Posts Tagged ‘webdesign’

Font Embedding & The Law

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Choosing the right font is key to any piece of graphic design, whether it be for web or print. Unfortunately web designers have been stuck with the same old system fonts for years, unable to create intricate typographical layouts without the use of images. I think we’ve done a pretty good job to be honest because any old-school print designers would have a heart attack if they knew we’ve been working with a choice of about six fonts to fulfil the needs of every website that we create.

There have been a number of different processes and applications written to try and solve this problem by allowing custom fonts to be embedded into websites. In this post we will outline the latest and most popular techniques, and the legal issues that you may unknowingly face by using them.
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Posted in Tips, Website Design, Website Development | 3 Comments »

Texture in Web Design Part 1: Inset / Outset Elements

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

A growing trend amongst top web designers is to use an assortment of subtle textures in their work. This helps give depth and, even if you don’t notice them at first, add an extra degree of complexity and intrigue to a design. If used intelligently and effectively (and by that I mean tastefully!) textures can really lift a website to the next level.

Over the next two weeks I will walk you through a range of techniques that can be applied to many different elements of your designs to give them just that extra bit of style…

This week we’ll be mostly talking about insetting and outsetting page elements in Photoshop (and CSS3), as well as covering how add these effects to non-vector patterns without having to manually cut them out!

Inset / Outset Text & Objects

This is a pretty simple one really and it works on almost any style of font. For both effects you begin in the same way… First, type out your text and select your colours / background colour in Photoshop. Then, in your layers pallet double click the far right of the text layer that you want to apply the effect to. A Layer Styles box should open…

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Posted in Tutorials, Website Design | 1 Comment »

Designing for Touch Screen

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Now, this post was supposed to go out about two weeks ago, and since then it seems that every designer under the sun has written on the same subject - That’ll teach us for being lazy. Nonetheless, we decided to publish it anyway, just in case anyone missed any of the other great posts out there…

By now you should all have heard of the iPad, and if not then you must have been living under a rock for the last few months! Touch screen devices are here to stay and you need to start thinking about how to design and develop to get the most out of them. Apple would like you to believe that the iPad is the only touch screen device that anyone should own (and to be honest it probably is the best), but there are already some strong competitors, and many more coming to the market this year. So, you need to get your thinking caps on and start designing your websites to work with them, as well as updating your other sites, too. There are a lot of things to consider… here are just a few.


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Posted in Tips, Website Design, Website Development | 1 Comment »

Our brand-spanking new website!

Friday, June 11th, 2010

After tweeting yesterday that we didn’t have time to blog this week, it actually turns out that we do! So for those of you who haven’t noticed already, we have a brand new website! And I thought I’d tell you a little bit about it…

The decision to redesign wasn’t taken lightly. In my opinion there have to be strong reasons in order to make it worth while dedicating so much (unpaid) time to redesigning your website, and in our case I think there was. The original site was very simple, and quite popular! A lot of people seemed to like it, but in our opinion it just didn’t say as much about the company as we wanted. There weren’t enough images of our work, and from a clients perspective, there wasn’t enough information on how we approach our work and the way that we build our relationships.

Instead of spending a lot of time working this information into the current design, the decision was made to start from scratch as it wasn’t actually much more work!

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Posted in General, Tips | No Comments »

Designing From The Top Down - A New Way To Design For The Web

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

We recently attended Speak the Web in Sheffield and Leeds and brought a lot of really useful information and ideas away with us. I attended the Leeds talk where Andy Clarke, a well respected designer, leader of web design studio Stuff and Nonsense, and CSS guru, presented a preview of his new publication “Hardboiled web design“.

The main theme around his talk (and something that we put into practice at What!?) is top-down web design and development.

Top Down Web Design

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Posted in Tips | 2 Comments »

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