The Art of Color Coordination Colors affect us in countless ways—mentally and physically, consciously and subconsciously. Psychologists have suggested that color impression can account for 60% of the acceptance or rejection of a product or service. Good color choices should never be neglected in web design. A bad color combination can have the same negative effect as poor copy and slow load times. In this infographic, we will briefly discuss color coordination and how you can use this to your advantage when designing your site. Special thanks to @speckyboy, @smashingmag and @onextrapixel. Click on the infographic below to view a larger image: View an enlarged version of this Infographic » Click here to download a .pdf version of this infographic. Want to display this infographic on your site? Simply copy and paste the code below into the html of your website to display the infographic presented above: Website Color Scheme Examples Complementary Colors – Naturestable.com Analogous Colors – Simplebits.com
Medieval Castle Layout: A Typical Castle Layout, Explaining Different Areas and Buildings The Medieval Castle Layout of Farleigh Hungerford Castle So let's look at the layout of an excellent example of a Medieval castle - Farleigh Hungerford castle, in Somerset, UK. Farleigh Hungerford has many traditional features of Medieval castles. Although it's not a totally perfect example (I struggled to find the 'perfect' one!) Farleigh Hungerford Castle was, first and foremost, a grand residence for the Hungerford family. Here's an image of the castle today taken from Google Earth. The Different Buildings and Areas of a Typical Medieval Castle Layout This is the layout of Farleigh Hungerford castle, as it would have been in Medieval times. Key to Plan The Great Hall Courtyards Kitchens Moat and Dam Bakehouse & Brewery The Keep Gatehouse Barbican Chapel and Priests' House Stables Dungeons This medieval castle layout diagram is adapted by E Morris/Exploring Castles from an original by HCHC2009 licence CC-BY-SA-3.0; via Wikimedia Commons. The Keep The Moat and the Dam The Kitchens
53 Steps to follow if you want to become Freelance Web Designer/Developer (60+ Resources) :Speckyboy Design Magazine In recent months I have been setting myself up as a Freelance Web designer/Developer, if I told you it was a rocky road I wouldn’t be exaggerating . If I had followed the check-list I have compiled below it would have made my life that little bit easier and stress free. But, like most things, entering into a new chapter can make you feel blindfolded and you stumble about trying to find the answers. But the truth of the matter is I have completed my transition, I am a Freelance Web Designer and couldn’t be happier. Please note that this post is fairly old and some of the points and resources may no longer be relevant. 53 Steps to becoming a Freelancer Web Designer/Developer 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. Essential Further Reading
Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices Advertisement Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. "Buy this now!") How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user’s attention and entice them to click? Best Practices for Effective Call to Action Buttons Designing call to action buttons into web interfaces requires some forethought and planning; it has to be part of your prototyping and information architecture processes in order for them to work well. Draw user attention with size In web pages, the size of an element relative to its surrounding elements indicates its importance: the larger the element is, the more important it is. Size of call to action button versus surrounding elements A web page may have multiple calls for action.
Sign Up Forms Must Die I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? We can do better. But before we get into the potential of gradual engagement (your path out of sign-in “dullery”), let’s look at how the process of engaging with an online service typically works. Figure 13.1 A sign-up form greets new customers at Google Video. You are required to give us your email address, select a password, tell us your name, your location, verify this strange word, agree to our terms of service, and finally, you will get what’s behind the form. Now contrast this approach with that of another online video service: Jumpcut. Selecting Make a Movie brings up a single input field for the title of your movie and a few options you can use to upload media files for your movie. So far, no form.
Password strength verification with jQuery Many sites that require login credentials enforce a security setting often referred to as password complexity requirements. These requirements ensure that user passwords are sufficiently strong and cannot be easily broken. What constitutes a strong password? In this tutorial, we’ll construct a form that gives the user live feedback as to whether their password has sufficiently met the complexity requirements we will establish. Before we begin, let’s get take a sneak peak at what our final product will look like (click for a demo): Please note: The purpose of this tutorial is to show how a simple script can be written using javascript and jQuery to enforce password complexity requirements. Step 1: Starter HTML First we want to get our basic HTML starter code. <! Step 2: Form HTML Now let’s add the markup that will be used for our form. Here’s an explanation of the code we used: Here’s what we’ve got so far: Step 3: Password information box HTML Each list item is given a specific ID attribute. \d
Copyright Website 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets - Smashing Magazine Advertisement When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online. In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. The result: hundreds and hundreds of sets available almost everywhere, usually not that well executed and often duplicated from other sets. Below we present 35 incredible free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons. You might want to take a look at the following articles we’ve presented earlier: Free Icons For Your Web Designs Bagg & Box Telecharger Icon Pack5 70 high-quality free icons released under a Creative Commons license. Apple Mail Icons14
What The Highest Converting Websites Do Differently Did you know that companies that take on a structured approach towards conversion optimization are twice as likely to see a large increase in sales? Given this, you’d think more companies would test and run experiments. Yet 61% of companies do less than 5 tests per month. My gut tells me the reason for this is MOST companies are too caught up in the “business as usual syndrome”, and they rarely take a second to stop and think about really focusing on conversion optimization. In this post we’re going to go over what the highest converting websites do differently. But before we get into the details, we want to highlight a few points to get you thinking first: You have 0-8 seconds to make a compelling headline and landing page. Got that? 1. Visitors should clearly see on your homepage or landing page why they should do business with you and the benefit of it. A great example of this is MailChimp: If you think about it, whose usually tasked with sending out the email newsletter? 2. 3. 4.
47+ Excellent Ajax CSS Forms | Noupe Forms needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of form elements (Fields and Labels), powerful techniques and Functionality (AJAX) to make the form look and work creatively. There is a great bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch forms. Thanks to AJAX, we can provide real-time feedback to our users using server-side validation scripts and eliminate the need for redundant validation functions and processing data. Let’s take a look, hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further on your own. You might be interested to check some of the designs that was mentioned in the posts below: Styling Forms 1) Uni Form – an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css, "modularize" it, to get nice looking, well structured, highly customizable, semantic, accessible and usable forms. 2) CSS-Only, Table-less Forms – A great example of a well designed form using modern css techniques. Demo Styling Form Elements Demo : Form Usability and Accessibility Demo:
31 Extremely Impressive Web Icon Sets for Free 31 Extremely Impressive Web Icon Sets for Free 13,185 views In Freebies by Sheila Mahusay Sep 28th, 2011 2 Comments Icons are one of the fundamental components of Graphical User Interface (GUI). In web applications, icons serve as an intuitive representation of hypertext links and quick navigation from a web page to another. Creating icons can be very protracted since certain design specifications are to be considered such as its color, shape, design, size and scalability. So, why squander much of your time creating them when you can avail free high quality icons in just a few clicks. You may also want to read the related article below. Don’t forget to Subscribe to our RSS-feed and Follow us on Twitter — for recent updates. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 10 Free Useful Icons for Designers 11. iPad 2 Icons 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. iCandies Icon Set 19. 20. 48px Web Icon Set 226 icons 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 16px Glyphs 31. You like this post? Author Sheila Mahusay 2 Responses