• Liquid Guard

    Liquid Guard

    Waterproof everything you can think of with Liquid Guard. Our products use revolutionary Nano-Technology provides protection from water, oils, corrosion, heat, and abrasion.

    View Portfolio
  • Vida Soleil

    Vida Soleil

    Vida Soleil pronounced (V-Da-Sol-A)! Our high fashion swimwear of the finest quality will take you to your destination! ~The Sun is Waiting~

    View Portfolio
  • 5am Hunt

    5am Hunt

    5am Hunt is the world's leader in wetlands and waterfowl conservation.

    View Portfolio
  • WebTasks

    WebTasks

    Webtasks offers a host of features designed to give your startup, small, or medium sized business the highest level of services at the lowest cost.

    View Portfolio
  • Splyt Analytics

    Splyt Analytics

    Data without context is meaningless. Context allows you to evaluate the meaning of each event that takes place in your app and SPLYT automatically injects context into your data.

    View Portfolio
Pause
1 of 1 Next:

Good Web Design Is All About The User

Sat, 04/13/2013 - 16:48 — nickv
It’s easy to get caught up in the private world of web design, spending too much time playing with the latest CSS tricks, or flipping through the coolest design showcases. You start forgetting that your work isn’t all about being on the cutting edge and snagging a web design award or two. The reality is that the latest and greatest design trends are irrelevant, and sometimes even alienating, to the majority of audiences. Unfortunately, that kind of work is often only appropriate for an audience of other designers, and those projects are rare.

So take a step back from trying to one-up your peers, and consider the basics. At the heart of design lies the famous maxim that form follows function. Make sure your work is holding true to that principle by making sure of these three things:

Suitability

You can still be innovative while working with a more sedate style.

Simplifying design elements, like reducing drop shadows, images, and other fancy effects and flourishes. Not only can this help your site’s speed, but it can also help give that that’s becoming very popular as an aesthetic choice.

Using CSS Sprites to display images, or creating icon fonts for common UI elements.

Denoting the height and width of your HTML image tags, so that they can load in their own time, without holding up the rest of the page.

Aesthetic frills are meant to fill in the spaces left over by solid functionality, not the other way around.

A designer’s work has almost endless flexibility when it comes to producing a beautiful result, but far less flexibility in terms of usability. Starting out with a structure that appeals to and works with your audience ensures that your site is just as attractive to a user as it is to another designer.