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Rich Typography On The Web: Techniques and Tools

In addition to font stacks, why not replace the heading text with an image, embedded font, or bit of Flash? The methods described below are easier than they sound. And the end result is that the vast majority of users will see the beautiful typography you want them to see. A word of warning, though: don’t use dynamic text replacement for all of the text on your page. All that would do is slow it down and frustrate your visitors. Instead, save it for headings, menu items, pull quotes and other small bits of text.

Let’s Call It a Draw(ing Surface)

HTML 5 defines the CANVAS element as “a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.” A canvas is a rectangle in your page where you can use JavaScript to draw anything you want.

How to Draw with HTML 5 Canvas

Among the set of goodies in the HTML 5 specification is Canvas which is a way to programmatically draw using JavaScript. We’ll explore the ins and outs of Canvas in this article, demonstrating what is possible with examples and links.

Effective Alt Text

It is perfectly possible to diligently apply alt text to every image on a site and create a result that is completely useless. Unless the alt text effectively conveys the information the image displays, it will be ineffective.

Making $10,000 a Pixel: Optimizing Thumbnail Images in Search Results

In search results, the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. When it comes to making your search results more efficient to use, more relevant, and more attractive, images reign supreme. There is simply nothing else on your search results pages that can come close to offering the same potential as thumbnail images for dramatically increasing your conversion rates and revenues.

Fifty Monochromatic Website Designs

Color choice is a key element to the success of any design. It invokes an atmosphere and sets the mood. One method for using color is to use only shades of a color, which is known as a monochromatic color scheme.

Image Optimization Part 1: The Importance of Images

On average, 46.6% of the page weight for these popular sites consists of images, included either inline with tags or via CSS stylesheets. This is a massive percentage and it tells us one thing: There’s huge potential to improve the performance of websites if we can improve the way we handle the image payload. By focusing on images you can make a difference and delight your site visitors with a faster and more pleasant experience.

CSS Overlays: Using CSS Positioning to Overlay Web Objects

An overlay is when one web object overlaps another. Overlays are often used to highlight or draw attention to important items on websites to raise conversion rates. This article shows how use CSS positioning to avoid slicing and dicing your overlays and assembling with tables. Along the way we'll look at the workarounds we used to make the technique work with different browsers (most importantly IE5.x Mac and Safari).

The Sphere of Design

The web design community thankfully seems to be wrapping up the "design vs. usability" argument. In case you missed it, the conclusion was: "Not either/or but both, and it depends."

Graphic Design vs. Usability

Graphic Design can "hijack" usability efforts if the graphic design team is not "on board" with usability. This is probably why these days more and more graphic artists (like the students at the Art Institute of Portland where I am currently teaching a class) are learning about usability and have a sensitivity for its user-centered intentions.

Graphic Design Plays a Minor Role on the Web

The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don’t try and force the Web to be what it’s not.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

Develop PHP applications with Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums offers Web application developers a REST-based Data API to manipulate the photos and albums stored on its servers. PHP's SimpleXML extension and Zend's GData Library are ideal to process the XML feeds generated by this API so you can customize PHP photo management and photo sharing applications. In this article, meet the Picasa Web Albums Data API and see how you can use it to retrieve photos and photo metadata; add, modify and delete photos; and perform keyword searches of Picasa's user-generated content.

Cooking With Stock

It’s not a secret. We all use stock imagery in our day-to-day design work. So why doesn’t anybody ever talk about it? Just like the inventory of a grocery store, not everything you see on a stock photo site is an ingredient for a gourmet production. By far the worst mistake you can make when choosing stock is selecting stereotypical or clichéd images to convey a concept.My guess is that we’re all just a little ashamed. We want people to see our work as just that: ours. When you have to tell someone that you didn’t create that grungy texture, or you didn’t take that beautiful photo, it feels a lot like admitting that you’ve cheated on a test. But this is nonsense—as designers, it’s our job to put things together and deliver a composition that looks good.

Web Design 101: Photoshop

Photoshop promises great power, but can be more than a little challenging when it comes to clarity and patience. New users can easily get frustrated at how daunting some of the challenges can be when it comes to getting the job done, and even those who are a bit more familiar with it still ﬁnd points of frustration that impede both production and creativity. So for those who barely know Photoshop, but would like to become more familiar with it—ﬁnd out what sort of things to look for when it comes to the palette system, layers, styles, effects, various tools, and saving or exporting their work—let’s look at the basics.

Creating Bulletproof Graphic Link Buttons With CSS

A CSS problem I have been wrestling with lately is how to create a bulletproof shrinkwrapping graphic button. By that I mean an image-based button that will expand and contract to fit the amount of text it contains. It is a very useful technique for CMS-driven sites that allow the client to change the text that is displayed on buttons, as well as for multilingual sites.

Colour Theory

In this article, I’ll cover colour basics and three simple colour schemes so that you can feel confident about choosing colours for your site. I’ll follow up this article with another piece on how to simplify these colour choices. After all, it’s more fun to enjoy the compliments on your Web site design than it is to sweat over the colour choices.

Colour Schemes and Design Mockups

After a web designer presents a site’s architecture, or wireframe, to a client for approval, the next step is to determine the look and feel of the site through colour and graphics. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how I keep this process as simple as possible, both for myself and for the client.

DzineBlog

Founded in December 2007, Dzine blog Is all about designs, here you can find inspirational designs and some good tips in logo, graphics and web designing. My aim is to share quality graphic design resources, graphic design tips and much more good inspirational designs and useful information in designing, precisely and regularly.

Print-Friendly Images and Logos with CSS

In certain instances, not everyone views every portion of your website online: eventually, someone is going to print parts of it. In many cases, this is perfectly fine: if you have a print style sheet that takes care of your worst sins, your website should look okay. But one area where it may still look lackluster is the images.

Five CSSriffic Treatments to Make Your Images Stand Out

Sometimes just having images isn’t enough. Sometimes we need a little help to make our outstanding images truly stand out. And that’s where CSS can help. Here are five things you can do, using CSS, to make the most of your images.

Make Your Designs ‘POP’

Admit it, effects are cool. Drop shadows, gradients, glows, bevels and the like can be a lot of fun and are ridiculously easy to apply to your designs. However, once you discover the powerful effects waiting inside today’s graphics suites, it’s easy to get carried away.

Stop Stealing!?!? Affordable, High Quality Photos are Within Your Reach

Are you a designer and wonder where to find high quality images? Are you using unlicensed pictures and images because you don’t know what else to do? High quality images aren’t nearly as expensive as you think! Some very talented photographers are leaving mainstream outlets and submitting their photographs to sites that sell directly to the end user. Artwork, photographs, images, background… every type of graphic you need are available in multiple sizes and file types.

Twenty Best Simple and Inspirational CSS Web Designs

After looking through hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites, I’ve compiled the top 20 CSS websites for clean and simple design. What do these designs have in common? They all have clean simple interfaces and remain uncluttered and easy to read. Many of the designs display a good deal of illustrion or photorealism, two of my favorite current trends that can contribute a lot to a design.

Twenty of The Best Uses of Color in Current Web Design

Many sites “play it safe” when choosing colors. Brilliant colors have to be carefully controlled to avoid looking amateur. I’ve selected these 20 sites for excellent use of color along with their overall web design. Quality of CSS, features, ease of use all come into play as well.

Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards

When designing interfaces for browsing data-driven sites, creating navigation elements that are also visualization tools helps the user make better decisions. Wilson Miner demonstrates three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based navigation patterns.

If I Told You You Had a Beautiful Figure...

Lay out images consistently across your site using a liitle clever JavaScript.

Do Too Many Graphics Reduce Sales Page Conversion Rates?

Optimizing an offer page to maximize the number of people who make a purchase or pay for a subscription is a delicate process. You need to get the balance just right.

Display 2.0: A Look Forward to the High-Definition Web and Its Effect on Our Digital Experience

The adoption of high-resolution displays--with 150 or more pixels per inch--will significantly alter our conception of what the Web and networked applications can potentially be. As the price of high-res displays comes down to earth and early adopters make way for mass consumers, beautiful visualizations of data will enrich the digital realm.

3D Effects

Three-dimensional illusion effects are powerful devices that can achieve excellent results. They can also add significantly to overall page filesize, and can reduce usability if overused, so should be used deliberately and with care (unlike the title image above, see cooltext.com if you want one).

Design Melt Down

A web resource about web design techniques.

Favourite Logos

When I find a really nice logo, icon or button, I save a copy to file for future inspiration. Here's my collection of logos, with descriptions of why I think each one works. See article on designing logos for guidelines of logo design fundamentals.

Logo Design

Logos are graphical shorthand that can represent a company or product, and communicate certain characteristics.

Text-Based Logos

Logos in the form of words or letters have natural properties that make them visually effective: (see also logos article): good recognition; good descriptiveness; and good presence.

Colour

Colour is one of the designer's best tools. There are lots of ways to use it to help communicate a message. Colour can carry meaning, express personality, differentiate, frame, and highlight content.

Contrast

Contrast is the most fundamental design device: it differentiates elements; it brings out dominant elements; it mutes lesser elements; it creates dynamism.

Imagery

Don't reinvent the wheel for functional imagery. Concentrate creative effort on imagery that adds value in branding or message (content).

Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds

Gradients: a nutritious part of your Web 2.0 breakfast. Wouldn't it be swell if you could get all that goodness without opening Photoshop every time you needed a little gradient bliss? Matthew O'Neill explains how you can.

网页设计中的颜色

从心理学角度来讲，不同的颜色代表不同的意思。从这个观点出发，本文讨论网页界面中背景颜色和内容颜色的关系。了解这个关系，有利于：a) 为网页中不同的内容选择适合的颜色；b) 浏览网页时，可以方便的找到需要的内容。

The Brilliance of Smart Photoshop Objects

When it comes to editing an image, that typically means going back into the image app, recreating the image, then putting the newly created image into your site. A serious GoLive advantage is that communicates directly with your imaging apps to regenerate a new image right in place on your page.

Coloring Outside the Lines

This series of articles about color is designed to help you get started right now selecting colors for your site.

Web Graphics Basics

Good web sites require a seamless integration of text and graphics. Here's the least you need to know about web graphics.

Hues to Use in 2005

These out-there colors won't come alone, or even in pairs... they'll be seen in packs. Designers, desperately searching for something fresh and new, will go balls out, applying this palette to tripped out patterns of stripes, polka dots, and plaids to create looks similar to those seen on the streets of Tokyo.

Très Chic Simplicity

What exactly is 'chic simplicity,' you ask? It is somewhat of an oxymoron: simple yet sophisticated. The design exudes simplicity through its forms, fonts, and layout, and sophistication through its textures, details, and tastefulness. It's a fantastic 'look' that can be used for almost every genre of websites: a professional, yet hip, corporate site; a stylish, yet clean, commercial site; or just a fun and colorful personal site. Whichever style you're going for, this 'look' will fit.

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention

Tthe usual approaches for preventing hotlinking (hijacking) images have a couple of side effects. This system works much better.

Program with SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML format that describes scale-independent graphics, with good support in free software and commercial tools. In this installment, David introduces scripting and animation with SVG, and touches on manipulating SVG through DOM. Because SVG is XML, it lends itself to transformation and/or generation with any of the tools and libraries you might use for XML generally.

Save For Web

The purpose of the 'Save For Web' dialog is to allow you to tweak optimization settings for web file formats and show you how those settings will affect your artwork. This allows you to find a good balance between file size and image quality.

Color on Web Design

Psychologically speaking, different color has different meaning. From this point, this article focuses on the relationship between the background color and content of the web interface.

Logo Primer

I want to explain why a logo should be produced in a vector program such as Illustrator or Freehand. (Vector art is LINE art -- the digital equivalent of art done in pen and ink.)

A Better Image Rotator

About a year ago, I wrote an article, introducing a method for displaying a random image every time someone visits a web page. Administration was simple: just add or remove images from a folder on the server, and they would appear (or disappear, respectively) from the pool of random images being displayed on that page.

Photoshop: Create Seamless Background Tiles with the Tile Maker Filter

Photoshop can create backgrounds and textures with a combination of filters and commands, but you can also create a pattern based on a selection from a scanned image. If you define a pattern based on a small selection from a scanned image, you can use the Fill command, a Pattern layer or the Pattern Stamp tool to fill a selected area with that pattern. The pattern that you defined will be repeated horizontally and vertically to fill the selection.

State of Online Graphics

Judging from the work of fellow Help writers, the value of graphics in online Help is subject to debate. Of the more than sixty Help systems reviewed for this session (including the suites from Corel, Lotus, and Microsoft), fewer than half featured significant use of graphics. Even the Help systems of some graphics applications consisted mainly of text, broken only occasionally by utilitarian screenshots of tools and buttons. Yet, even though we have had only a few years of experience in designing graphics for online Help, many of the Help systems revealed a wealth of good ideas worth adapting for use in your own systems.

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization

Visual designers working on the web need an understanding of the medium in which they work, so many have taken to code. Many have entered the usability lab. But what about the other side? Are developers and human factors professionals immersed in literature on gestalt and color theory?

Faceted Metadata for Image Search and Browsing

The authors present a new method of image searching based on conceptual descriptors. This method differs from the traditional methods of image searching that are based on keywords and visual similarity.

Web Graphics - From the Tried and True to the New

You've gone to a lot of trouble to put together your Web page. The graphics make it look especially effective. But what if hardly anyone sees them? After all, Web surfers are au impatieut breed with short attention spaus. They might wait about 30 secouds, and theu they're off to another site. You ueed to keep your graphics files as small as possible so they'll load quickly. What cau you do? This demoustratiou shows how to use several popular graphics packages to compress the size of your graphics, alLd where possible, make them transparent.

Art Direction and the Web

Introduces the principles and techniques of the art director, and shows how art directional concepts can shape memorable user experiences.

Attractive Vectormaps: A Call for Well-Arranged Webmaps

If a user has a choice between two maps he/she will often use the map with the 'better' design. This means a map, besides being readable, should be visually attractive, comparable with other maps and eventually deliver some tools to navigate and interact with a map. A further problem is that a lot of maps are not always self-explaining by default. SVG offers some possibility to make maps well designed. The readability is dependent on several factors: e g. the chosen colors, used fonts or minimal dimensions for symbols, line-styles and fill-patterns. The article is pointing to basic principles for designing visually attractive maps.

Add Inspiration With Illustrations

Which comes first, the concept or the artwork? The assumption has always been that you first figure out the concept, then find the art to fit. But even if we leave many things in our life unquestioned--design shouldn't be one of them.

Color on the Web

You're seeing red. They're seeing orange. Not the same, is it? More often than not, color on the web is approximate. So how do you choose colors that are going to work best? Are you forever stuck with the old 216 color 'web-safe' colors? Is there technology that ensures what you see is what your visitors get?

Finding and Using Art on the Web

So you want to add graphics to your site, but you don't know where to get them? Well—first you have to learn that you can't just take graphics off someone else's site unless you want to go directly to Jail, do not pass go, and do not get $200 (though your Lawyer will get at least that per hour).

Image Tricks That Make You Look Good

Web graphics are more than just window-dressing. They function as navigational elements and provide informational design. Oh, and they need to look good, too. Learn how to add graphic zip to your Web pages by using these Dreamweaver techniques.

Cleaner, Sharper GIF, JPEG, And PNG Images

While they're not absolutely necessary for Website functionality, images help improve the appearance of a site. With a few gcood quality, highly optimised images, you can give your site the edge it needs to leave a lasting impression. The problem is that many Webmasters, both novice and experienced, don't feel confident when it comes to creating clean looking graphics and optimising them for the Web.

Optimizing Photoshop Files for Web Design

In this series of articles, we will cover a wide range of topics related to setting up Photoshop files for web design.

The Photoshop "Save for Web" Feature

As of version 5 and greater, Photoshop includes a very handy Save for Web command. This feature allows you to produce a copy of your image that is optimised for web use. This means that the image file will be as small as possible, and that the image will use only web-safe colours (if desired). Save for Web can produce GIF, JPEG, or PNG format images.

Photoshop Website Artwork

How to create all the graphics needed for an example website using Adobe Photoshop.

Resizing Images for the Web: Photoshop Tutorial

We all have those photos that we like to on the web to share with our friends. Or, we have some terrific images we've created that need to be resized for the web. Images for the web need to be both small in file size and in physical dimensions so that our viewers don't have to scroll right to see the whole picture. In Photoshop we can adjust our huge images to fit the web quite easily.

Glossary of Graphic Design and Web Page Design Terms

A collection of definitions for terms from graphic and web design.

Easy Web Graphics

Easy Web Graphics would be a good choice for novice or intermediate users of Microsoft FrontPage and Microsoft Photo Editor who want to make better use of those products.

Disappearing Act

It's easy enough to create an irregularly shaped image in Photoshop, but how do you get the rectangular background to disappear when you use that image on the Web or in a print-based layout? Here are some great techniques that'll help you focus on your subject.

Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design

The web is awash with sterile design solutions. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and countless others are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Though one might say this makes browsing easier by virtue of a standardized interface, in reality such sites create mundane experiences for their users and fail to make a positive connection with their audience.

The Design of World Wide Web Home Pages: Using Visuals to Establish Organizational Ethos

The World Wide Web presents information developers with the task of designing texts that will be accessed by multiple, global audiences. At the same time, Web technology presents developers with new design constraints. Therefore, Web text development warrants new design considerations. This paper presents an approach based on the rhetorical concept of ethos. Four visual design considerations—page grid, graphic files, icons, and text structure—are reviewed based on how decisions about each convey the ethos of the organization.

Dithering: Good, Bad, and Ugly

This piece discusses dithering in the context of Web graphics, and introduces the WebScrub image optimization algorithm developed by Todd Fahrner at Verso, realized as freely-downloadable Photoshop plug-ins for Mac and Windows, as well as scripts for the image-processing program DeBabelizer (MacOS only at present).

Digital Photography for the Web

Like digital photography? Here's a look at tools and tricks you can use to create great photos for your site.

Graphics

In this chapter we show you techniques to optimize the look and efficiency of your Web page graphics. Although electronic publishing frees you from the cost and limitations of color reproduction on paper, you will still need to make careful calculations (and a few compromises) if you wish to optimize your graphics and photographs for various display monitors and Internet access speeds.

Eye on Color

Each day, thousands of websites lose credibility and all-important return traffic -- not because they're poorly written, constructed, designed, or advertised, but because of: colors that clash colors that camouflage colors that just plain don't work! Attention to color on the web is generally considered the province of web-design professionals -- but those of us who study and teach professional writing are in a prime position to use our knowledge and skills to lead the way toward a more aesthetically-pleasing, and rhetorically-effective, World Wide Web

Random Image Rotation

Readers return to sites that appear fresh and new on each visit. On a news site, magazine, or blog, stories or headlines will be updated frequently. But how can static sites keep that fresh feeling? Dan Benjamin’s free image randomizer may do the trick, and you needn’t be a programmer to install it.

Interview with a Graphic Designer: Web-Document Design

Our in-house graphic designer shares her Web-document design experience.

Image File Formats for Print and Web

Images such as illustrations, photos and charts are an integral part of most technical papers. For the person compiling the document for print or online venues, images present unique problems. Unlike text documents, which are readily transferable between applications and platforms, images need special attention. In order to create images which are an appropriate quality for distribution, the author must always be mindful of the format of the final output. The final format will affect how the images are created, scanned and submitted.

Using Visualization in Websites

In some websites the amount of information is so large that the context may be lost whenever it is displayed on a single computer screen. If we try to have the entire structure visible all at once (so we did not lose the context), the details may be too small to read. For example, the HypViewer product on the right below is showing over one million IP addresses. If you think that adding visualization methods to a website automatically will improve user performance in this situation, you may want to consider the results of a couple of recent studies.

Thinking About Graphic Design

There was a time when graphic design - or how things looked at least - was regarded as the most central part of the web experience. A 'good' website, in the eyes of management at least, involved little more than the company message accompanied by attractive pictures, ideally animated as often as possible. Nowadays, we are beginning to realise that whilst design remains a vital differentiator in terms of web experience, it is for very different reasons. Users are by now accustomed to the very highest levels of graphic design work online. This means that whilst a professional approach is essential for any organisation serious about their online presence, on it's own a 'good looking' site is not sufficient. It is in its impact on usability that graphic design is now particularly significant in the online environment. Graphic design, or visual communication, is about more than looks. The way site content is presented will have a significant effect on how easy-to-use it will be. This not only includes questions of appropriate images and styles, but also choice of colour schemes and the way different interface elements are represented.

Web Design: Use of Graphics

The conservative use of graphics is recommended to ensure reasonable download speeds.

Gratuitous Graphics and Human-Centered Website Design

Notice how frustrating most company websites are. Lots of pretty pictures that take forever to load. Hardly any information on a page. Notice how difficult it is to find the information you seek, and especially, how difficult it is to do comparison shopping. Don't companies realize that in today's world, the website is a great opportunity to practice customer-centered interaction -- make the customers happy and they will come back again and again? Frustrate them and, well, the competition is only a click away.

Taming the Electronic Page

A web page will be within certain height and width limits. For the lowest common denominator, cross-platform web page, you should design to a minimum width of the Macintosh default of around 470 pixels and a maximum of 625 wide to accommodate people who have standard 14' VGA monitors. The majority of surfer now have 800 x 600 or larger monitors. Unless you really need to accommodate the lowest common denominator, and that comes down to knowing your target audience, you can work to a more realsitic width of about 760 pixels. Even at the larger sizes, it is desirable from a 'readability' point of view, to limit the text line width to 8-10 words.

Web Graphics and Palettes

Indiscriminate use of graphics, no matter how cool, will only antagonise the reader to the point that they will switch off the automatic graphics download in their browser - and all the designer's efforts will be wasted.

Web Page Design for Designers

The purpose of my Web Page Design for Designers site is not to teach people how to produce web pages. There is little mention of HTML or any other technical stuff except where necessary. It is assumed that the reader already has a grasp of HTML programming, or has made the decision to use a WYSIWYG Web page editor. It is aimed at people who are already involved with design and typography for conventional print and want to explore the possibilities of this new electronic medium. They are probably already using page layout tools like QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Freehand and Illustrator and have discovered that designing web pages is something quite different.

Cross-Browser Variable Opacity with PNG: A Real Solution

Periodically, someone tells me about the magic of PNG, how itÂ’s the ideal image format for the web, and that someday we'll all be using it on our sites instead of GIF. People have been saying this for years, and by now most of us have stopped listening. Sadly, flaky browser support has made PNG impractical for almost everything--but now, with a few simple workarounds, we can finally put one of its most compelling features to use.

Updating Graphics In Existing PDFs

Adobe's built-in way to edit and replace images is fairly slick. Start out by checking your preferences--choose File > Preferences > TouchUp. The two applications listed here will be used for editing bitmap and vector images, respectively, so make sure these are the programs you want to use for those purposes. Remember, though, that only Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator will be able to send the images back to Acrobat without any additional work on your part.

Graphics on the Web

There is no limit in the Web specifications to the graphical formats that can be used on the Web. You just need a MIME type so that the format is labelled correctly for transfer across the Web, and so that a suitable viewer (if one exists) can be located at the other end. In practice, certain formats are more widely understood than others; certain formats are more suited to one type of graphical data than another; so you should make an informed choice about what format to use.

The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes

I do this because, well, I love design. More to the point, I crave design talk: who’s influenced who, what tools do you use, what trends do you observe, what rocks your world, and so forth. I get a lot out of this discourse. The signal-to-noise ratio of this particular subset of the Internet has always tilted strongly towards meaning. Until fairly recently, that is, when I started to notice a new feeling creeping into the sites I frequented. In what were nominally gathering places to discuss and celebrate online design, design seemed to be just about the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Web Graphics 101

If you work anywhere near a Web site, sooner or later you'll have to deal with graphics. Unfortunately, not everyone who winds up handling graphics is a professional designer, and even experienced Web designers don't always understand that graphics have to be produced in a particular way. On the Web, as with anything computer-related, there are more ways to do graphics wrong than there are to do them right.

The Delicate Art of (Web) Design Critique

Since I tend to hang around on various web-related mailing lists, I often see numerous requests for design critiques. Increasingly, this leads me to wonder about the process of critiquing other people's design. It's quite one thing to criticize someone's code; one can argue the merits or not of being a stickler about standards compliancy, or using CSS, or whatever. But design is more personal than writing code. (Writing on its own is also very personal, but that's not the topic here.) How do you constructively critique someone's work without being taken the wrong way? How do you accept criticism without feeling hurt or angry? Here are just a few ideas, gathered from observations and comments from others.