Building a useful not-found search results page |
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Big trucks, nothing found I once worked with a client who sold trucks. Big trucks. Trucks so big that their “light” vehicles regarded my car as a speed bump. And they sold plenty of them. The first set of data was a 8MB, pipe-delimited text file that, I was told, could change daily. Writing a [...] |
10 minutes to read. |
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Thoughts against the clean buzzword |
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Aside from a knee-jerk requirement, what is clean design? Here I rant about clean as the result of good design, not a bullet point in some RFP. |
5 minutes to read. |
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The difference between copying and stealing |
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What makes copying easier than stealing? Thought and effort separate those who push their medium from their copycats. |
10 minutes to read. |
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Test Usability By Embracing Other Viewpoints |
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How do we know if a website is usable? By looking at it from someone else’s viewpoint. |
2 minutes to read. |
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The design process vs. design-as-product |
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The trouble with the word “template” is that its meaning depends on one’s point of view. To some, a template is a ticket to an instant website. Many content management systems allow owners to change plug-and-play themes as easily as they change clothes, and inexpensive skins are just a Google search away. To others, templates [...] |
2 minutes to read. |
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When is web design not a product? When it’s a process |
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You can often tell a website whose owner thinks design is a product. They’re the ones with slick edges and generic guts, where paragraphs flow into a given space like gel into a bucket. If the text is well written, you wouldn’t know it from the slapdash presentation. It’s like a $100 Merlot in a [...] |
minutes to read. |
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Passing The Holy Milestone: How To Meet Deadlines |
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For too many projects, there comes a time when every action taken, every decision and sacrifice made, is spurred on by pressure to finish. Tempers seem to shrink along with the available days, talk about “high standards” gives way to “good enough,” and people realize that deadlines are aptly named. During the last-minute crunch, someone may well wonder, how did it come to this? Could it have been prevented? |
minutes to read. |
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From zero to layout: A redesign process |
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When I began working on a one-page web project, my client asked about the process. How do you plan a single page? What leads from raw text to a finished product? Getting from concept to finished draft requires many steps, but each phase shares common traits. |
minutes to read. |
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Creating a logotype depends more on the means than the end |
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The process of designing a type-based logo is similar to that of designing a shape-based logo. Both logos need to convey a message, do it quickly and appease the client’s taste. |
minutes to read. |
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Preparing a site: The preflight checklist… and more |
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Most web projects require a few common steps, but sometimes the obvious gets overlooked. How do you make sure everything in a checklist gets done? First, have a checklist based on experience. Second, understand that you need more than one. |
minutes to read. |
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