I love minimalist website designs for three reasons. Firstly, done well they look great. Secondly, good minimalist design is always about the content. Thirdly, I find minimalist websites easier to read and navigate. Minimalism is definitely a preference, and obviously not suitable for all clients. Here are a few of my favorite minimalist web designer’s websites. [read more]
Blog
A Website Built For Content
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009One thing I’ve never really understood is why website designers build websites before they have received all of the content from the client? I think the process for this is wrong and ultimately hurts both the client and the designer.
Content, they say is king - and it really is, yet these days it does not seem to be the most important thing we consider when we approach a website design. Both designers and clients often get hung up on all sorts of other details such as accessibility, user experiences, graphic design or html & css validation - and whilst ignoring these sorts of things can detract from the success of a website I think we need to start putting a bigger emphasis on generating content.
RSS Hompages
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009About a week ago I heard the news that GeoCities is finally shutting down, something that I had wrongly thought had been done some time ago. So, with many other geeks I’ve been bring back memories of regular visits to my friends personal websites full of animated gifs and links to other ‘cool’ stuff on the web. These memories have got me thinking about the future, should we still all have a personal homepage in a multi-social-network age? And if so why are we not using it? And what should it be? [read more]
A Digital Lomographic Camera
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009Lomography seems to me to be less about photography and closer to some sort of random art form. The desired results have less to do with any input or control from the user and relies heavily on the many quirks of the camera itself. Strange though it may be, I absolutely love it.
The Lomo LC-A, a Soviet Bloc era camera with a plastic lens, was discovered by a group of young Austrians in the early 90’s. They loved the photos that the camera produced and promptly contacted the Lomo company in St. Petersburg, Russia, in order to negotiate the distribution rights of the camera in the West. Somewhere along the line the future Russian premier, Vladimir Putin, got involved and the deal was done. [read more]
Choosing Font Stacks
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009Recently other website designers have been discussing two separate aspects of website design; graded browser support and font stacks. I think that we need to start thinking about both of these at the same time.
It seems to me that print designers have all the fun. They can have any choice of type for their projects and as such their choice of type actually defines their work, an obvious example is David Carson. On the other hand, website designers are usually limited to the fonts installed on the users computers. These fonts are dependent on many different aspects of each users set up, which operating system and which browser they use, even their version of office suite can affect this. [read more]
Five things for 2009
Thursday, January 15th, 2009Last year I held off on many purchases that I just could not justify, what with the economy going downhill and becoming a freelancer (again) I needed to penny pinch. This has caused a bit of a backlog on my wanted list and it needs addressing, either I need to trim this list down or win the lottery. So I’ve picked my top five from the list, and reasoned through why I want/need the item, and added a score of how likely I am to get it. This is a list of things that ideally I would like to get this year, and (hopefully) when I actually come around to getting each item I can refer back here to make sure that I still have valid reasons for the expense. Anyhoo, here goes. [read more]