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Design secrets revealed - 35 Pro designers asked 5 must know questions
smashingmagazine.com — 35 professional designers disclose their favorite CSS technique, how they prioritize their designs, their favorite font, their most read design-related book and the design magazine that they read religiously.
jonwinstanley- 1965 diggs
- digg it
- commandos, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Great ! One of the best article by Smashing Magazine !
- element21, on 10/12/2007, -6/+7definitely one of their best - there is soo much information to digest though. its gonna take a few reads before I'm content!
- monospaced, on 10/12/2007, -40/+14Since WHEN does the word "Designer" refer to website-maker?
- Frozo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I dug you up because I understand what you're saying. There are all kinds of designers. It's like someone going into Carvel and asking for "ice cream" and expecting the person to serve them chocolate because it is the only flavor THEY eat.
GREAT article though!
- Frozo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I dug you up because I understand what you're saying. There are all kinds of designers. It's like someone going into Carvel and asking for "ice cream" and expecting the person to serve them chocolate because it is the only flavor THEY eat.
- masamunecyrus, on 10/12/2007, -5/+44@monospaced:
Since they started DESIGNING websites. - rstrb8r, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3In the article, Nick Francis's reply to the first question includes: "We consciously don’t consider code at all during the design process. Our designer still does a lot of print work, and what’s great about print is that there are no constraints. Print design has no boundaries with texture, typography or the smallest of details. As long as it fits on the page, it works! "
Obviously, he knows nothing about print design, print production, prepress and offset printing. I can venture that he is equally inept at web design, programming and usability.
There's one set of answers I don't need to continue reading! - bat-21, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7SmashingMagazine needs to hire of these designers to redesign their bland, clunky website.
- cypher35, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10This article is gold... I've been designing websites for years and even I am finding some techniques in here that I had never heard of.
- BeyondGoodNEvil, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3I'm with ya, mono. I like more descriptive language, instead of generalizations. I hate when people call musicians "artists". It's truly ridiculous! We call people who make statues "sculptors", not "3D-material artist". "Artist" is too general a term, like "designer". Hell, the next step of the current over-simplification/dumbing-down of our language is to group "artist" with "designer" and call it "creativist". These oversimplified, general terms like "artist" and "designer" require an additional clarifier like "musical" or "website" or "fashion". What's wrong with "musician" and "webdesigner"?
"Musical artist" is 14 characters long (ncluding the space)
"Musician" is 8, a reduction of 42.857%, folks!
Possibly, the powers that be are making our language more easily translatable with Simple English, in which case I can see the reasoning behind it, but even then, at some point when Simple English becomes dominant in the world, the efficiency gained from returning to a bigger vocabulary and fewer adjectives, will bring terms like "musician" back. - zurp, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3@retards
Since you're reading the article on the WEB, one can infer that it is referring to WEB DESIGN.
Srsly, do you also go around ridiculing websites that refer to "links", because they could also refer to sausage links? - david76, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1It seems odd to ask a designer about a CSS technique they use. I usually don't think of design as implementation in code, but rather just design, usually, in Photoshop.
- joaob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dugg because one of the designers admits to using text-indent to cheat at SEO
brilliant!
- lunchbox170, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Yes, this is probably their best article they have ever done.
Awesome guys...love it!! - ezkcdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9This is great. Amazing free resource.
- DariusMonsef, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Great gathering of information. I would have been interested to know more about how they use color or are inspired by it.
Some of my sites for color inspiration:
http://www.COLOURlovers.com
http://www.DesignMeltdown.com- element21, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2this is one of my favourites for 'Color' (Colour as we say down here) Schemes
http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php?search_term=Apple
- element21, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2this is one of my favourites for 'Color' (Colour as we say down here) Schemes
- n0va, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3at least three people said they read Smashing Magazine. it's kinda sad if you interviewed 35 designers and none of them read your articles.
it also says a lot about the magazine. - wedges, on 10/12/2007, -7/+14web-developer ≠ designer.
- Lazaryn, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4web-developer ≠ web-designer
- HigherLogic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6web developer > web designer > graphic designer > designer
...at least in terms of the web. Great article by the way, and Krug's book is definitely a *must* for any web developer, it should be required reading. Usability should be the foremost concern for any website. Just common sense.
Oh, and the second book on the list is actually available online (well, the "for the web" version is, which is probably a better choice anyways):
http://webtypography.net/ - joel.smith, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1a web developer and a web designer are two different things
web designer--of course, the design of the website. layout, colors, visuals. this often includes the actual markup of the layouts, as well.
web developer--developer of the web applications used to either driven the website, or the functions of the website--uses programming languages such as PHP, JSP, ASP, etc. The web developer role can also include the markup of the layouts.
A lot of freelancers are web designers AND developers. I offer these as two different services with my company.
- JeremyBanks, on 10/12/2007, -7/+4Why do those comments look just like the ones in paid-for-diggs stories?
- wompninja, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3(web) curiously left from the title. Boring as hell for real designers, and Web Developers are not designers they are code monkeys.
- MedHead, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Anyone else find it funny that the first topic, "1.1 Communication", is preceded by the heading "1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.", which is grammatically incorrect?
- letdowntourist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10to all those slamming the fact that its just for web developers, try actually reading it. i dugg this for the fantastic typographic comments. univers and din are underused today.
- wedges, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i use din all the time. bottom line is that most of the points are web related: "standards, accesiblity" "content" "navigation" "css-technique" plus the mention of digital web magazine and a list apart. when you focus primarily on code you're a developer, rather than a designer.
- wompninja, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I myself use univers when the problem demands it, the reason these fonts are under used today is because they were used to the point of exhaustion 20 years ago by the swiss school of thought.
- reddevil3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10A list apart is such a gorgeous website.
- phmfthacim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8usually when I see something about web design on digg, I expect that it will be complete garbage.
this, on the other hand, is amazing! - Hervard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2* {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
outline: 0;
}
^ Very useful. Thanks for the article :) - donnyburnside, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Umm, you don't 'design' websites. You build and develop them. Designer is what we were described as back in '99.
- david76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3There are still website designers who just design websites and don't actually build and develop them.
- Asvetic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm a designer that designs static websites, then pass them to a developer for the build/code part. And I definitely wouldn't classify myself as a web-designer either.
- donnyburnside, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1For colour inspiration use http://kuler.adobe.com/
- jimcarrey363, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The best comment in that article......
"One particularly useful tool are conditional comments, allowing me to serve up fixes for the broken rendering in Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Even though IE7 is newer, it is still far from being a good product. I am thankful that Microsoft at least provided us with a work-around solution for their shoddy browsers."
Suck it MS. - Kyan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Jivin'!
- shaunmadams, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good resource links in that article. Some great comments too.
- mizraabianz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1really nice article, I enjoyed the fonts selections. Helvetica rocks!
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Blah .. lots of misinformation in there too. Why do people do things like this? For example on the CSS image replacement for your logo they use things like:
text-indent:-9000px;
and
line-height: 1000px;
WTF ?? Why is using -9000px the "right" way to do this? They respond by saying "look at your site on a mobile phone to see why this is the right way to do this." LMFAO. Depending on the browser on your mobile phone this is quite possible to end up making the site completely unusable and 9000px + wide. If you want things to work well on your mobile phone you might consider disabling CSS and giving users a nice lightweight and functional page.
Also why is having a logo that's got a line-height of 1000px the "right" way to do this. The things they are trying to acheive can be done in much more "proper" ways (notice I didn't say "right"). Also consider the ways that the different rendering engines will handle this, even going from IE 5.5 thru 7, let alone FF, Opera, Safari. Sad that this is goign to be taken as the "right" way to do this by too many people, uggggg.
Both of these solutions will come back to bite them, and quickly. This alone tells me that this "right" way to do things may not be so "right" after all. I could probably pick apart many other examples in there as well, but after that point they lost me. It reminds me a lot of "monkey see monkey do" and a dash of "me too"'s thrown in for fun and a lot of CSS designers I've worked with who have hacks upon hacks upon hacks -- who typically spend more time pulling out hair than getting work done. Know the limitations of your medium and embrace them, don't hack them into submission. If you find yourself having to do that many hacks to get the job done you probably need to re-examine the way you've implimented your design. - Koski, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is one of the best articles I've seen posten on digg, ever. Cheers!
- insub2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Great! Just super!
my two favs:
# Using overflow:auto to clear floated elements. Simple Clearing of Floats. [Matthew Buchanan, New Zealand]
# Using more than one class per element. For example, I could give a paragraph tag two classes.
. This may seem extremely novice but I find that when I talk to people about this, they have no idea it’s possible. (This also comes in handy when you want the last element class to take on a slightly different property as the ones before it.) [Matt Downey, US]- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2insub said: # Using overflow:auto to clear floated elements. Simple Clearing of Floats. [Matthew Buchanan, New Zealand]
How about using something painfully obvious like .... clear ?? *shakes head* Not a shot at you insub ... just a statement. Why potentially mess up your overflow to clear floats when there is a perfectly good way to do this already. Also using overflow that way you are relying on an undocumented behaviour that can change at any point in the game . . .
I _really_ don't get why people use some of these hacks. Hacks are just that ... hacks. The more you use them the more you resemble them. Given all the hacks listed by these 35 pro designers I feel that they are a lot closer to hacks than designers IMHO.
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2insub said: # Using overflow:auto to clear floated elements. Simple Clearing of Floats. [Matthew Buchanan, New Zealand]
- warmrobot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+02 things:
1) overflow:auto do not clear anything in Opera if you not add width or height (usually I add width:100%).
2) About chapter 2.5. Usually I write overflow:hidden; instead of outline:0; I saw this technique at the first time on zeldman.com.
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