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Design Principles

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Com: Need. Know. Accomplish. The skill designers lack and other small tips | Before & After | Design Talk. Writer Mark Penfold e-mailed me from the UK with questions for an article he was preparing on page layout for Computer Arts magazine. Any of his questions could sustain an entire article and some a book. Here are the really short answers: 1. What are the basic elements of design? Are there any golden rules? The three basics are type, image and space. 2.

Nothing happens in isolation. 3. If you’re painting a picture, there’s not much need for consistency. 4. The most common weakness among all designers is knowledge of typography. 5. A single page is about the size of the human head, so everything’s right in front of us, and we see it all pretty much at once. 6. Do you mean . . . . . . like this? 7. Viewers identify color more quickly than any other attribute. 8. Full color is how we experience life, so the more “alive” that you want your page to feel, the more important full color is. 9.

Use a grid. 10. The print version of this article is in Before & After issue 38. SloDive - Dive Into Inspiration. Articles on Web Design & Usability. Home Articles We've Written Programming a Web site? Look at these coding tips to make your job easier: Creating a Visual Web Page Template: Use the power of Visual Basic .NET to create an ASP.NET Web page template. The visual template allows you to control the look and feel of your whole Web site using a single ASPX. We know you're busy, so we'll cut to the chase. Writing for a Web Audience: Studies show Web visitors don’t read; they skip and scan. Interested in usability testing? Remove Stumbling Blocks by Usability Testing: Help visitors navigate your Web site by removing stumbling blocks in advance. Struggling to get started? Web Commandments: Ten deadly sins and how to overcome them. Going strong? E-Business--Up Close and Personalized: Use personalization and one-to-one marketing techniques to improve your company's e-business.

Google Follows These 8 Simple Rules (and So Should You) It’s Google’s world. They’re just nice enough to let us live in it. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google out of a dorm room in 1998, they had no idea that it would one day employ 32,000 people, process one billion searches a day, and earn over US$30 billion a year. What they had, instead, were some very non-traditional thoughts on how to run a business. Rule #1: Stay Simple Google’s home page is a perfect example of the company’s commitment to simplicity. For Google, simple means faster, easier to use, and higher quality. That’s why software developers who work at Google are taught that the best products “include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals.” “Simplicity is powerful.”Google Company Philosophy What a Tangled Web We Weave… For some reason, it’s human nature to make things more complex than they need to be.

But simple writing is usually more effective – and the same goes for business models. Rule #2: Collaborate Going it alone? How Can You Improve? Best Web Design, Period.