11/2008 Article Archive

  • November 28, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (11/28/08 Edition)

    For those of you living in America: I hope you got plenty to eat yesterday. For everyone else: I hope you got a lot done at work yesterday. It being the day after Thanksgiving, I thought I'd add a couple of lighthearted links to this ordinarily serious list. I'm sure you will enjoy Veerle's first website article as well as Techie Zone's 10 Most Addictive Online Flash Games. See. Even if you don't live in America, you can still benefit from the Thanksgiving holiday. I am truly thankful to God for my family, and my vocation and I hope that all of you share the sentiment.

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    • 1403 Views
  • November 25, 2008 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Mission Impossible: A Diagonal Nav Rollover Effect with CSS

    The HTML rendering model is based on boxes. Every element of a web page is a box set on a grid. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that our graphics all have to be squares and rectangles. Over the years we've gotten pretty creative in our attempts to break the grid (or at least create the illusion that we've broken the grid). Still, there are limitations we've come to accept. One of them is the inability to build an overlapping diagonal navigation. Without using image maps and complicated Javascript, it's a task that seems almost impossible. In this article, I'm going to share a method I developed to overcome the problem. When you're finished with the tutorial, you'll have a simple, semantic, diagonal set of navigation buttons (rollover effect included).

  • November 21, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (11/21/08 Edition)

    I was happy to see the positive response to my Bible design article earlier this week. Every once in awhile I post something that I'm just sure will step on some toes; I'm usually pleasantly surprised. I'm interested in exploring the thought of design as a layer of interpretation in later posts so keep your eyes out for that in the next few weeks. Here are this week's 5 for Friday:

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    • 1888 Views
  • November 18, 2008 in Design Inspiration

    Bible Design: Illuminated Manuscripts to Postmodern Power Plays

    How does design affect the way we read and interpret God's word? I started considering this question recently after Isral Duke, a designer out of Baton Rouge, contacted me with a thought provoking poster featuring Titus 1:7-8. By nature, design adds an interpretive grid to a body of information. Even the most unintrusive layout communicates subliminally about the designer's view of the contained text. And since God's specific revelation to man (the Bible) has been given to us as written literature, the importance of the design containing its text should be of great concern to us. Until now, I've never seriously considered the implications of Bible design. How has it been approached in the past? What is modern design doing to the Bible today? And most importantly, how will this generation of designers shape Bible design in the future?

  • November 14, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (11/14/08 Edition)

    It's been awhile since I've mentioned Vandelay Design here in my introduction to 5 for Friday. But this week Steven's article about 21 ways to communicate with visitors is worth mentioning. A lot of the links on 5 for Friday focus on technical design skills, but if after applying all these skills our sites don't effectively communicate then it doesn't really matter.

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    • 1502 Views
  • November 11, 2008 in Business & Process

    What to do When the World Wants to Cut Web Design from the Budget

    It's no secret that marketing and technology budgets are the first to get thrown overboard when money gets tight. The web designer is in the unfortunate position of fitting squarely into both of those categories. Also, unlike our sister graphic design, web design has never seen hard times like we're moving into now. We were in uncharted seas to begin with, and now a storm is coming. But are the results of a tightening belt destined to be only grim? Absolutely not. We will weather this storm and come out the other side all the better as long as we stay long-sighted and stick to a few basic principles.

  • November 7, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (11/7/08 Edition)

    Having already posted a list of Photoshop tutorials this week, I tried to shy away from such lists on this week's 5 for Friday. Fortunately, there were some great articles and resources posted in the blogosphere this week that have nothing to do with Photoshop. I'm sure you'll agree. Here is this week's 5 for Friday.

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    • 1172 Views
  • November 5, 2008 in Design Inspiration

    11 Photoshop Tutorials All Web Designers Should Learn

    If you read any web design blogs (and obviously you do) I'm sure you know there are about a million great photoshop tutorials floating around. So many, in fact, that it can be overwhelming. The point of the Photoshop tutorial is to teach a new technique—something that can be incorporated into your arsenal of web design skill and reused again and again. But after several years of aimless rummaging through the unorganized mass of online Photoshop tutorials I've come to an important conclusion: At their core the vast majority of these tutorials are teaching one of only a handful of techniques; the rest are essentially variations of the same. What this means is that a short list of well-chosen online Photoshop tutorials will pretty much bring you up to speed. I have compiled such a list. I encourage you to go through all of these tutorials. I realize that some of them may seem to overlap at first glance, but I think you will find that they all contribute a unique technique that you can incorporate into your everyday work.