Noise, Grooves & Text-Shadows…

…And what do you get? One of the biggest web design trends of 2009 – 2010.

New sites are popping up all over using very simple techniques to create very effective, modern looking designs. And why are these techniques proving so successful? Well one of the biggest reasons is they are used so heavily nowadays on designs for Apple products, namely iPad and iPhone.

That’s right, Noise, Grooves and Text Shadows are such a winning combination because they highlight depth, and pixel perfect accuracy, simply because each of them use a single pixel width or height to create the desired effect, and you can’t get much more accurate than that…Well, unless you are designing for iPhone 4, in which case you have to use a bit of maths to calculate how wide a pixel actually is on screen, as the new screens use a higher resolution than that of superman’s vision!

What’s Your Daily Web Routine?

We all have one, a daily routine of websites we check and get updates from on a regular basis, it may be so natural and embedded that you may not notice it, but we do! So I thought this would be a fun way of sharing my routine and also find out how others spend their day on the web.

To kick things off I will list out my daily bookmarks and sites I visit in order, along with a rough estimate of time spent on each site, then hopefully get some feedback through comments on other peoples daily routines!

Create an Accessible Image Based Navigation

Since the launch of Hull Digital Live ’09 back in August 2009 I have been flooded with requests on how I created the graphical navigation on the web site. The answer is simple, a sprite and a dash of CSS!

This technique of image replacement can be found on a range of websites including the Apple website and Web Designer Wall, and it has a range of benefits, mainly loading time and reduction of file size.

Using the image replacement technique is very handy when each link is unique. If you notice on the Hull Digital website, each link on the navigation has its own unique background on rollover. It can be used if each link has the same interactive states but I would advice using CSS more in this case.

HD Live ’09 Technology Conference a Total Success!

So, October 14th ’09 saw the region of Hull get its first Digital Technology Conference. I was asked to speak at the conference a while back from its founder Jon Moss, to which I agreed without question. I was also commissioned with the task of designing the website for HD Live which was featured on my portfolio a couple of months back. Well, what an experience! The conference was incredible, I met some fantastic people, learned a load about what was going on with all things digital, and received a very warm welcome from a fantastic audience when I finally stepped up to the podium.

Speed Up Your Design Processes While Reducing Errors

A developer friend of mine once taunted me with the fact that all I do is ‘make things look pretty‘. Well as a web designer you strive to make every design you create as unique and special as possible. You cant simply dive straight into a design, there is a lot of ground work to cover off before even laying down your Pen to Tablet. In an attempt to avoid churning out generic looking websites I follow a very structured design process. Every stage in this process must be unique and covered off correctly.