Web Design

In part one of this article, I focused on sharing resources for getting started in design for the web. Here, I’ll review how I learned the basics about code in order to enrich my designs and share the resources I recommend to learn about coding on your own.

When building websites, things like background gradients, tabs, and buttons often must be extracted from the design file and engineered in their own right in order to work correctly. In this article, Marty explains how to prepare your graphics file to make this easier.

It’s often more efficient to use CSS and a customized graphic rather than javascript for common effects like button rollovers. Here, we break down how to design and build them.

Recently, a friend asked me where she could take classes on how to become a great web designer. I’m often asked this question, and I don’t have a concise answer. I do, however, have some recommendations for how to get started on your own.

Popular wisdom claims that if you’re building a web app, you should “release early and release often.” This is good advice, and what I’ve told clients before, but it’s not risk free, as some have discovered. Read on to see what I’m talking about.

Once again, yesterday evening the strains of the sublime, transcendent keyboard riff of the “The Final Countdown” could be heard in the Loud Dog office as we officially launched the ummm… re-launch of the the Loud Dog website. Now with new, improved portfolio!

Hell froze over the other day. Well, momentarily anyway. Steve Ballmer, in an apparent moment of befuddlement and rare “truthiness” seems to have opened the door a crack to the possibility that there’s something about open source that may actually not be a commie pinko plot.

What are favicons? Why should you use them? How do you make them? Where do they go? What is the meaning of life? Read on, as I gamely tackle these vexing questions. Well, the last one I can answer now. It is of course, forty two.

Learn how Loud Dog uses Print Style Sheets to make sure our websites look as good on paper as they do on the screen.

By now, surely everyone with an interweb connection has taken note of the stark contrast between the Obama and MacCain campaign’s marketing savvy or complete lack thereof - “let’s go with this lovely lime green backdrop, it really brings out your eyes!”.

We recently had a conversation at the office, which amounted to posing and attempting to answer the question, “what’s the best way to show our clients the value we offer with our client side coding expertise”? Using the web, we decided, is an experience that’s become exponentially familiar as we all rely upon it more and more, yet everything that happens behind the scenes, is for most people effectively still quite a mystery.

Want to make a custom iPhone/Touch weblip icon for your website? Sure you do! It’s an easy way to say “I’m hip, I’m cool, I’m with it”.

Last month, I wrote a post effectively skewering Microsoft over their decision to make their forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser render websites by default as if it were the non-compliant IE7 and forcing developers to add extra markup to their sites to tell IE8 to render in standards mode.

A website redesign can leave you with nightmares of broken links. Learn how to sleep easy and keep your visitors happy.

The following post was originally written early in February 2008, but was never “posted” on our website because we were in the middle of a re-redesign. I’m posting it now as a kind of back story to my other post today and as evidence of the speed at which things can move in this crazy, mixed up world wide internets!

Andy Rutledge responds to Milton Glazer’s essay at AIGA with this comparison of art and design:

Art involves no responsibility to anyone other than the artist’s ideas, ideals, vision and purpose. Design, on the other hand, involves a responsibility to everyone and everything other than those things. For example: to the client’s needs, the client’s aims, the client’s expectation of result, the clients’ customers’ expectations, needs and concerns, …even to the public at-large.