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Agile Designers by Webalys is a platform for web designers, currently in beta. Up to now already around 1,900 designers have registered and put up 740 resources. This is massive, considering that the service just launched on the 7th of November of last year. Reason enough to take a closer look at what's in store.
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A few days ago we brought HTML_CodeSniffer to your attention, a bookmarklet for testing websites in terms of accessibility. Today we encountered a brand-new project, that aims at the average designer and is set to be the starting point for everything around accessibility. Community-driven and crowdsourced, A11Y as the project abbreviates itself, wants to support and encourage accessible web designs. The project is refreshingly different and growing rapidly.
Media queries are a great tool for changing a website’s layout depending on parameters like viewport width, but it can be very annoying when browsers do not do the same thing. An obvious example is whether or not a vertical scrollbar, should one exist, is included when the viewport’s width is calculated.
I made a note about this two years ago in Media queries, viewport width, scrollbars, and WebKit browsers. In that post I also pointed to the following statement in the Media Queries specification:
The ‘width’ media feature describes the width of the targeted display area of the output device. For continuous media, this is the width of the viewport (as described by CSS2, section 9.1.1 [CSS21]) including the size of a rendered scroll bar (if any).
So it’s pretty clear what browsers are supposed to do. But in reality this varies. It doesn’t just depend on the browser and operating system but also on user settings. To find out what current browsers do, I created a simple Media Query width test document with a number of breakpoints and opened it in a lot of browsers.
I saw three different behaviours.
Copyright © Roger Johansson
The week is coming to an end and that means it is time for us to look back on the week that passed, the best design news, resources and other goodies. This week we look at Responsive Web Design, Twitter Bootstrap, what comes first the idea or the design, as well as taking a trip down memory lane with the history of Apple.com
Over the past few years there has been an emergence of new custom trends in website design. A very popular idea is placing all your major content onto a single page and using dynamic scrolling animations to locate bits of content. These single-page layouts are popular among landing pages and mobile apps which only need to display a small section of related information. In this article I would like to go over some interesting techniques you’ll find in single page websites.
The main idea of HTML/CSS/JS UI kits is to offer you a range of production-ready web elements with a consistent style, so that you quickly kick-start any new web project. Typically standard UI packs will include buttons of different sizes and types, form field elements, navigation & pagination systems, tabs, alerts and tags
Responsive design is something a lot of designers talk about. And considering the importance of responsiveness and all the buzz around it, it’s impressive the amount of websites that are still not responsive. By now, with the amazing growth of mobile usage, every single website should be responsive to be able to attend to every user’s “screen size needs.�
Building a website from the ground up is very hard. Even some people who are able to code in web languages like JavaScript, HTML and CSS would find difficulties in the process. Fortunately, a few Twitter developers and designers are aware of this situation and had launched a framework called Bootstrap to make life easier for web designers and developers.
When you work on putting together your web site is it best to start with content or design? It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg conundrum. You really should not work on one entirely before the second. Here are two scenarios we’ve worked around and let me say, they are not ideal. 1. Working the design around a finished content document There have a been a couple of cases where a client hands me a finished Word doc to start a web site with and announces grandly: “I’ve got the content nearly finished for you.� On the one hand, it’s great that they’ve been thinking about the content of their web site.
A framework is basically software application which assists developers to quickly design and develop dynamic websites. With the advent of HTML5 and CSS3, development becomes easy for everyone. Here at SkyTechGeek we conducted a search and collected 7 newly released frameworks which will assist our audience to design and develop beautiful cross browser dynamic websites, and applications.
It seems that there has been a line drawn in the sand. A few brave design pioneers have all but denounced skeuomorphic design as yesterday’s news and have voted it off of the proverbial island. Are we witnessing the turning point of design as we know it, or are these champions simply jumping an imaginary bandwagon? Let’s take a closer look at the two biggest styles in 2013…
After Tim Cook addressed The Wall Street Journal’s bad reporting on Apple’s cut on component orders for the iPhone 5, the quarterly numbers for 2013 were announced. As everyone expected, they were mind bogglingly good. As we have reported here on Bit Rebels before, Apple is in no way struggling to make profit off of their own ingenuity. But how is it that they continue their success year after year? Maybe the answer can be found in Apple’s website history.
Making a website that is aesthetically pleasing is a process. It’s not generally going to happen overnight and it certainly won’t happen without a little intuition. It also requires the usage of a lot of different technologies to make the website look its very best.
Many talented web designers like to show off their skills online and web design portfolio websites have become very popular. This is also a strong trend other creative niches and many graphic designers and photographers have creative portfolios as well.
The post Weekly News Roundup – 25 January 2013 appeared first on Design Reviver.
For designers color is perhaps one of the most important aspects of web design, some might find it a bit intimidating, some might simply go over the top with color while others just use a horrible mishmash of color that makes no sense. Check out this article for five of the most common mistakes web designers make when it comes to color choice.
When choosing a color scheme for a design, there are several questions that should be asked: What does this brand represent? What is the over all theme of this site? What is the target audience? Answers to these questions can help a designer choose colors that not only look good, but enhance the brand and make it easier for visitors to identify with the overall message.
I am a strong believer in looking at other designs for inspiration, but this shouldn’t be a primary method for choosing colors. If you frequent enough design galleries, you will definitely notice color trends. At the beginning of this decade, you may remember that it was difficult to find a site that wasn’t using blue and white. Then shortly after, we experienced the “web 2.0″ color palette. Be original with your color selection. Instead of extending the life of a trend, try to set the next one.
Sometimes web designers can get so caught up in trying to make a site look cool, that they forget content is king. When designing for text, keep in mind that contrast is key. You don’t always have to use black text on white, but keep the contrast high and avoid using colored text on a colored background. Remember if visitors can’t even read your text then how are they supposed to understand your message.
Yes, choosing a good color scheme is tough, but when you hit that designer’s block, fight the urge to pull out “ole faithful”, that color that you used on your last three designs. Sure, it looks great, but chances are it doesn’t work for every product, service, or company. So, in order to avoid temptation, it may be a good idea to remove this color from your design repertoire all together.
Yes color is a good idea, however too many colors will not make a website better. If a designer goes way overboard with color, this can cause a sensory overload, and the visitors are more unlikely to never return. Honestly there is no reason why you should use more than three to four, this is not only more oversee able, but it also shows that you have just some idea of where you are going with the design.
One of the most important things to remember when designing is your target audience, if you are creating a website selling children’s toys then your color scheme should fit that, bold primary colors would be important for this project, however if you are selling furniture for retirement homes then you should pick colors are more laid back.
The post 6 Color Mistakes Made By Web Designers appeared first on Design Reviver.