We’re back with a free font suggestion — Liberation Sans

March 27th • No Comments • Under: Sidenotes • Tags: design

Why use Lucida Grande, Arial, Helvetica or Verdana if there is the fantastic Liberation Sans — created by Steve Matteson and liberated by Red Hat, Inc. under GNU GPL licence. Read more »

How to Create Beautiful and Elegant HTML Lists Using CSS

February 24th • 21 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: code, css, design, development

HTML list have become one of the most used HTML elements for marking-up various semantic content structures — navigation, comments and even image galleries.

This article will explain and show you how to style lists inside blog posts, articles or other basic HTML documents.

Before we start, it is necessary to understand the importance of using specific HTML tags <ul> and <ol>, instead of simple numbering (like 1., 2. or •, ») for building lists. By applying content a semantic structure, we emphasize the relationships between different content elements. In case of lists we are able to imply that there is a certain relationship between all of the list members, which is possibly described by the paragraph introducing the list. It also helps screen reader users for whom the total number of items is announced before the rest of the list. Read more »

How Graphic is the Web Design, and How Web is the Graphic Design

November 22nd • No Comments • Under: Understanding Web, Web Critique • Tags: critique, design

Sorry for such a long heading, but it is the question which by itself is an answer to those trying to understand how the web design is different from the graphic design.

Designer and writer Armin Vit recently asked “[W]hat web sites could be considered landmarks for our profession?”. Ideally one should be able to name

A visual solution that not only enables, but also transcends, the message to become memorable in the eyes and minds of viewers.

He lists few examples from the field of graphic design: “Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles”. Read more »

New WordPress Theme: Sans–serif Racer

November 14th • 24 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: design, WordPress

While tweaking the Times Racer theme which is currently used in this blog, I was fascinated by how the sans-serif typeface and the aligned positioning of different elements made it look really harmonic and solid.

After hours of PHP, HTML and CSS trickery, the new theme was named Sans-serif Racer and ready for the release. It features unique border elements, light background shading and, similarly to Agneka Simple, one base color which can be easily adjusted. Read more »

Logos and Names Are Not <h1> Headings

November 13th • 1 Comment • Under: Design Suggetions, Understanding Web • Tags: code, design, suggestion

It is a common trend among many web designers and developers to use h1 tag for a logo of a website. Although such decision has no impact on the visual presentation of the content, it drastically diminishes the semantic power of h1 tag.

Every page on the web can be viewed as a single document. Hypertext enables linking and organizing them into groups and sets, which requires that each document has a clear purpose and structure.

Domain names are unique identifiers of those different groups of documents and are the broadest description of their content. Therefore usually they already include the name of a business, person or product (I will refer to them as ‘logos’). Read more »