Website Redesign Tips 3:22 PM

Whether we are working on client or our own site, we are designing something that needs to meet someone else’s goals and below are the tips i have employed to get my projects done.

• Start with a question: what problem are we trying to solve?
• Understanding the problem you are solving begins with research. Research uncovers achievable goals.Being tired of a site is not necessarily a great reason to redesign.
  
• Research makes you a credible partner with stakeholders. Shows you care about business considerations.Build the relationship before you show the design. This sets up collaboration between you and your client instead of a service-based relationship.
• Redesign objectives need to be an integration of user needs & business goals. First part of learning what people need is getting out and talking to them. Research helps you manage changing requirements. Can always return to the real things people really need. Provides you with bulletproof reasons to keep project on track.
• Have a content strategy: know what the actual content on your site will be before you finalize your design. Remind people where you are in the process before you present designs. Outline previous decisions, status, etc.
• Learn to translate: sometimes people say one thing but mean another. Try to look for the actual meaning of people’s comments. Convey the meaning of design so you don’t have to get into arguing the details. Use design to communicate the direction of the project: who is it for and how does the design reflect that?
• Dealing with feedback. When you receive feedback reference the research. Communicate the “why” behind the design. Bring the discussion back to the strategy level and away from the pixel level. Sell ideas not pixels.
• When looking for inspiration, check out what your peers are doing, where you have been, and more.
• Design from the content out and ensure function is part of the design.

Best Fonts for Titles and Headlines 5:47 PM

'If you write for a site or a magazine, it is the content and the title that meets the visitor’s eye before they read in detail. The headline gives the reader a prior idea of what the site is all about. A bold headline or a title with a captivating font is the first step to win the whole battle. They grow the reader’s interest to stay on the page, instead of giving it a look and move for another interesting one. Here is some information on eye catching and bold fonts to galvanize the sites look and invite more readers.
An article worth reading at: Best Fonts for Titles and Headlines

Design Criticism and the Creative Process 8:08 AM

This an interesting article that i came across.Hope it is useful in your career.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/design-criticism-creative-process/

WHY PERSUASIVE DESIGN SHOULD BE YOUR NEXT SKILL SET 11:50 PM

Persuasive design is the next practice it will supercharge and embrace, folding its techniques into interaction design.
Have a pleasant reading

WHY PERSUASIVE DESIGN SHOULD BE YOUR NEXT SKILL SET

The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web 7:25 AM

I'm a designer . I don't do any coding, just design. I work in InDesign, Illustrator, occasionally photoshop. I then hand off my Illustrator/PSD design files to the developer who applies the code. Sometimes i run into trouble and endless QA with my friend web designer over the mock up sites i design

In my opinion, there's two sides to this:

1) as a Graphic designer i should know the limitations that exist when designing for the web.
2) the developer should be able to match my design perfectly as long as my requirements are realistic for a web design (hence point #1) such as using a 960 Grid System template and using a 10px grid with snap to to grid turned on in photoshop/illustrator. That way all my layout elements will be 10px/20px/30px/etc apart and easier to work out, code wise.

Here's a website that lists a set of guidelines for communicating your designs to the developer:
The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers
photoshopetiquette dot com



Hope it's useful for the designers who mostly do print collateral.

The Most Wanted Design Tutorials in Photoshop 4:20 AM

Here are now the unique, creative and stunning tutorials every Photoshop developer surely loves to learn.
http://www.funspill.com/design-tutorials-photohop/

Enjoy

Best Tutorials 2:41 AM

I found some interesting resource and thought you might enjoy too.
http://sharkwebstyle.com/2011/03/best-tutorials-february-2011/

Have a pleasant reading.

Free History Menu for InDesign 3:14 AM

Free History Menu for InDesign

It's so very cool that InDesign has an unlimited number of Undo's. Until you need to use them.

The problem is you can only Undo one step at a time -- there's no History palette, thus, no way to click on a 'state" ten or twenty steps back. Just gotta keep on pressing that old friend, Command/Ctrl-Z, over and over again till you arrive at the point right before you screwed something up.

You can get a bit more control if you don't mind using the menu command, Edit->Undo, instead of the keyboard shortcut. The Edit menu tells you which action is on the chopping block: Undo Typing, Undo Scale, Undo Deletion of a Mess of Pages You Shouldn't Have Trashed You Imbecile, Undo Typing, like that.

65bit Software, an InDesign software developer from the UK, leveraged the program's internal tracking and turned it into a *free* plug-in called MultiDo. It's been available since January for InDesign v2.X, but they recently upgraded it to work with InDesign CS. Both versions, in Mac and Windows permutations, can be downloaded here:
http://www.65bit.com/products/multido/multido.shtm

MultiDo adds two dropdown menus to the Edit menu: Undo Multiple and Redo Multiple. They slip nicely into place directly below InDesign's regular Undo and Redo menu items.

Each of MultiDo's menus lists up to 100 of your undoable/redoable actions, the same information that InDesign already knows about, and would tell you eventually if you chose Edit->Undo over and over. The cool thing is that because of the menus, you can simply choose an action that's 10, 20 or 76 steps back, instead of having to click the keyboard shortcuts that many times.