Web Services Team

Even though you may have been working in Web design for years, it is always good to refresh your memory on Web typography basics. This article is a bit lengthy, but reads well.

ENJOY!

Download:

Elegant Web Typography

Photoshop Express is a pretty cool example of what you can do with Adobe’s web technology as a whole.

Yahoo has added to their list of things to look for to speed up your site. Lots of great info there to think about if you didn’t already know. I’ll definitely be on the lookout to implement these things whenever possible.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flextv_flexbuilder101.html

This is a nice starter video seminar to get an idea of what it takes to develop Flex applications.

Enjoy.

While looking for some CSS templates I could throw on top of some other things I was playing with I remembered a students in one of the cohorts mentioning they got template from http://www.freecsstemplates.org/. While browsing through the nice designs there (though most look like they are really designed to be wordpress templates, which didn’t fit what I was looking for) I stumbled onto a couple nice links at the bottom of the page.

PD Photo

Wikimedia

One of my biggest annoyances with the Open Movement (originally I had source in there but hat is more specific to code) is that it seems (usually) that only coders embrace it. It’s always hard to find people who are willing to give away their photos and artwork for free use. I’m glad I found these sites because it is always great to have a place to search for photos. Granted most of my complaints come from the Mod community (game modification) where it’s always easy to find examples to play with or others who will share code with you but it was almost impossible to find anyone who would let you use a texture or model outside of it’s original purpose (like taking a Halflife model and modify it to use in Quake 3.)

Also while typing this I remembered another nice place to look for Creative Commons works. Flickr actually has an option in it’s advanced search to search on CC items only. If anyone has any other resources like this feel free to share.

Streamline your forms with widgets

This is a really nice tutorial on how you can change up your lists of checkboxes into something that looks a lot better and also takes up significantly space. Though the one negative to this approach is that it may be hard for some users to figure out but overall is still not that bad in a usability sense.

InsideRIA had an interesting post on some different presentations on some bad things you can do to usability. These things seem obvious but most of us don’t figure it out till it’s already to late.

The following link is a great article on some of the basics of Web design.

www.webdesignfromscratch.com
It highlights the following:

1. Simplicity
2. Central layout
3. Fewer columns
4. Separate top section
5. Solid areas of screen real-estate
6. Simple nav
7. Bold logos
8. Bigger text
9. Bold text introductions
10. Strong colours
11. Rich surfaces
12. Gradients
13. Reflections
14. Cute icons
15. Star flashes

I was tasked with creating an image rotator for a page where the image would change every time the page loaded. The hook was to also get a text caption area to change along with it. So, without the use of flash (because the image and caption are located in two different areas of the page), here is a little php to make that happen.
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DESIGN & TECHNIQUES:

Advanced Photoshop

Computer Arts

Layers