CategoryShowcases

April 9, 2009 — Last week we already presented our first selection of beautiful, clever and creative logo designs. This post presents the second part of our selection, featuring even more beautiful and creative logos that will hopefully inspire you or at least give you the idea of what the current logo design trends look like. Read more…

April 6, 2009 — There are an extensive amount of roads you can take in web design, specifically in navigation. Here, we will talk about one specific navigation technique, tab-based navigation. If properly carried out, tabbed navigation can be very clean and organized within a web layout. [Links checked February/10/2017] So what is tabbed navigation? Well, it is essentially a set of buttons most often set horizontally. Tabs generally follow numerous different styling guidelines. First, a tab set usually is attached to or slightly protrudes from a container, like in the example below. Also, notice how the open tab matches the background color of the container, and the other buttons are darker. This is another common styling guideline. When you look at tabbed navigations, you will also notice many styling trends. First, many tabs will have rounded corners on buttons. This helps to create a clean look. Also helping to make a clean look is the use of separation between buttons. Most designs use space to separate buttons, but a bevel, single line, or background color contrast will also look nicely. Read more…

April 4, 2009 — We recently showcased beautiful websites from the fashion industry, and in response to reader requests, we’ll do the same thing here for sports websites. This article showcases the most beautiful website designs from the North American sports industry, including ones for news, teams and leagues, sports apparel and more. As in any industry, sports websites have their own trends, as you will see below. However, because the websites showcased here fall into a number of different categories and serve different purposes, not all of the trends we discuss will be relevant or applicable to all types of sports websites. Read more…

April 1, 2009 — As designers, we are always in constant need of inpiration. Whether it be Web or graphic design, other work to fuel our creativity is essential. Logo design requires the most amount of inspiration, however. Read more…

March 31, 2009 — Web design has come a long way since its beginning, especially in terms of styling. Take a look at a website from 10 years ago and compare it to one from today. The differences are enormous. One of the major changes you will notice is the background. Today, backgrounds are one of the core features that determine how visually interesting a website is. The background holds the theme of the website, and there are a vast amount of possibilities when designing a website background. This article goes over the best practices and popular trends of backgrounds in the current stage of innovative Web design. You may also be interested in the following related posts: * Web Design Trends For 2009 * Mobile Web Design Trends For 2009 Read more…

March 25, 2009 — In this article, we take a closer look at the nature of drop-down navigation menus and analyze situations in which they should or should not be used. Read more…

March 18, 2009 — Readability is one of the more important aspects of Web design usability. Readable text affects how users process the information in the content. Poor readability scares readers away from the content. On the other hand, done correctly, readability allows users to efficiently read and take in the information in the text. You want users to be able to read your content and absorb it easily. Read more…

March 17, 2009 —

Editor’s Note: An updated collection of user experience research on breadcrumbs is available in Vitaly Friedman’s article, “Designing Effective Breadcrumbs Navigation”.

On websites that have a lot of pages, breadcrumb navigation can greatly enhance the way users find their way around. In terms of usability, breadcrumbs reduce the number of actions a website visitor needs to take.

March 12, 2009 — From a web designer’s perspective, it can be very interesting to look at the top websites from a particular industry to see how they relate to their target audience, the different approaches that are used, and how they compare to websites in other industries. Read more…

March 3, 2009 — Why use icons? Design is all about communication: it doesn’t matter how important or exciting the information that you’re sharing is if you fail to hook your visitors. When initially viewing a website, most users will first scan the page for visually interesting content, and only after something grabs their attention will they actually begin reading. Icons are a simple, effective way to draw users into the content of your website. Read more…