Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Posted on September 11, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Designing through Writing
Learn more about the “In your Shoes” Approach to content writing and how to effectively integrate strong copywrite in your web and print marketing designs. This article explains the importance of text in your design and how to leverage it to reach your target audience.
Posted on September 10, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Bad Practices: Website Login Form Placement
How many website do you visit that you must login before accessing? For example, consider the example of Facebook, the most popular social network in the world today.
At the site’s home page, facebook.com, what do you see? A login form on the left and simple registration information on the right:
Why do we like this layout? [...]
Posted on September 5, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Dissecting Serif Fonts
Serif fonts are a class of classy, old style fonts based on the handlettering of scribes. To paint a picture of what a serif font is, consider that the serif fonts are originally designed by handwriting with a wedge-tipped pen.
The calligraphy style creation of serif fonts results in the “foots” on the letters and the [...]
Posted on August 29, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Using CSS for Bar Graphs
You do not need advanced PHP scripting or XML data to create a web graph. All you need is simple CSS and HTML. You can use graphs to display data more illustratively. This tutorial is going to show you how to take boring data in a table and display it in a bar graph. The [...]
Posted on August 23, 2008 - by Impress Lab
In Praise of Obama’s Poltical Branding
Never in the history of American politics has a candidate for office successfully leveraged marketing so well as Barack Obama, the Democratic hopeful for President. From perhaps one of the most cleaver logos, to his slogan plastered over any possible marketing medium, to online marketing in social and interactive websites to just plain beautiful graphic [...]
Posted on August 20, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Using Custom Fields in WordPress
Custom Fields add additional functionality while simplifying posting in WordPress. A Custom Field is essentially routinely used information that you would like on all your blog posts. For example, consider that you have a blog about books. At the bottom (or top) of the content of the post, you want to list the ISBN Number, [...]
Posted on August 19, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Creating CSS Alert Boxes
A quick and useful way of beautifying your content are alert boxes, which are becoming more and more common on the web. Alert boxes quickly highlight important information, such as warnings or tips, separating them from your main body content.
Purpose of Alert Boxes
Considering that the average website visitor only spends perhaps a minute on each [...]
Posted on August 19, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Why Not to Underline Hyperlinks
While many would say that you should underline hyperlinks (using text-decoration:underline;), we think otherwise. Instead of using the underline feature that is standard in hyperlinks, you should use a bottom border.
The reason for this is from a readability standpoint. If you use the standard underline, the line will be cutting through the descenders of your [...]
Posted on August 16, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Conditional Formatting in WordPress
Conditional formatting is a powerful, and perhaps rarely used, template tag that can make WordPress more like a dynamic Content Management System. With conditional formatting you can display certain item, contained within the tag, depending on what type of current page is displayed (such as if it is a static page, blog post, category, or [...]
Posted on August 15, 2008 - by Impress Lab
Styling Typography for the Web
The styling of your typography on websites is perhaps the most important design element - more important than fancy Photoshop headers or cute buttons. Why? Consider that the words you write online are, in most cases, more important than images. In fact, if done correctly, you can say quite a lot with powerfully and cleanly [...]