» 2008 » June- tutorial blog

Web pages are full of buttons. Navigation, links, “next” buttons, “submit” buttons, “OK” buttons, “close” buttons… the list goes on. When you go about designing a new web page, chances are its going to have a lot of buttons. Make life easier for yourself by creating a button class that you can reuse over and over in your HTML whenever you need a button.

Not only is this a favor to you, but it’s good for your users and aesthetics as well. Consistency is a key factor in usability. Let’s get started.

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Adobe Illustrator has some cool and powerful tools for manipulating the colors in your document. Using these tools, you can achieve some very nice colorization’s even if you aren’t particularly good at choosing colors. It also becomes easier to try out different versions quickly!

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Illustration is a lovely trend in web design. It fits the medium well. Great Illustrators though, often don’t think in terms of the web when they do their illustrations. Take a look at this very nice sky/hill cityscape illustration I found on shutterstock:

I think this illustration would make a great base for a web design, but clearly it isn’t prepared for such a task out-of-the-box. Lets do some manipulation and prepare it the web.

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Like it or not, our lives often take us away from the computer. Out of our homes, and into the great outdoors. But just because the Eyedropper tool isn’t within reach, doesn’t mean that you need to turn your inner-designer off. Here are some ways you can keep your design on while you are away from the computer.

Bring a notepad and pencil.

Nothing is worse than having an amazing idea and then losing it to a flood of other thoughts before you can get it down. If you are at the computer, it’s easy to give your epiphany a more permanent home, but while you are away, the best tool is always your trusty pen and pad. Field Notes is a very cool, designer-friendly brand for your notepad needs.

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You know what they say… design is in the details. When you are designing a website, there are opportunities abound to focus on little details to visually enhance the experience. In this tutorial, we will show you how to create links with underlines that “glow”.

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