change you will notice is the subscribe button at the end of each post. However, I have made many more changes to the sites coding. So please let me know how everything looks.
Thanks,
Greg
I liked the redesign of my site, but it just wasn’t functional. The content was too far from the scrollbar, the content area was too small, the background didn’t look very good in smaller browsers, the list goes on. So I re designed it yet again. Let me know what you think via comment. Thanks.
Also, here is the old background if you want it for anything 
I believe there are three parts a designer needs to make a name for his or herself. These are realism, functionalism, and non-conformism.
So you probably wonder what a realist even is. I’d define it as someone who realizes things can go wrong, and probably will. In other words, they live their lives by Murphy’s Law. This is a good thing because when problems occur, it is easier to deal with them if you already know they are going to happen. This applies to everyday parts of life, and especially to the design world.
Realism applies to design, in the form of deadlines. Everyone hates them; well, at least I do. I used to often find myself scrambling at the last minute to finish things because I thought they would take an hour, and they ended up taking five. (Usually the problem doesn’t take that much extra time, but I was very out of practice with my javascript.) So anyways, as far as time management on projects, it is good to look at everything that can go wrong (because it will) before establishing a deadline with your client, audience, etc.
A functionalist is a person who puts the usability of a website, interface, etc. in a higher place of importance than the design itself. Think about it this way; what is the point of design if it isn’t conveying a message or main point?
I was recently thinking about this because recently I’ve had two design jobs; both for bands. Both bands wanted completely different types of designs. So I’ll get right to it, is there a relationship between the music a person likes/listens to and the style of design that they prefer. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is.
For instance, people who prefer music types such as metal, or newer genres like screamo seem to prefer grungy design. As you may be able to guess, this is the type of design and music that I prefer. On the other hand, designers that like softer types of rock seem prefer more clean types of design.
Of course, this is all just my opinion, and it leaves gaps for styles of music like country, rap, classical, etc. So if you think there is a correlation between music and design let please me know. Just comment with your style of design, and the type of music you listen to.
You just finished creating your new website. It’s awesome right? Maybe it is, but there is a good chance it isn’t. Here are my top five reasons good sites go bad.
Take a look at a css gallery. All of the sites featured have “eye-pleasing” layouts. If you break down many, if not most, of the websites, you’ll find that the structure completely lacks functionality. For instance, I just opened up CSS Mania. The second most recent website added to their weblog section uses images for their main navigation. For those of you who didn’t already know, images shouldn’t be used for the main navigation of a website. There is a chance that the user may have images disabled in their browser, but more commonly, if the image doesn’t load, whoever is taking the time to view the website will be completely lost, and probably leave (never to return). Text should always be used as the main source of navigation.
Afterwards, I took a look at the next website. This one has its navigation in the bottom right corner of the page. This is the worst possible location for navigation! A study by Sav Shrestha and Kelsi Lenz, shows how users typically view web pages in an “F-Shape”. The left and top areas are viewed the most heavily. That’s why it makes sense to have the navigation and content over towards that area.
Well lately I’ve seen many “imageless” generators for many types of objects on the web. Some include rounded corners on boxes and even ones that make boxes look like speech bubbles. One I have not seen, is for imagelss gradients. So I took it upon myself to create one. This is just the beta version, but I will improve the design soon. Also, please let me know if you find any bugs in it.
Enjoy, and please spread the word.
Thanks =]
I believe that this is a topic worth talking about; can a designer be great and successful while using free tools? My simple answer is yes, you most definitely can be. Notice my usage of the word “can”. Using the right free tools can be just as effective as using more expensive software such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver.
The first thing you need is a great sense of design. Even if you have these more expensive tools, but you lack a sense for good design, your designs will often be failures. The only thing I can say on developing a good sense of design is to practise, and look at other designers’ work. A great place to try is CSSMania. The only problem with css galleries is that, after viewing a nice site, you may inadvertently mimic their style of design. This is never a good thing to do. Besides making the original designer angry and possibly setting yourself up for a lawsuit, you still have no definite style of your own. So instead of looking at css galleries or similar sites, I would attempt to look at other forms of media or design. These can include TV commercials, magazine layouts, or even book covers. Just use your imagination, and try and develop your own sense of style.
Brushes are a very nice way to create a grunge effect. They are simple to use, and believe it or not, they are simple to create. I use them all the time in web design or just simple photo manipulations. Anyways, you probably don’t really care where I use them; so let’s begin.
Alright so you’ve got photoshop open, now its time to open up your browser {which should be Firefox}, and search for images using keywords such as dirt, rocks, bark, etc. Anything earthy that you think may work as a brush. I used the keyword “dirt” on google images to come up with this image:
At this point you are probably wondering how this is a brush. Well, as it stands now, its not. You need to change the levels before you can turn it into an amazing grunge brush. Follow the following instructions:
Enter the following settings:
Now you should have something that looks like this:
Now select the magic wand tool {
}. *NOTE* you can simply select the magic wand tool by pressing the ‘w’ key Set it to the following settings:
Now click on the black part of the image. You should have something that looks like this:
Now hit delete. After hitting delete you need to desaturate the brush.
The selected region should be gone and your image should look similar to this:
