The Whys And The Hows Of Textures In Web Design - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Texture is becoming integral to design. It’s gone beyond being a trend — it’s now a simple and effective way to add depth to a website. Wielding the power of texture is a great responsibility. It increases the effectiveness of websites and is a quality tool in the arsenal of designers.
It can guide the user’s eye and emphasize the importance of key elements. However, texture has long been synonymous with “dirty” or “grungy” design. Its overuse can be seen throughout the world of music group websites and has left a bad taste in the mouths of designers. Textures vs. Before we get into textures in depth, let’s distinguish between patterns and textures. The Function Of Textures We love texture on the Web for a multitude of reasons. Grabbing Attention With a Call to Action Texture can highlight elements such as titles, headings, icons and buttons. When used minimally, texture separates the content from the rest of the website. Enhancing Information Architecture Maintain Legibility. 16 Pixels: For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake - Smashing Magazine. 16 Pixels: For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake Advertisement I know what you’re thinking.
“Did he just say 16 pixels? I’d like to persuade you otherwise. As usability expert Oliver Reichenstein says in “The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard1”: [16 pixels] is not big. In this article, I’ll explain why 16 pixels should generally be the minimum size for body copy in modern Web design. You see, in most cases, if you’re building websites with the font size set between 10 and 15 pixels, you are costing your clients money. Readership = Revenue If you’re building a website for someone — even yourself — chances are its purpose is to make money. Perhaps it’s to sell a product directly, or to offer a service, or just to generate leads. So, every element should be designed to achieve that goal. Think about it. Important Facts About Reading There are some particular findings that are pivotal to issues such as readership and readability and comprehension, which is really what body copy is all about.
Free E-Commerce WordPress Theme: Balita - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement In this post we release yet another freebie: the Balita WordPress theme, a theme dedicated to shops that sell products for children. The theme was designed by Tokokoo and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use for both private and commerical projects.
Not many theme providers have produced e-commerce themes for baby and toddler products. For you who have been working in this particular market niche for some time or are about to start, this Balita e-commerce theme is a great opportunity for you. Using such bright and cheerful pantone colors that suit this clothes department (baby/toddler products), this Balita e-commerce theme will surely attract more and more customers to your online store.
Download the Theme for Free! The theme is released under GPL. Large Preview Live DemoLarge Preview (.jpg, 0,17 Mb)Download the .zip-package (zip, 16 Mb, including instructions) Balita Theme: Features Large Preview Large Preview. How to Create Tabs in WordPress Settings Pages. Advertisement Using tabs in a user interface can help you better organize content, so it’s only natural that WordPress themes that have a lot of options would benefit from tabs on their settings page. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a tabbed settings page, and you’ll get to download a WordPress theme that implements the code. Overview To get a quick grasp of the tabs we’ll be creating, go to Appearance/Themes in the WordPress admin area. You will find two tabs there: “Manage Themes” and “Install Themes.”
The process is actually fairly simple: we set and send a tab variable when a tab is clicked. In our approach, there are three times when we will need to know which tab the user is currently on: For the sake of brevity, we won’t explain all of the code, only the snippets that are relevant to this approach. Creating The Tabs The first snippet we will inspect is the code that produces the tabs: This function will be called later in the content for the settings page. (al) Create Perfect Emails For Your WordPress Website - Smashing WordPress. 10 jQuery Plugins to Enhance your User Interfaces. With a recently estimated over 20 million websites currently using jQuery it is essential to know what jQuery plugins there are out there in order to stay with the web design trend. Today, we’ll put some focus on some popular jQuery user interface plugins to help you enhance your current website to stay ahead of the crowd!
jQuery Image Parallax Ever wanted an animated header but refused to put Flash on your website? Well, there is now a jQuery plugin which allows you to do just that with, you guessed it – zero Flash! It creates an overlay of images and animates them when your mouse hovers the header. Get that WOW factor with jQuery Parallax. jQuery News Ticker Ever wanted to display the latest news on your website in a sort of “headline news” way.
jQuery Letterings This awesome little jQuery plugin creates eye catching fonts, typical called web typography! jQuery Stylesheet Switcher Designing a web page and can’t decide what styles to choose for a client? jQuery Page Peel jQuery Simple Modal. 27 Examples of Color Usage in Web Design. Here on WDL, we’ve discussed how colors can be used to invoke various emotions. For example, the color red symbolizes excitement and energy, while the more tranquil color blue represents calmness and stability. Here we’ve gathered a collection of web designs that make good use of color. In these examples you’ll notice some using color to highlight and draw attention to specific elements, while others use larger amounts of color to set the over all tone of the site.
Nevertheless, there’s plenty of color usage here to inspire you. Indubitablee Grind Best Made Engine Creative Urbanoff Ignacio Macri The Combine S.Dallyn James Garner Fuzzco Sunday Best Neuarmy Karb Igor Zagnienski playground de Certau & Associes Alexander Zhestkov Hyper Flow Festival Column Five odopod Daniel Martin Archfirm JChebly Lefft The Manual Bloom Health Source: The Best DesignsAwwwardsunmatchedstyle About the Author Gisele Muller loves communication, technology, web, design, movies, gastronomy and creativity.
Related Posts 414 shares Read More. 10 New Twitter Tools That Will Get You Tweeting. Whether you’re new to Twitter or an experienced user, Twitter tools make everything easier. Here are some of my favorite new tools to make Tweeting easier and more useful for any user. Try one or two that looks useful and leave a comment in the box at the bottom if you like. 1. Send Tweets At Optimal Times In Just a Click With Buffer Whenever I see an article I like I just click on the Buffer icon and it becomes a Tweet that is then automatically posted at the next optimal time. Buffer makes Tweeting great content on a regular basis easy. Cool Feature: With every Tweet you send via Buffer you will get detailed analytics about how many clicks, retweets and reach. 2.
Twimbow is a great way to stay on top what people are tweeting to make getting started Tweeting easier for you. Cool Feature: You can add pre-set hashtags (learn more about what hashtags are in #4 below) to your Tweets to color-code them for other Twimbow users, which connects you to other the Twimbow community of users. 3. 4. HTML5 & CSS3: Take Your Design to Another Level. While both languages for HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t fully complete yet, taking the time time to familiarize yourself with some of the pointers in this post can really help you achieve that clean look and feel for your site.
Let’s take a deeper look at them. HTML5 is the latest version of HTML or Hypertext Markup Language. It is currently only fully supported by a handful of browsers but the next year should see a large increase in usage. It isn’t expected to be completed until 2014, but the features that are available now are a great way to become acquainted with HTML5 and add some cool elements to your website. Steve Jobs famously refuses to allow Flash on the iOS due to the many bugs and crashes it experiences, therefore, learning how to use the more intricate features of HTML5 is going to be a must for those who want to develop apps and iOS-friendly websites.
HTML5 simply builds upon the widespread success of HTML4. Here are some examples of HTML5 in use: Features Why Use It Cool New Tricks. Border-radius: create rounded corners with CSS! Home / CSS3 Previews / Border-radius: create rounded corners with CSS! The CSS3 border-radius property allows web developers to easily utilise rounder corners in their design elements, without the need for corner images or the use of multiple div tags, and is perhaps one of the most talked about aspects of CSS3. Since first being announced in 2005 the boder-radius property has come to enjoy widespread browser support (although with some discrepancies) and, with relative ease of use, web developers have been quick to make the most of this emerging technology. Here’s a basic example: This box should have a rounded corners for Firefox, Safari/Chrome, Opera and IE9. The code for this example is, in theory, quite simple: However, for the moment, you’ll also need to use the -moz- prefix to support Firefox (see the browser support section of this article for further details): How it Works border-bottom-left-radius, border-bottom-right-radius, border-top-left-radius, border-top-right-radius The Syntax:
20 Super Clean Fonts Perfect for Minimal Style Design. 931 shares 10 Best New Free Fonts We’ve been on the prowl for some new free fonts to share with you. After much searching, we found quite a few, but we believe in “only the best” for WDL readers. The fonts we’ve rounded up for this post are absolutely beautiful, and we know that they’ll find a home in many or your… Read More 1138 shares 9 Free & Useful Fonts for your Designs Whether it’s PSD’s or icons, we love finding high quality free files and sharing them with our readers.