Latest posts
Don’t start with a page template (Read more)
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in web design is this: don’t start with a page template. Focussing your initial design effort (and front-end coding) on a homepage or indeed any other kind of layout template is not the way to get the best results (unless you really are just designing a tiny one page site). In recent… More
Is ‘flat design’ really flat? (Read more)
I’ve been following the growing trend for ‘flat design’ with interest. But is it really ‘flat’ or more a reaction against over-used design details like the drop-shadow? I would argue that the visual impression of depth in a UI is very useful and not something we are going to lose, particularly for very complex UIs. Take this page from Layervault,… More
In Defence of 3D Buttons (Read more)
There’s been some discussion in the web design community recently about ‘flat’ UI design as the arrival of ‘honest design’. See this post from Allen Grinshtein for example. Of course ‘flat’ design has been around for a long time (here’s a flat design I worked on back in 2007), but has been getting more attention with the arrival of Microsoft’s… More
Sleeping Columns Using the Semantic Grid System (Read more)
So a couple of weeks ago I was working on building a complex responsive grid that had different column widths at different breakpoints, and blogged about it here. I found this system works pretty well and is very scalable, meaning I can quickly build complex responsive templates for new layouts on a site. However, all those classes are pretty cumbersome… More
CSS Sleeping Columns in Responsive Layouts (Read more)
Fluid CSS grids are great because they give us a way to align content into a grid that responds to the width of the browser or device screen. However, as the underlying grid gets narrower we usually want to rearrange the columns so as to retain a comfortable amount of space for the content. Sometimes, of course, this means splitting a… More
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