Loud Dog Links

July 13, 2010

• Why you should not hire me to design your website:
  The most common argument I get from clients that want web design is “But I just need you to do the .psd file designs, I have a developer friend that will put them together for me.” This is fine. If I wasn’t so completely picky and insane this would be great, but to me I see it like this: If you designed a tattoo for yourself, spent months thinking about it and drawing it, would you take it to your cousin’s friend that bought a tattoo gun on ebay because he calls himself a tattoo artist now?
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, design, webdesign

May 12, 2010

• The (sad) state of web fonts embedding
  An excellent explanation of all the @font-face hurdles.
  by: Matt DeClaire | tags: @font-face, fonts, typography, webdesign

May 5, 2010

• The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010 (Smashing Magazine)
  Cool overview of current web design trends
  by: Josh Orum | tags: webdesign

April 16, 2010

• The Four Pillars of Building Instant Trust Online (ClickZ)
  Nice overview of establishing trust and credibility online. Most of the principles apply to offline communication as well.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: marketing, webdesign

April 8, 2010

• Jeff Veen Talks Future of Typekit (Carsonified)
  Nice interview with Jeff Veen of Typekit. Includes a good overview.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: fonts, webdesign

March 30, 2010

• Fred Wilsonâ��s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps (Carsonified)
  Awesome list from a successful investor. My favorite is "Software is Media": Your software has to have a personality. People have to feel like they’re consuming media when they consume your software.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: strategy, webapps, webdesign

March 2, 2010

• Web Design Criticism: A How-To (Smashing Magazine)
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, webdesign

January 19, 2010

• Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces (Flyosity)
  Realism has always been an important part of my UI design philosophy - it's easier to use something if it feels real. Here's a great tutorial on how to make things feel real without being cheesy.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

January 13, 2010

• A Negative View of White Space (Finch Creative)
  A good collection of design theories surrounding whitespace.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, webdesign

January 11, 2010

• The Case Against Vertical Navigation - Smashing Magazine
  In fact, designers and architects are increasingly creating user experiences focused so strongly on content that navigation starts to become indistinguishable from content. This type of seamless experience is more effectively created when a horizontal navigation bar is used because horizontal navigation does not intrude on the content area and it’s still easily accessible visually and otherwise.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: bestPractices, design, usability, webdesign

December 19, 2009

• What You Need To Know About Behavioral CSS (Smashing Magazine)
  Interesting article on new interactive behaviors in CSS3.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: css, webdesign

December 16, 2009

• Stronger, Better, Faster Design with CSS3 (Smashing Magazine)
  Another interesting look at design techniques that are now easy to do with CSS3. HTML5 and CSS3 are going to allow really rich, interesting interfaces, and websites that don't have them are going to suffer by comparison. Of course, we need to remember that IE and other browsers may not support everything.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: webdesign, webdevelopment

October 12, 2009

• Streams, Walls, and Feeds: Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: marketing, onlineMarketing, pr, webdesign

September 21, 2009

• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

September 10, 2009

• Embeddable Google Document Viewer
  Wow, this is awesome. View a PDF in any browser.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: coolStuff, webdesign, webdevelopment

September 7, 2009

• Why your Web content will look darker on Snow Leopard (John Nack on Adobe)
  Apple has switched their default gamma to 2.2 from 1.8, creating generally darker displays that will match Windows displays (in the past, Macs have been lighter). John Nack explains why they are making the change. (Incidentally, I have my display set to 2.2.)
  by: Josh Orum | tags: technology, webdesign

July 6, 2009

• The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News (bitquabit)
  AWESOME post on the "spit and polish" required to build a good web app. I've been wanting to write a blog post like this for years (it's called, "why good stuff is expensive and not cheap"), and this is just sweet.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: webapps, webdesign, webdevelopment

June 23, 2009

• Stop Password Masking (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Yay! I hate masked passwords. It's such a pain in the ass. Nielsen even has a good solution for public computers: a checkbox that turns on masking.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

June 15, 2009

• In the search of Holy Web Grid (Carrer Blog)
  An attempt to come up with the best grid for web design, using the Golden Ratio. Based on a 1024 browser width, but supporting smaller resolutions.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: webdesign

June 11, 2009

• jQuery Tools
  Another tool library laid over jQuery. This one looks really promising. Nice and small.
  by: Matt DeClaire | tags: framework, javascript, jquery, webdesign