In our earlier article about Web design trends for 2010 we covered the strong influence of print design techniques, keypress navigation, horizontal layouts, rich typography and aesthetically pleasing designs. Web design today is developing rapidly, breaking the limitations of conventional approaches and exploring the possibilites of upcoming technologies. Designers are not only experimenting with new techniques and design approaches, but they are improving the quality of their designs in both technical and conceptual respects.
Modern websites have great strengths, such as flexibility, cross-browser compatibility and personalization, but they are also becoming increasingly simple and intuitive. This is being done through the application of subtle usability enhancements, drawn either from the Web itself or from offline interactive systems. The Web today is increasingly complex, while usage of the Web is becoming increasingly simple.
In this article, we’ll explore some new design approaches and techniques that you may want to develop for your own projects. We’ll present rather unusual or unconventional design approaches and try to understand what’s actually interesting about them and how we can apply them to modern Web design. More specifically, we will discuss the following: real-life metaphors that are applied to the Web, hidden complexity, subtle interactivity, context-sensitive navigation and rapid CSS3 adaptation.
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In this article, Cameron Chapman presents a number of principles of minimalist design, as well as an exploration of current trends and additional examples.
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Web design is a fickle industry. Just like every other form of artistic expression, Web design has undergone a continuous and surprisingly fast evolution. Once a playground for enthusiasts, it has now become a mature rich medium with strong aesthetic and functional appeal.
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A grid at its barest is nothing more than a series of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines spaced at regular intervals, but its innate propensity for creating order out of chaos makes it one of the most powerful tools at a designer’s disposal. If you want to reap their benefits of grids on your next project but are unsure of the specifics, this article is for you.
Grids are everywhere in our society, and have been for centuries, as this city plan for Washington, DC drawn in 1792 by Charles L’Enfant demonstrates. If you’re even vaguely acquainted with the fundamentals of graphic design, you’ve probably worked on some kind of a grid or at the very least seen examples of grid-based layouts. Grids are an established design tool, and a wealth of knowledge exists in the literature discussing the theory of grids and extolling their benefits. I will make no attempt to summarize them here (if you want a good primer on grid theory, have a look at this piece by Mark Boulton).
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We often talk about how to make our websites more usable, whether it’s tweaking the HTML structure of pages to benefit the user’s process or figuring out how best to display a message via CSS. But we never bring this thought process into our jQuery-based (and other JavaScript-based) elements. How can we enhance the user experience and usability of our jQuery events?
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Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the idea of a design hierarchy of needs rests on the assumption that in order to be successful, a design must meet basic needs before it can satisfy higher-level needs. Before a design can “Wow” us, it must work as intended. It must meet some minimal need or nothing else will really matter.
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The Netherlands, also known as the “Low Countries,” is a small, crowded, muddy piece of land through which a few big important rivers fortunately run. In this country, you can find coffee shops, wooden shoes, tulips, windmills and a lot of water. And everything is rather small! Well, at least most of the architecture is. How cute is that? But it’s also the land that brought the world many great painters, famous architects, and excellent graphic, fashion and interior designers. We all know Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mondriaan, Rietveld, Koolhaas, Escher, Droog Design and Viktor & Rolf, don’t we?
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Website navigation menus generally come in one of two orientations: vertical and horizontal. Horizontal navigation menus display items side by side. Vertical navigation menus stack items on top of each other. In this post, we highlight some remarkable vertical navigation menus, for your inspiration.
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Many of us today probably use the Web to book tickets and find information about movies. By selling tickets and entertaining visitors, websites help movies succeed at the box office and earn public approval. And yet, website developers don’t get any public recognition for the success of movies. Isn’t it a bit unfair in the Internet era not to bestow a single bit of appreciation for the presentation of movies online.
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If you want to “go big” visually with a website, delivering complex interaction and a rich experience across a wide range of browsers, Flash is the only way to go. Right? Nope. Given the widespread adoption and advancements of modern browsers and JavaScript libraries, using Flash makes little sense. But it does have its place on the Web, considering the need for progressive enhancement.
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