Loud Dog Links

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

May 29, 2009

• A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy
  Hallelujah for Stephen P. Anderson's article on the value of aesthetics. He's currently my hero.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: aesthetics, design, interface, psychology, ui, usability, webdesign

May 19, 2009

• The Ugly Truth About the Web (Linux Magazine)
  Using Cufón to embed nice fonts in your website.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: fonts, webdesign, webdevelopment

April 28, 2009

• Loop11
  New online usability testing. Looks like it's in private beta now, but could be interesting.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, userResearch, webdesign
• Let your links look like links (456 Berea Street)
  Don't make me think about where your links are! While you don't need to follow convention slavishly, keeping your links underlined helps users find them. The corollary to this is don't underline things that aren't links - people want to click on them.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

April 21, 2009

• Fluid Images (Unstoppable Robot Ninja)
  Sweet technique for creating images that adjust to page width.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: css, webdesign, webdevelopment

April 9, 2009

• Tools for Analysing and Tracking Your Competitors (The Netsetter)
  There is an abundance of tools for analysing and tracking competitors, allowing you to quantify their traffic, see how their site has changed, find out details about their domain, be alerted when they are in the press and lots of other things. Most of these are better for sites that get a lot of traffic, but any information is better than none.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, competitiveResearch, webdesign, webStrategy