A Bunch of SmashingMagazine.com Articles and other links…
“Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation”
Lots of drop-shadows, gradients and high-contrast coloring go a long way for “well-designed” tabs. I was hoping the hope of the captive that this article would address my concern about how tabs simply hide information that some people—perhaps more people than we think—simply don’t see the hidden information. The Fancast vertical-tab system seems to help me the most. It uses more than one word to indicate more content is ‘underneath.’ Horizontal systems depend too much on mouse expertise: that the casual user can track their pointer in a near-perfect lateral movement.
“Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert”
“The Gutenberg diagram (or the Gutenberg rule) is a concept that maps out something called reading gravity. Reading gravity describes a habit of reading in the western world: left to right, top to bottom. The Gutenberg diagram splits up a page into four quadrants: the ‘Primary Optical Area’ in top left, the ‘Strong Fallow Area’ in top right, the ‘Weak Fallow Area’ in the bottom left and a ‘Terminal Area’ in bottom right.” This article also talks about “subliminal suggestion” through imagery…
“8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs”
smashingmagazine.com: “The measure is the length of a line of type. To a reader’s eye, long or short lines can be tiring and distracting. A long measure disrupts the rhythm because the reader has a hard time locating the next line of type. The only time a narrow measure is acceptable is with a small amount of text. For optimum readability you want the measure to be between 40-80 characters, including spaces. For a single-column design 65 characters is considered ideal.”
“Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to... Hell?”
Geir Wavik: “MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) is a structural Web page search engine from Opera Software that crawls Web pages and returns results detailing page structures. If we look into MAMA’s key findings, we see that the average website has a table structure nested three levels deep. On the list of 10 most popular tags, table, td and tr are all there. The table element is found on over 80% of the pages whose URLs were crawled by MAMA.”
“How to Create Intense Light Streaks in Photoshop”
blog.spoongraphics.co.uk: “A couple of subscribers left their comment on a previous post that collated a range of inspiring graphic artwork from digital artists across the world. The commentors asked how the light stream effect on some of the pieces was created. I did a little research and picked up a couple of tips from similar tutorials to present a walkthrough on how to create intense light streaks flowing around an object or person.”
“Crazy Cool Vectors in Illustrator and Photoshop”
abduzeedo.com: “In this tutorial I will show you how to create a very nice image inspired by the amazing work of Andy Gilmore. If you don't know who he is, I highly recommend you to check his work out. He creates images combining vectors and blend modes to create astonishing designs, and that is what we are going to do. We will use Illustrator and Photoshop in this tutorial.”
“15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website”
smashingmagazine.com: “Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how your website performs and how successful your conversion rates are. Track daily unique hits, monthly page views and browser statistics, all useful data to start tracking from day 1. Google Analytics is a free favorite among website owners. Others to consider are Clicky, Kissmetrics (still in closed beta yet), Mint and StatCounter.”
“The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist”
Dan Zambonini: “We’re developing a checklist that all websites should be checked against before launch. Let us know if we’ve missed something out, or if something needs further clarification. Some well-known and well-documented tasks (such as validation and accessibility testing) are not explained in detail. Add your suggestions in the comments.” This is literally a checklist!