Guest post written by Mary Ward
Keeping an eye out for your career’s future is important for everyone.
However, for web designers, looking forward may be even more important than for many other professions. Many web designers are freelancers, or work for more than one company at a given time. Jobs can be short or long term contracts, so looking for the next job is often not too far out into your future.
Us designers love a good rant about IE6. And why not? Everything looks perfect in Firefox, Safari, even IE7 and 8. Then you open up IE6 and everything is a mess. In an ideal world no one would use IE6 anymore (and all browsers would render websites the same way).
But at the same time I do get sick of IE6 rants and campaigns. This isn’t a rant, it’s more of a ‘be aware that it still exists and some reasons why it still exists‘ post. A recent blog post of mine researching popular design blog analytics showed that there are still 3% of users using IE6. And that’s in the field of design. There is more than likely a lot more than that in terms of the World Wide Web.
These days the words renewable, fresh, organic, green etc. are used quite a bit and more and more brands and businesses are jumping on the ‘green’ band wagon (which is a good thing of course).
These are all words that I would also associate with the following websites. With the right colour scheme, using elements of nature e.g. grass and trees, adding some subtle paper backgrounds and using hand drawn graphics/text you can design a fresh ‘green’ website too.
A few weeks ago I posted a blog post analysing my stats. It got a pretty good response as we don’t often see a lot of websites’ stats these days.
To follow this up I asked a few design blogs that I regularly visit to share their stats. No specific numbers, just percentages and interesting tidbits.
Keep reading →
Last week I went to Refresh Belfast and listened to the guys from Front, one of Ireland’s leading web development teams, talk about user experience and visual design among other things.
Here’s a brief roundup.
Remember those days when people used to put website hit counters on their site (actually I still see this every so often)? These days we are more secretive about our stats, or we simply don’t see the need to share them openly with the rest of the world.
After checking my Google Analytics account recently, I thought it might be of interest to publicise some of my findings. So I selected 1 month, April 1st – April 30th 2009, and here are the findings.
Illustrated characters are a very popular trend and as I stated in my guest post for Six Revisions: Five types of effective headers in web design, they add some character and a sense of friendliness to your website.
I’ve put together a showcase of my favourite illustrated characters along with some further links for inspiration.
I had the pleasure of attending and talking at Barcamp Belfast on Saturday (25th April) before dashing off and getting a plane to London for the marathon.
I had a great morning and going by feedback from others the whole day was a great success with some fantastic speakers and over 350 attendees. Well done to Andy Good for putting it together, along with all those who helped out. There’s a good video montage of the day here.
Check out my latest guest blog post over at Six Revisions: Five Types of Effective Headers in Web Design.
The post looks at 5 different styles of headers, showcasing 5 examples of each.
Last year I published ‘25 hot female web designers‘, showcasing a collection of female designers who are hot at web design and had great websites.
With the recent publication of the A List Apart Survey 2008, I thought it was a good opportunity to follow this up with another 25 great designers.
This year’s survey found that 16.2% of those surveyed (29,567 of A List Apart readers) were female. That’s a rise of 0.1%. So there’s not much improvement in regards to the amount of females in the industry, but I have came across 25 more great designs.