SXSW Day 1
First day over at SXSW and a new day is upon us. Here’s a quick recap of the first day.
SXSW Here We Go
Tomorrow I have the pleasure of flying out to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest (SXSW).
Very excited. Love it in the States and have wanted to go to SXSW for years now. Austin looks like a great place.
Book Review: Logo Design Love
What excited me about Logo Design Love was that it was written by fellow Northern Irish man David Airey.
David, responsible for the popular Logo Design Love blog as well as his own personal blog, is a brand identity designer who has worked with top brands globally.
How To Setup A Reusable Framework For Your Next Website
You’ve done your research, sketched out the wireframes, designed a stunning mockup and now its time to markup. Where do you start?
Having your own reusable framework is a great way to save time and provide a basis for your next website.
Your own reusable framework is by no means perfect for every project that you work on but it is a great starting point and it can evolve over time.
New Website
A quick blog post this week as I’ve been working on getting a new portfolio/blog on the go. This was one of my goals for the year and shouldn’t have been too hard since I started working on it back before Christmas, but it did take a bit longer than expected.
Checking Your Site For Visual Hierarchy
When a user visits your website, you have 5 seconds to grab their attention. Okay, maybe that’s not always true but none the less you want to make sure there’s a banana (banana being the key element you want your users to look at) to grab their attention.
You also want to make sure that visually your website has a hierarchy and is broken down in order of ‘importance’. Call to actions, H1s and H2s will fall under the more important elements, then H3s, H4s and links, then paragraph text and other images towards the bottom of the scale.
A user should be able to look at a page and instantly recognise this hierarchy. Now here’s a useful way to check if your hierarchy is as clear as you hope it is.
10 Websites Every Web Designer Should Know About
There are a number of websites that you, as a web designer, will use on a daily basis making life easier and making you more efficient.
Here is a list of 10 websites (in no particular order) that I find useful and am constantly using. I’m also interested in what websites you swear by and use all the time, so please share in the comments below.
Book Review: Handcrafted CSS
Handcrafted CSS is by one of the web design industries’ most established authors, Dan Cederholm. He is the man behind Bulletproof Web Design, Web Standards Solutions, Simple Bits and most recently Dribbble.
How To Design A Sexy Button Using CSS
Last week I launched a holding page for Ecliptic Labs, an iPhone development company based in Belfast (keep an eye on them, there’s going to be some great stuff from them this year).
Here is the holding page in all it’s glory.
Associating Colour With Interaction
Different colours mean different things to us and by using colour we can associate feelings and actions to certain situations.