5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (10/3/08 Edition)

As some of you already know, I recently changed the name of my design studio from Liquid Design Media to Six House Design. For the most part it's been a smooth transition and I'm already seeing great benefits from my new website. But I'd like to take a moment and warn any independent designers thinking about making a name change that lack of planning can really eat your lunch. I recommend making a general timeline and checklist to guide you through the process. It's not nearly as simple as it seems up font. And now, this week's 5 for Friday:

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Simple and Stunning (Part 3): 10 Website Designs that Inspire

This is the third installment of Simple and Stunning on Mirificam Press. In case you're new to Mirificam Press, Simple and Stunning is an ongoing list acknowledging excellent website designs that combine the simplicity of a great user interface with stunning layouts and color schemes. I've made a noticeable change in this edition, though: Instead of capturing only the initially visible area of each site, I included the scroll area below. My purpose in the previous method was to present a kind of first glance presentation. But with increasingly sporadic monitor sizes and resolutions, I think my new method will give you a better feel for the whole design.

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5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (9/26/08 Edition)

It's amazing how quickly Friday rolls around. It has been another great week for online web design blogs and resources. I especially enjoyed Six Revisions' list of CSS techniques for charting data. Charts and graphs are something that I rarely see tackled in the CSS world and Six Revisions did a great job.

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Designers Beware: 10 Warning Signs of a Bad Client

No other force has more power to make or break the spirit of the web designer than the all important client. The good ones make us love our work and the bad ones can make us wish we were dead. Sometimes when it gets really bad, we have to fire a client. But wouldn't it be great if we could tell the good ones from the bad ones right away and avoid them like we would bad fruit at the market? I don't think it will ever be quite that simple. There will always be a few bad apples that sneak in under the radar. But over the years I've learned a few warning signs that are dead giveaways for hard-to-please, controlling, whiny and/or needy clients. If you come across a potential client with one of these, think twice about the project. If they have two or three, run the other way.

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5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (9/19/08 Edition)

This is my first Friday back from my much needed and long anticipated vacation. I have to admit I've been dragging a little this week trying to get back in the swing of things. But that doesn't mean that the world of web design was feeling the same way. I enjoyed getting back to reading my favorite blogs after my little break. Here's what I stumbled upon this week:

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The Hierarchy: Using Heading Tags the Right Way

If you've been using CSS and web standards for awhile, then you probably already know that the HTML heading tags h1-h6 are meant to denote a hierarchy of importance—the most important, of course, being

and the least important being

. If you're new to CSS layouts and web standards then you might think heading tags just make text bigger or smaller. But there's a lot more to heading tags than most web designers realize. And in order to build beautifully semantic websites that degrade gracefully, a proper understanding of the tags is a must.

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5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (9/5/08 Edition)

I'll start this week's 5 for Friday by warning you that I will be on vacation next week and taking a blogging break. This will be the first week in almost a year that I haven't blogged. Don't worry, though, I'll be back the following week with the usual flow of articles. This week, everyone seems to be talking about Google's new browser Chrome. It's an interesting topic but it's almost completely eclipsed the real break-through product by Mozilla called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a browser plugin that uses natural language to allow users to perform previously multi-step tasks with simple commands. I'd like to go on record right now as saying, "Mozilla is onto something here."

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Show and Tell: A Christian Designer's Guide to Faith in the Workplace

How should a Christian manage his or her Christianity in the workplace? This is a question most Christian designers have considered at one time or another during the course of their career. In our current age (especially in America), the attitude of employers toward public displays of faith varies dramatically from one workplace to another. Some Christian designers work in a laid back work environment where outward displays of faith are seen as generally harmless (annoying at worst). Others work under management that is openly hostile toward Christianity. Still other Christian designers work for religious organizations where it's expected that every employee will let out a "praise God" from time to time.

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5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (8/29/08 Edition)

There were some seriously long article titles this week. I can't argue with the content, though. I especially encourage you to read the A List Apart article. It would be interesting to work out a Christian worldview on the issue. Aaron Rester makes some good points and he may ultimately be right that "cartographer" is a better metaphor for the web design vocation than "architect". I'm just wary of some of the pop philosophy he uses to get there. Any comments?

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Rollover Lite: A CSS Rollover Everyone Can Enjoy

I realize that there are about a million rollover tutorials out there. Some use JavaScript, some use CSS, but there are very few that are geared toward creating semantically correct rollovers that degrade gracefully. That's exactly what I'll be doing here.

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