Articles - Page 242

CSS / 14 Oct 2009

How to Use TypeKit on Your Site: Step-by-Step

Several options have cropped up recently for adding custom fonts to your website by utilizing the @font-face selector. TypeKit is an exciting new player in this game because it stands out in two key areas: ease of use and richness of fonts available. This tutorial will take you through several small, super simple steps to get TypeKit up and running on your site. You won’t find any advanced techniques or scripting here, so even if you’re a novice web designer this should be a cinch!

CSS / 12 Oct 2009

70 Beautiful Handpicked CSS Galleries

CSS Galleries are an amazingly rich source of web design inspiration, and a fantastic way to promote your design skills to the world. Although you shouldn’t worry too much about where you are (or are not) featured, it’s good to know where to look.

We’ve scoured the web and compiled a comprehensive list of 70 great CSS galleries. Some are incredibly popular, others represent smaller niches in the web design industry.

Inspiration / 5 Aug 2009

35 Marvelously Minimal Websites

Here’s to the design minimalists. Here’s to focusing on functionality, simplicity and basic design principles. Kick the tires all you want on these sites today – you’re still going to love using them tomorrow.

This is our roundup of 35 stunningly simple, marvelously minimal web designs. Enjoy!

Competitions / 4 Aug 2009

Fanurio Winners

Thank you to everyone who entered our competition to win a copy of Fanurio. I’m pleased to announce that the winners are Vicente Canales, Mark, and Josh St. John.

Your details have been passed on to the developer, and you should receive a license code shortly!

Competitions / 27 Jul 2009

Win a Copy of Fanurio

I’m pleased to announce our latest competition to win a copy of Fanurio, a cross-platform time tracking application. It offers an intuitive interface, flexible timer and the ability to produce detailed invoices.

We have three copies to give away, and entering is simple. All you need to do is leave a comment on this post saying why you’d like a copy. The competition will run for one week, and we’ll announce the winners on the 2nd August.

Good luck!

JavaScript / 13 Jul 2009

Detecting Location Using Google AJAX API

There are times when one needs to find out which part of the world a particular visitor is coming from. There are plenty of IP-to-Location lookup providers out there, who offer this service at a reasonable cost (depending on how much detail you require).

Google’s AJAX Maps API offers this look up for you free of cost (so long your needs are non-commercial). You can even use the latitude and longitude information returned by the API to plot the user’s location on a Google Map. Nifty eh? Let’s now look at a simple example – we will be detecting the user’s location based on his IP address and rendering it on a map.

Before we begin, you might want to check out the demo.

Typography / 30 May 2009

Introducing Typekit

Font support on the web has long been a topic of debate. Recent years have seen the emergence of various techniques for embedding fonts through flash, a method known as Cufon, or various plays on the new @font-face CSS properties emerging slowly through CSS3.

The main limiting factor to date is that of font licensing. Understandably, foundries are reluctant to allow web designers to publicly host their font files for anyone to download. A few typefaces have been licensed for use online, but designers are severely limited in choice.

This week saw the announcement of a breakthrough system – Typekit.

Articles / 17 Apr 2009

Defend Your Design

We all know that acute rush of adrenaline experienced before submitting a design for review or approval all too well. You click down on that “Send” button, take a deep breath and look at the design one more time before releasing your mouse. It’s gone.

You’ve sent your design out into a cruel, critical world. Will it succeed or will it fail? Perhaps that depends less on the design itself and more on whether or not you’ve set it up to succeed. As designers, we need to be advocates for the craft by explaining what we do and educating clients on our method.

Articles / 18 Mar 2009

Creating a Shaking Login Form

Tired of the plain old boring login forms? How about we add some jazz! If you have ever typed in your password wrongly on your Mac, you would have seen that the login screen will vibrate and kinda shriek to indicate that the password you entered is wrong. I always found that rather cool! It’s surprising how little this trick is being used in web applications today. So, I thought I will write up a tutorial on how to get this going.

Business / 11 Mar 2009

Good Design, Now What?

Here at Design Shack, we’ve built up a solid archive of the best designs the web has to offer. When browsing through the 3,000+ sites featured, it’s hard to fully grasp the amount of time and effort put into the design and development of each one.

That’s why it breaks my heart when I see a brilliant site screenshot taken the day it was launched, but when clicking to visit the live version, I find a shell of what it used to be.

Interviews / 3 Mar 2009

Becoming a Productive Designer: An Interview With Leo Babauta

Leo Babauta, a blogger famous for the philosophy of keeping life and work simple has kindly allowed us to interview him about blogging, design and how we can all work with less clutter.

We’ll be talking about a regular day for Leo, how blogging has launched his career, and the principles he suggests for a designer to be more productive. It’s great to speak to someone so genuine and passionate about their philosophy, and I hope you enjoy reading what he has to say.

CSS / 26 Feb 2009

Correctly Displaying Your Logo With CSS

Every site has a logo, and whether it’s a page filling feature or a small design element, it often forms the primary title feature of your page. This article will show you how to implement a logo using correct semantic markup and simple HTML code, with all the presentation done via CSS.

It’ll ensure that those browsing your site without images will see a decent alternative, and provide search engines with a correct representation of your page title.