Category: Uncategorized

Touching colors must have a minimum 30% grayscale differential (contrast) or the human eye struggles to find the edges. This retinal error can cause an optical effect known as popping. This color “secret” is not generally taught in design schools. There is a so-so online grayscale test site: toptal.com https://pinetools.com/grayscale-image Try it. It doesn’t always…

http://seekingalpha.com/article/227332-mobile-apps-the-wave-of-the-past QUOTATION / SUMMARY:“Just like the PC, I expect the rise of a good mobile Web to topple the walled gardens while creating a platform agnostic environment that levels the playing field. In this scenario, the one with the biggest garden has the most to lose – Apple. The diminished importance of apps will reduce…

There are a couple of special characters: the “en dash” and“apostrophe”. Small obsessive typography details I can’t let go of. :) Imention them only because most people never notice those consciously. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case While you have serif links underlined and blue (default), this is unnecessary Spartan design –even primitive. People know what looks like a text…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Aesthetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headroom_%28photographic_framing%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_spiral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_angle

I preach 7 to 9 links is the best-case requirement on a home page. So I choke on “link clutter”. That is frequently beyond a designers control since it’s probably edict from a committee. I have low-expectations of dropdown and flyout navigation. I am prejudiced about dropdowns for various reasons. It is mostly a matter…

h1{color: #333333; font-size:280%; line-height:100%;font-family:Impact,Haettenscheweller, “Arial Narrow Bold”, Charcoal,sans-serif;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;letter-spacing:-1px;} I suppose the spacing would be better specified as an “em” space instead of pixels –per responsive design specs for mobile. And, of course, the size needs to be adjusted to the whitespace. If the line height is NOT specified the fat words wrap on top of…

Is it possible to do nonlinear gradients in CSS? For example, say I’d like more black at the top in a gradated banner. Can I define a starting point for the gradient to begin? What I’ve seen so far has a start and finish point at the edges of the div. Can one tweak this…

“Web credibility is based directly on the overall visual design of a site, specifically noting layout, typography, font size, and color schemes.” –Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab Think of a web page as a person. If a person is not congruent, contradicts himself, and does not seem to be consistent, that person is typically not…

Cross-device development The novel development of mobile applications with technologies that let you write code once and run it on several devices of different phone vendors. Baked-in “UI continuity” has the widest audience reach — and thus the most value to the user. Overall continuous UI tapestry = ecosystem Media queries are part of the…

http://24ways.org/2010/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-gradients This link above was written by the same book author of “Responsive Websites”. It’s good stuff. I have a philosophy that “basic” elements of speed. Gradients is one of the elements that can give “light and depth” cues. As the author, Ethan Marcotte, says though –gradients can be abused and overused. Nonetheless, he has…