Design Curate already has a growing collection of freebies — PSDs, WordPress themes, CSS/HTML snippets, and lots more! We’ll be adding new free resources every week, along with featuring a few commercial design goodies from time to time as well.

Read on to find out more about the new site, or just head over and take a look!

What is Design Curate?

Design Curate is a collection of free and commercial resources for designers.

It’s pretty simple. Any free resources are just that — completely free for you to use, incorporate in your designs, and build upon. We’re giving something back to the design community, and sharing our love of design.

Our First Freebies

We think you’ll really love a few of the freebies that are already available on the site. Here’s a quick overview of our favourites:

Subscribe

There are plenty of ways to subscribe to the new site, and find out about the latest freebies:

• Email Newsletter
• RSS Feed
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+

We hope you enjoy everything that Design Curate has to offer, and look forward to seeing you over there!

Submit a Resource

If you’d like to submit your own resource to be featured on Design Curate, we’d love to hear from you. Just drop us an email for more information.

Last Thursday, I found out that someone had taken it upon themselves to “hijack” our primary domain name — designshack.net — and transfer it away from our registrar. We’re working hard to reverse the process, and I’ll be documenting the current situation here.

The Story So Far

After finding out that designshack.net had indeed been transferred away from our control, I did three things:

• I telephoned GoDaddy (our registrar) to let them know, and seek their advice on the protocol to follow. I was advised to go through their “Unauthorised Transfer Away” process, filling out a report with the relevant identification to prove my ownership.
• I contacted PlanetDomain, the registrar being used by the thief, to tell them that the domain name had been stolen.
• I did a little digging around, and discovered that several other domain names seemed to have been victim to the same theft.

Each of these processes is still ongoing, though we’ve been fortunate in that our name servers haven’t been changed (and, when they were at one point, we were able to request a reversal). Design Shack is still alive and well at our primary domain name for now.

The Other Sites Involved

The domain names affected by this scam are:

• designshack.net
• css-tricks.com
• davidwalsh.name
• scriptandstyle.com
• sohtanaka.com
• instantshift.com
• kirupa.com
• shiachat.com

It’s difficult to find a connecting thread between each site, as we all use a number of different registrars and hosting companies. Needless to say, we’re working together to get each domain back in the hands of the real owners.

Timeline of Events

The timeline I’ve been following is more or less identical to the details documented by Chris Coyier over at CSS-Tricks, so I won’t repeat the details here.

Everything was a little more subtle in our case. There was no evidence of our Gmail accounts being compromised, and no malicious links added to our site. Just the sickening theft of a domain name.

The current situation is that we’re waiting for GoDaddy and PlanetDomain to finish discussing the details of the case, and return the domain. Both parties have been in touch with ourselves, and each other, so I remain optimistic that we’ll have the domain name back in our hands within the next couple of days.

How Can You Help?

Thank you to everyone who has petitioned GoDaddy on Twitter to help our cause. They’ve been professional and helpful so far, as have PlanetDomain when speaking on the phone. We really appreciate your support.

Unfortunately we’re somewhat hindered by the fact that neither company’s domain name team works on weekends, with GoDaddy based in the USA and PlanetDomain in Australia. Considerably different time zones lead to a frustrating delay in communication.

If you’d like to continue to help, please feel free to tweet a link to this post, and politely urge GoDaddy to continue to give our case priority. We’ll keep you posted with how things go, and will continue to publish our articles and inspiration as normal!

It’s also worth bookmarking designshack.co.uk, as we’ll be reverting to that address as a last resort.

Updates

5th December

We publish this post with an overview of how the situation has developed from the 1st December onwards.

5th December, 1am

We receive our first communication from PlanetDomain:

Good Morning David,
Thank you for your email.
We are currently in communication with GoDaddy regarding this issue. We
will advise you via email of the decision.

5th December, 8am

I discover that our name servers have been deleted, and proceed to call PlanetDomain. They re-instate the correct name servers, and Design Shack comes back online.

6th December

PlanetDomain confirm that the hijacker’s account has been disabled, so the domain name should be safe from here out. They’re working with GoDaddy to get it transferred back.

7th December

Ou domain name has now been returned to GoDaddy, according to WHOIS. We’re now just waiting to it to be assigned back to our account. We’ll then be upping security to a slightly paranoid level…

7th December, 2pm

Everything is resolved. The domain name is back in our account. Thanks to GoDaddy and PlanetDomain for their excellent support in getting this sorted. We’re thrilled to have it back!

Further Reading

• Chris Coyier’s excellent updates on the situation
• The related Hacker News conversation
• The related Slashdot conversation

Good news! Design Shack is growing and we’re looking for some rockstar designers and developers to join the team. Read on to see what type of talent we’re after and how you can apply!

What’s the Gig?

We’re looking for some occasional content contributors. Basically, you’ll use your expertise to write the kind of content that you see here on Design Shack on a daily basis. We want fresh insight from talented professionals with teachable skills to offer to our awesome and diverse reader base.

How Much Are We Paying?

Making money from the Internet? Your parents might be skeptical but this is an actual paid opportunity. You write quality content, we give you money. To start we’re offering a rate of $60 per 1,000+ word article.

Who Should Apply?

We’re looking for two primary things in our contributors. First, you obviously have to possess some relevant design and/or development related skill. Whether you know about CMYK printing and logo design or PHP and application development, we’d like to hear from you.

Secondly, and just as importantly, you have to be able to write. This involves both a basic understanding of grammar and sentence structure as well as the ability to teach complicated subjects and communicate complex ideas through written word.

Apply Now!

If this sounds like something you’d like to pursue, fill out the form below to apply. We’ll be immediately checking out the samples that you submit so make sure they’re top-notch. If we like what we see, we’ll get back to you and talk about bringing you on board!

Today we’re going to discuss the importance of intentionally directing user attention to the portions of the page merit it most. We’ll discuss how people are prone to read a page and how we can bend that tendency to our own will.

We’ll also take a look at an awesome product that will enable you to get a quick snapshot of how a typical user will view your designs so that you can begin to improve your layouts right away.

Like the article? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter to stay up on recent content.

Predicting User Eye Movements

Establishing a conscious and intentional visual hierarchy is something that I’m constantly discussing on Design Shack. Being able to structure a page so that the user receives information how you want them to is a huge key to being a successful graphic designer.

Every time you create something, you should be constantly analyzing where and how you’re directing the user’s attention. If you neglect this step, the result could be that a typical user takes a rather undesirable path that you’ve unintentionally set up. For instance, something in your site footer could grab a user’s attention above all else and then lead it off the page, causing the person to lose attention and move on rather quickly.

The more you make conscious decisions to consider visual hierarchy, the better you will become at wielding this principle. You’ll learn to instinctively make decisions that maximize the message you’re trying to convey and encourage action where necessary.

Ultimately however, intuition is a tricky thing. Simply “feeling it out” is not always the safest bet, especially if this concept is new to you. So how can you be sure that your design is being viewed the way you intend?

Tip: You’re an Unreliable Source

The first step in the process of considering how a user might read your design is to analyze how you yourself read it. An exercise that I typically engage in is to stare outside of my monitor for a few seconds to clear my mind then to look back at the design and let my eyes wander where they will. Carefully think about what in the design is grabbing your attention and why. This will give you a decent idea of which elements people will tend to gravitate towards.

Despite the fact that I think you should perform this task repeatedly throughout the design process for every page layout project you embark on, the unsurprising truth is that this experiment is heavily compromised by you the designer.

When I Paint a Room, I Only See Mistakes

When you view something that you personally created, you have almost no chance of actually looking at it the way everyone else does. This is never more evident to me than when I paint a room in my house.

After I’m finished with the room, I step back and look around to survey my work. Inevitably, this is the moment when I become very discouraged. My eyes don’t see a nicely painted room but instead jump from place to place, targeting in on the places where I know that I made the tiniest of mistakes: that point where the wall paint bled slightly over to the ceiling or where the trim has a slight drip.

It’s not actually the case that I’m a horrible painter, I’m just more prone to see the small mistakes because I know they’re there. When anyone else walks into the room, they see a nicely painted room and would have to search tirelessly to find the mistakes that I can’t ignore.

Fast forward a few weeks and I’ve become used to the painted room. When I walk in I don’t look around and spot the mistakes, in fact, I barely regard the quality of the work or even the color of the paint. Instead, there’s simply a subtle change in the mood or feel as I walk into the room. This is of course the ultimate goal of the project, I was merely unable to experience it properly until I had become detached from the work.

Back to Web Design

Fear not, there’s actually a point to that longwinded story. Just like me with the painted room, you are unable to honestly view and analyze a design as you create it. Even if you’re proud of the work and don’t find any fault with it, your eyes will still tend to look at your favorite components: that logo that you spent hours perfecting, the texture that you’re so proud to have created from scratch or the headline that you carefully crafted with pixel perfect kerning.

Your personal involvement makes you a lousy example of how a user will read a design. So what’s the alternative then?

Testing Methods

The best way then to se how a typical user will view a design is to get some people in front of it. If you work in an office, you’ll be tempted to ask the people around you, but designers in general tend to look at a design differently so unless that’s your audience, you still need an outside opinion.

Obviously, the best way to go about something like this is to build a focus group, set up some eye tracking software/hardware, and run as many tests as you can to see how people respond to the design. Then you collect the data, average it out, create some heatmaps and bam, you have a perfect picture of how someone will read your design.

You Want Me to Do What!?

I can already see what you’re thinking. This is a bit ridiculous isn’t it? Unless you’re designing a new homepage for a multi-million dollar company, there’s no way you have the time, budget or resources to follow the advice above on every project. The mere suggestion to do so is entirely laughable!

The good news is that you can achieve similar results without all the hassle. Because people tend to focus on certain items, we can use software to predict with a fair degree of accuracy how a person might read the design. So basically, some smart people teach an application how to view a page like a human and then you show your design to the application to receive feedback.

Meet Feng-Gui

I’ve been looking for a decent solution for simulated eye tracking for a while without success. Then I heard Paul Boag mention a product that really seemed to be what I was looking for: Feng-Gui.

Feng-Gui allows has an impressive series of tools that is aimed at helping you analyze your design from a perfectly objective viewpoint. If thus far you’ve been slightly intimidated by this entire discussion, don’t worry, these tools are so easy anyone can use them.

Analyzing a Design

To see an example of the type of information you can glean from products like Feng-Gui, let’s take a look at the Apple home page. After all, if anyone gets this stuff right, it should be the amazing Apple design team. Here’s the page in its current sate:

Once we have a screenshot, we can upload the file to the Feng-Gui dashboard shown below. There are a few basic controls for adjusting the parameters and a tool to select certain portions of the image and designate them as unique “areas.” The shot below is all ready to go, we need only to hit the “Analyze” button.

The Heatmap

Once you hit the Analyze button, Feng-Gui takes off and does its thing. In just a minute or two you have a few extremely helpful resources at your disposal. The first and certainly one of the most helpful is a good old heatmap. This makes it immediately apparent which portions of your design are catching the most attention.

One look at our sample project above and we can immediately draw some valuable conclusions. First of all, the headline announcing the iPhone 4S is definitely winning the attention battle. This makes perfect sense as we’ve all learned to instinctively gravitate towards large headlines as an important source of information.

Another major contender is an area on the right of the hero shot of the three iPhones. This holds a very valuable piece of insight. The area that is highlighted is not so much the iPhone itself but the picture on the phone: the face of a little girl. Always remember that faces are magic when it comes to grabbing the user’s attention. We simply can’t help it, when there’s a face on a page, our eyes are drawn right to it.

Notice how the hierarchy seems to be taking shape. We see that the majority of our attention is being directed toward the headline, this is then moved down a little to the hero product shot and is pulled down further by a colorful picture of an iPod Touch in the footer. This page really seems to be reading well from top to bottom.

We can see this same information in a different way by clicking on the Opacity tab. Here everything has been blacked out and faded back in according to the heatmap values. This view really gives you a perfect picture of what a user might absorb after a quick look at the page (which is typically all you get).

The Gaze Plot

As I’ve hinted at several times already, it’s not just important to know what the user sees but what order they see that information in. This helps you construct the page in a way that maximizes understanding and retention of important elements.

Feng-Gui provides for this need in the form of a Gaze Plot. This shows the software’s best guess at how a user might read the page. The result looks fairly crazy, which is good, because our eye movements do tend to be quite sporadic when reading a page.

It’s important to note that your natural inclination is to read a page in a “z” pattern: left to right, top to bottom. However, as designers we can break this natural inclination. Notice how in the example above, the first focus point is at the top right of the page. There is definitely a noticeable back and forth pattern though as your eyes try to revert to what’s natural. According to Feng-Gui, each point of focus on this image lasts “for around 200 ms during the reading of linguistic text, and 350 ms during the viewing of a scene.” So even though it may seem like all this eye activity would take a while, in reality it happens in the span of a few seconds!

Thinking about these results we can once again tell that the Apple page is fairing pretty well. We start with the headline, jump to the product heroes, look down at the footer, and then begin to read the finer print on the page. This is a perfectly logical progression, which indicates that Feng-Gui is performing pretty solidly.

Does This Really Help?

To many designers, this is all going to seem like a pointless exercise. After years of being a professional designer, many of us could’ve reached similar conclusions on our own. However, I urge you not to discount the value of products like this one.

For starters, not all designers are built to think like this. Working eye-tracking simulators into your standard workflow will help you remember to critically analyze a design to see if it’s meeting your goals. Further, even if you have the theory down, it’s really nice to see an objective viewpoint. Software will never be as good as a focus group of fifty users, but it is definitely a nice alternative for those short on time and money.

Finally, regardless of whether or not you need a tool to help you see what a user sees, you can bet that your client isn’t as highly trained (otherwise, why would they need you?). This makes heatmaps, gaze plots and the like incredibly useful tools for building client reports that justify your design decisions. Armed with these you’ll look infinitely more professional in a presentation! You could even bundle such a report as an optional premium add-on to help boost your profits.

Conclusion

To sum up, page layout is much more involved than merely arranging the elements in a way that looks pretty. It’s about willfully structuring a message and user experience that meets a set of established goals. Too often designers stick elements in wherever they seem to fit with zero thought as to how it might disrupt the flow of information on the page.

Tools like Feng-Gui are a huge help in your quest to learn to structure your designs in a logical and effective way. Have you tried some other similar service? How does it compare? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credits: Micky, karpacious, City University Interaction Lab

All this comes hand-in-hand with a change to the Design Shack brand, and a funky new logo courtesy of Aaron Mahnke. Read on to find out a little more about the design, branding, and the changes we’ve made to the site.

Simplify & Streamline

The new design is a little more toned down, and we’ve stripped away quite a bit of the clutter that used to adorn the previous layout. The gallery is easier to navigate, articles are presented in a familiar fashion, and we’re placing more focus on the content.

Our New Logo

I’ve felt for a while that Design Shack has been in need of a more compelling logo, and unique visual brand. Our new logo retains the understated simplicity that we’re always aiming for, incorporates a few unique elements relating to our name, and gives Design Shack a better feeling of identity.

The logo has been designed by Aaron Mahnke, and we’re really pleased with how it turned out.

Submitting Your Design

It’s now easier than ever to submit your site design to our gallery, and you can send us a web design, piece of branding, or an interface example. Just head over to our submission form, fill out the details, and we’ll consider it for inclusion in the gallery.

If you’d prefer to receive a little more feedback on your submission (and advice from the Design Shack team), there’s another option available to you in the form of a Design Critique. This costs $49, but also includes a post on the site that promotes your site and includes all our constructive feedback on the elements of the design we love, or feel could be improved!

Find out more and see an example here, along with details of a few other design guidance and advice services that we’re starting to offer.

.co.uk to .net

Last (and probably least for most readers!) we’ve made a switch from our old .co.uk domain name to the new designshack.net. We’ve always been an internationally focused site, and this new change reflects this better moving forward.

Thanks for Reading Design Shack!

As ever, we’re incredibly grateful to you, dear reader, for taking the time to visit the site and read what we have to say. Thank you for your support over the past five years, and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy our articles and inspiration!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the site, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Today we’re announcing an affiliate program that all Design Shack members can take advantage of. If you run a blog, have a Twitter account, or want to spread the word about our latest deal via email, we’d love for you to help with promoting our weekly deals!

We pay a 15% commission on every sale you generate, and you can keep track of every click and sale you generate in real-time. Read on to find out more!

How It Works

Every Design Shack member has a unique affiliate link (you can find yours here when logged in), which tracks every visitor you send our way:

• Live Statistics: We keep you updated in real-time with any clicks and sales you generate.
• Monthly Payments: Your commission is paid via PayPal at the end of every month.
• Repeat Business: After clicking on your link, you’ll receive commission on all sales that person generates for a full three months!

Dynamic Banners

We’ve prepared a few different banners that you can use on your own site, most of which automatically update to show the latest deal we’re offering each week.

Get Started Now

If you’re already a Design Shack member, you can get started here. If not, it just takes ten seconds to sign up (and you’ll get lots of other goodies at the same time!) – become a member.

What is it? Who’s it for? Should you submit something? Read on to find out!

The Basic Idea

By reading Design Shack, you’ve helped us grow and become an important player in the design community and we’d like to give back by helping you out with your real-world projects.

Through the Design Dilemma program we will be offering completely free advice on how everything from how to get started with that very first step of a project all the way to how to tweak your design and make it amazing.

Still confused? Here are some typical questions we expect to see:

• I’m building a website for a mechanic and don’t even know where to start with the design and layout, here are some details… Can you help?
• Here is a logo design I’ve been working on, it’s a good start but I don’t think it’s quite there yet, any suggestions?
• I’m building a flyer for a business and need some quality photos, can you help me out?

Keep in mind that we have no intention of doing free work to put designers out of a job but instead want to focus this service towards professional or even amateur designers looking for a bit of help on a project. We all get burned out occasionally and we know from experience it really helps to have someone give you a little push in the right direction.

How Will You Answer?

There are two primary ways that we will answer Design Dilemmas. If it’s something small, we might just shoot you back an email with a few suggestions. However, for the most part we’ll be looking for topics that can help out not just the person asking for help but all our readers. This means we’ll be turning Design Dilemmas into full-blown instructional articles and tutorials.

Keep in mind that since this is a completely free service, we will not be answering every request we receive. Instead, we’ll sort through the submissions and look for good candidates for the program.

How Is This Different Than a Design Critique?

First of all, our Web Design Critique program is only for websites. Design Dilemmas on the other hand, can be about anything from color schemes to business cards.

Furthermore, since Design Critiques are paid, you are guaranteed an article outlining our suggestions (or at least a refund if we for some reason opt to pass). With a Design Dilemma however, as I mentioned above, you are not guaranteed a response. If you want some guaranteed advice, be sure to apply for a paid Web Design Critique, if you’re curious to see whether or not we can help with your problem free of charge, submit your Design Dilemma.

Awesome! Where Do I Start?

Head on over to our Design Dilemma page and tell us about your project. If we think it’s a good topic, we’ll contact you and go from there.

Again, we really hope this can be a way for us to give back to a community that has been incredibly generous to us. Thanks for reading and we look forward to your submissions!

Read on for a little explanation about what’s new in the latest iteration of the site, and what you have to look forward to over the coming month!

Broader Categories

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed publishing regular doses of web design inspiration over the past five years (yes, it’s been that long!). But I think that it’s time for us to expand a little further afield.

In addition to publishing inspiring web designs, we’re now also going to be focusing on beautiful interfaces, and gorgeous examples of branding. Both of these areas have lots to offer, remain relevant to our core audience of web designers, and look incredibly pretty!

We’ll be publishing a larger selection of different designs every day, retaining our high standard of inspiration but offering it on a slightly more regular basis. I really hope you enjoy it.

Design Shack Accounts

Another major new addition we’ve made is the ability to create a Design Shack Account. Why would you want to do that? Well, there are a few reasons:

• Quickly and easily submit your designs to be featured
• Access our exclusive weekly deals
• Request free Design Dilemma advice
• Receive our fantastic weekly newsletter

Is that enough of an incentive? Essentially, we’re wanting to kick off a regular series of weekly deals for designers in the New Year. This will require a solid membership system for the site, so we’ve implemented this now so that you can sign up in advance.

I’m also really excited about our weekly newsletter. This is going to feature top articles and inspiration every week, all wrapped up in a beautiful email. It will also be a great way to let you know about each weekly deal in the New Year!

What are you waiting for? Be one of the cool kids and get yourself signed up—it only takes about 10 seconds.

An Improved Gallery

In addition to the new categories, we’ve also made a few tweaks to the Gallery so that it’s far more enjoyable to use. You can now filter by several different attributes at any one time (viewing, just red, portfolio designs, for instance). This makes browsing the Gallery a lot more useful!

The different design categories have also been refined and expanded to accommodate the new types of design we’ll be featuring. Head over to the Gallery to see what’s changed.

As part of the upgrade, we’ve had to disable ratings on designs in the short term. These will be added again very soon, along with the ability to leave a comment on any of our featured designs. Over the next few days, I’ll also be adding a way for members to submit their own examples of branding and interface design to the Gallery.

Deals!

I mentioned our Weekly Deals project above, but I thought that I’d explain a little further… At the start of 2011, we’re going to be offering fantastic weekly deals to designers and creatives. Everything from graphics and themes, through to software and subscriptions.

These won’t be huge “bundles” of questionable quality, rather they’ll be hand-picked products we think you’ll really love.

I’m really excited about this, and I hope we’ll be able to offer something really useful to all our readers. I’m sure you’ll enjoy what we have in store!

Growing the Team

Last, but certainly not least, I’m pleased to welcome the third member of the Design Shack team—Joel Bankhead. Joel is going to be heading up the addition of new design content, and handling our weekly newsletter. It’s great to have him on board!

Thanks for Reading!

I’d just like to take a minute to say a big thank you to everyone that reads Design Shack. We’ve had an amazing twelve months, with traffic growing by 180% since this time last year. I’m really thrilled that you enjoy reading the site, and hope we’ve managed to inspire and inform you over the course of 2010.

I’m really excited about everything we have in store for next year, and look forward to sharing the next chapter of Design Shack with you. It’s our readers that make the site what it is!

If you have any thoughts about the new design and features, let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Here at Design Shack we love good inspiration and seek to provide you with daily bits of visual sustenance that will help you become a better designer by expanding your horizons and opening your mind up to different styles of design.

We’d love to feature your work in our gallery and want to make sure you fully understand the process so you can effectively decide whether or not you should make a submission. The following will serve as a basic guide for anyone interested in submitting a site. It will delve into our goals for the gallery, who should submit designs, some tricks to getting in and even how to handle a rejection notice.

Along the way we’ll scatter in some rockstar designs from our gallery that we feel typify the quality of work that we like to feature.

What Is the Gallery For?

The gallery here at Design Shack is meant to provide design inspiration. Our goal is to create a place where designers can go and flip through tons of concepts in such a way that a spark of inspired but ultimately original thought is kindled.

As a bonus, inclusion in the gallery will in fact provide your site with increased exposure to the web design community. However, we do not see this as an advertising slot. We will therefore not accept your submission just because you could “really use the exposure.”

Should I Submit My Design?

As a website owner or web designer, every project you create has a specific purpose. Many times, your specific needs require something boring. This is perfectly acceptable from a business standpoint.

Your client asks for something simple and usable with no flashy bits or fluffy design nonsense and that’s exactly what you provide. Sometimes originality can be less effective than an overused but familiar format that simply “gets the job done.” This type of site has a large appeal to many users and is the foundation of many wildly successful websites.

However, even if you’ve created a successful site that meets all the client goals and attracts a million users in two days, you should think twice before submitting to our gallery.

This site is all about design. Superfluous, purposeful, gaudy, or minimal, we evaluate and showcase aesthetic appeal. What this means is that sites like the type described above are rejected every single day. Somewhere on the web there should exist a showcase for boring, unoriginal corporate design, but that simply isn’t here.

When you create something that you feel is original, or even unoriginally trendy but particularly attractive, then you should consider submitting it to our gallery. The key question to ask yourself is whether or not your design can stand up to the scrutiny of professionally trained designers. Will these types of individuals laud you for your creativity or be disappointed in the unfinished quality of your work?

How Do You Decide Who Gets In?

To be brutally honest, there is no checklist of points to make sure you’ve covered or magic formula for getting accepted.

We take a look at the site and usually decide within the first two seconds whether or not it will be accepted. Completely off the cuff and non-formal, the exact same way your visitors will view your site for the first time.

What this means on a practical level is that if you want in, you have at best, two seconds to impress us. As I said above, there are no guarantees or formulaic approaches, but there are in fact a few things you can try that will increase your chances.

A Beautiful Header

Perhaps one of the single best ways to get into our gallery is to create a stunning header. The top portion of your site is prime real estate and no small amount of effort should be put forth in making it a bold statement that sets the impression for the entire site.

You’ll notice that our screenshots are most often cropped in such a way that the top portion of the website is highlighted. This is simply the first area everyone visiting your site will see and we like it when gallery entrants show off their skills here.

I often see entries that use minimalism as their theme and therefore really miss the mark in this area. Minimalism is great and we love to display it, but we have to have something to display. If the top third of your site is empty space, there’s simply nothing to inspire other designers. It may look great in the overall scheme of your site, but it simply won’t work in our gallery.

Be Bold

Again, there’s a lot to be said for “safe” web design and how it fuels the corporate world. However, we’d much rather fill our gallery with the exceptions instead of the rule.

We want to see something that impresses us, shocks us, makes us laugh, and/or genuinely inspires us to be better designers.

Boldness comes in color, size and complexity. Perhaps your site is shockingly yellow, has unnaturally huge typography, impressively complex illustrations or all of the above. Great, we want to see it!

Caution: We Said Bold: Not Ugly

Keep in mind that it’s very easy to go overboard with your big bold idea. What starts as a stylish retro circus concept all too often becomes something that looks like a carnival threw up on your website.

Stay away from colors that clash instead of compliment, anything that looks like it was designed in the 90s (it’ll be cool in ten years but not now), and any fonts that Windows users think are cool.

Know the Basics

The freelance design industry is overflowing with self-taught designers. On one hand, this is laudable. You deserve a pat on the back for blazing your own trail and learning a valuable skill without selling your soul to pay for a college degree.

However, the downside of this phenomenon is that half the designers out there making a full-time living at this don’t know jack about proper design theory. An intuitive sense of design is great, but unless you convert some of that into explicit knowledge, your designs will be hit and miss.

The most frequent fundamental problem I come across with gallery submissions is poor alignment. I think this is because many untrained designers have a “feel” for alignment but not a real understanding of how it should work. This goes hand in hand with the use of negative space, another frequently misused tool in web design. Check out this guide on using negative space for more information on how to effectively structure basic layouts.

Get the Details Right

Even though we generally abide by the two second rule for whether or not to further examine a site, make no mistake, we will look at the site in-depth and attempt to spot problems.

If your site is absolutely beautiful, but has an ugly logo in the top left, it will get rejected. If your site has an image with poor resolution that affects the aesthetic appeal, it will get rejected. If there is a bug in your CSS that causes some tiny bit of unintentional overflow in a major browser, your site will get rejected. And yes, if your site is built entirely in Flash and takes thirty seconds to load, it will get rejected before I even see it (Flash is fine, just watch your loading times).

How To Handle Rejection

To reject a website, we send one of two emails. The first highlights specific areas of the site that need to be addressed before we will display it. This implies that there is hope for the site to be included if you are willing to put forth the effort to improve it.

The other email we send simply addresses the fact that the overall design needs work. This usually means that we just didn’t like your site and honestly have no idea how you could fix it without starting from scratch.

Obviously, if you get the first email, we’ll be more than wiling to work with you on meeting our standards. Too many entrants get angry and defensive at this point when in reality they are a five minute fix from getting in. In this situation, you can either move on and spend your time on other projects or address the details we pointed out. The choice is completely up to you.

If you receive the second email, don’t be discouraged. Not making it into our gallery doesn’t mean that you’re not a good designer or that you don’t have an effective site. It simply means you found a couple of people who don’t like it enough to share it with others. Ultimately, it’s not really a big deal and you shouldn’t let it ruin your day.

Conclusion

I hope the information above will help you to make your decision for whether or not to submit your site to our gallery. We don’t pretend that we are the best design critics in existence, nor do we imagine ourselves to be the best designers on the web, we merely have very specific standards that help ensure we are providing the design community with a quality product.

As a general rule, when in doubt, submit your site. Ultimately, good or bad, we love seeing your submissions and helping you improve the quality of your work.

Now that you’ve read the manifesto, head over to our submission page and show us your work!

I hope that you have a wonderful rest over Christmas, take the time to recharge your batteries, and start the New Year full of fresh, creative inspiration.

Thanks for reading Design Shack, and Happy Christmas from myself and Josh!

Come check out our new Facebook page. Be a fan and stay up to date with all our posts and community links.

And while we’re on the topic of social media, be sure to follow us on Twitter as well!

I’m pleased to announce that Design Shack has become a member of The Smashing Network, offering us another outlet to get in touch with new designers and network with some other really fantastic websites.

A big thanks to the Smashing Magazine team – we’re really looking forward to growing Design Shack further, and hope that you’re enjoying our new articles. Thanks for reading – you make the site what it is!

Read on to find out a little more about our awesome new editor!

Put simply, I’m a creative. I know “creative” is typically an adjective but I’m using it as a noun because it conveniently envelopes everything I do (and it sounds a lot better than “nerd”). The long version would be be something like freelance graphic designer/web designer/writer/photographer/programmer/3D modeler. Some of these things I’ve been doing for years, others I’ve picked up recently. If you’re interested, here’s a small sample of my work.

Despite all that creative stuff, I actually just graduated from Arizona State University with a B.S. in Global Business. I currently reside in Phoenix, Arizona with my amazing wife Kelley. Feel free to drop me a line on Twitter to say hi or to make an inquiry regarding freelance work. I’ll be posting some really useful tutorials on Design Shack and I greatly look forward to hearing your feedback. See you in the comments!

I’m really excited about the direction Design Shack is moving in, and hope you’ll enjoy all the new developments we have planned!

• We’ve hired an editor. Our new writer will be making regular news posts, and writing some fantastic tutorials and inspirational roundups. Introductions to come shortly!
• We’re merging our feeds. Over the next couple of days, we are merging all our feeds into one. You’ll now receive all our new CSS gallery entries, news, and tutorials through one RSS feed. If you’re not happy with this, just let us know via email!
• More freebies! We’re teaming up with a few designers and developers to give away more free themes, graphics and scripts through the site.

I’m really looking forward to turning Design Shack into an even more inspiration place to visit! Here’s to the future.

If you’d rather not receive community news updates, simply head over to our feeds page and subscribe to the ‘Articles Only’ RSS feed. I hope that you’ll find the new content useful, and am looking forward to keeping your RSS reader updated with daily inspiration!