Author Archive
Having fun with transparency
May
Web design continues to grow and advance with new features constantly being brought forward through browsers, programming and markup languages. Being creative doesn’t necessarily being the first to use these new features but instead being the first one to experiment. Take a look at the border-radius property, on first glance it just just rounds off corners, but when you begin to delve deeper and experiment you realise that the property can do much more than just round off corners. To be creative you don’t have to magically spark new ideas all the time, sometimes its about working with what you have and ‘thinking outside the box’. In this post I shall be sharing and explaining a number of creative uses of transparency in web design.
This post has an autoplaying video for the example hinted above, be warned, I know some of you can hate autoplaying flash videos (including me) but this one is okay, just some relaxing music while you read.
Celebrating the finale of LOST with outstanding fan art
May
Since I am a huge fan of LOST and the finale is about to air in roughly 12 hours I thought it would be fitting to celebrate the huge success the show has had. Now some people say there are lovers and haters of the show, I for one believe the haters only hate because they are missing out. The suspense and overall plot of LOST is incredible, the writers seemed to have perfected the ‘cliffhanger’ ending across the years leaving fans right on the edges of their seat. If you haven’t watched any episodes of LOST I strongly suggest you do, if you gave up on the show for various reasons I can only say give it another chance. So in this post, to celebrate, I have showcased some of my favourite LOST fan art I have seen over the past couple of years. I hope you enjoy this post and also the finale coming very soon.
Gorgeous free icon sets that you should be using
May
The amount of icon packs currently available for commercial use is vast, to say the least. Every now and then when you’re working on a design and want to find that perfect icon, you spend hours searching the web. Even if you stay focused and manage to find that icon, you’ve probably been sidetracked to such an extent that you don’t know where the icon goes or what you wanted it for in the first place (exaggeration…or not?). This happened to me a fair few times until I started collecting some icon sets I liked and used regularly. Those sets can be seen below, I hope you like them and if you do, don’t forget to pay your respects to the authors.
Create a pixel perfect subscription box using CSS3
May
Today I will show how to create the above subscription box using simple HTML markup and a few advanced CSS3 properties. I believe CSS3 is the future and the sooner you can jump on the CSS3 band wagon the better. All the stylish shadows and gradients used are rendered using CSS properties which can be experimented with to produce some fantastic results.
Experimenting with data visualization
Mar
Data visualization as you might of guessed is the study the visual representation of data. Currently, the most popular form of data visualization that demonstrates creativity would have to be infrographics. The most simplest form would most likely be the table. Now when it comes to web design, designers tend to stick with what they know. Tables are used to produce pricing pages, pie charts to demonstrate percentage and proportion, bar charts to display discrete or discontinuous data and so on.
An interview with freelance web designer Sam Brown
Mar
Sam Brown a freelance web designer and blogger has kindly given up a few minutes of his time to answer a few questions about web design and freelancing.
He talks about how he got his first freelance job to what his favorite color and font is. If you are a designer wishing to enter the freelance world, Sam offers a great insight into becoming a freelance web designer.
Welcome to the new CreativityDen – Updated!
Mar
I am proud to announce the redesign for CreativityDen is complete, it has been a crazy couple of weeks but I think I am finally done. The design is completely different from the last but not to worry I have explained every last detail. I hope you like the new CreativityDen and I look forward to any feedback you may give. Oh, and I am also giving away a free ticket to the Future of Web Design Conference to celebrate. Enjoy!
The hidden power of border-radius
Feb
So hopefully after reading – Understanding CSS – Padding, Positioning and CSS3 – you understand the basics of CSS and have been experimenting with other properties. It is important to remember that some properties will allow you to achieve effects that aren’t necessarily stated. In this post we will explore the property border-radius and how it can be used to create circles, semi-cricles and quarter-circles. It also has the potential to produce some terrific designs using just CSS – no images.
Web designs with exceptional forms of navigation
Jan
There are a number of showcases demonstrating creative navigation throughout the design community. Despite this, the majority of them just showcase nicely designed horizontal and and vertical menus. Of course, they were probably creative at some stage. However, some web designers test the laws of usability and like to experiment with design. Today, I have showcased over twenty stunning forms of navigation in website design. I hope these websites inspire you to forget all forms of current navigation and to design new, better and improved ways of navigating websites.
Contact form or mailto link?
Jan
Whilst visiting various websites it has come to my attention that only about half use contact forms. The websites that don’t instead supply a mailto link which then opens an email client. Why do some websites choose to use a mailto link rather than a contact form? Is it because they’re too lazy to design and code a contact form or is it because they feel contact forms are unnecessary when you have well developed and easy to use email clients such as gmail. I am sure there are various reasons to why websites choose to display a contact form or supply an email address, but in this article I will be telling you why contact forms are the way to go.