Loud Dog Links

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

April 7, 2009

• A List Apart: Articles: Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2008
  An interesting analysis of survey data on what others in the field of web design are doing since last year, how they are feeling about their jobs, how they stay current, etc.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: reference, research, survey, web, webdesign
• Design View / Andy Rutledge - Gestalt Principles of Perception 3: Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Good Continuation
  Go Andy! More design principles that we employ at Loud Dog with every project. It's nice to touch base on these and confirm that our internal dialogues are consistent with these fundamentals.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: design, layout, usability, webdesign

March 31, 2009

• Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Nielsen is usually critical of design widgets, but in this case, he's found that big drop-down menus are easy for visitors to use and navigate. Expect to see a lot more of these.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: patterns, usability, webdesign
• 10 Creative & Rich UI & How to Create Them (Noupe)
  A bunch of cool UI patterns. Nothing ground breaking, but a good resource.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: patterns, webdesign

March 20, 2009

• The Magic Behind Amazon's 2.7 Billion Dollar Question (Jared Spool)
  "Was this review helpful to you?" increases Amazon's revenue by $2.7B.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

March 19, 2009

• Overly Judgemental IE6 Splash Pages (Hugs For Monsters)
  NSFW, but I had to link to it for its utter hilariousness. Possible pages that are displayed when people visit a site using IE6.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: funny, webdesign

March 17, 2009

• Sites Without Menus: Do You Really Need a Main Nav? (Devlounge)
  Jakob Nielsen posed that question in an Alertbox article from 2000. He came to the conclusion that “users look straight at the content and ignore the navigation areas.” In essence, navigation is not as important as most designers make it out to be.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: patterns, webdesign
• Gravatars, simple personalisation for web commenting (RDJS Web Development)
  Interesting and fun extension to the OpenID concept
  by: Josh Orum | tags: webdesign

March 10, 2009

• In Defense of Readers (A List Apart)
  Good point about designing. When you're designing for print, you need to remember two audiences: people reading your stuff, and people looking at your stuff. When you're designing for the web, you need to remember people using your stuff as well. Most remember the latter two audience, but forget the people who just want to read. Don't forget: copy sells! And if you can't read it, it can't sell.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, webdesign

March 3, 2009

• Graceful degradation versus progressive enhancement (Opera Developer Community)
  Nice explanation of a common decision point in web design/development.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: accessibility, usability, webdesign

March 2, 2009

• Write for Reuse (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Interesting guidelines for writing for the modern web. Essential tips: modularize content - one topic per post; use keywords and specific language in your posts so that there's no question what it's about.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: webdesign, writing

February 11, 2009

• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites | How-To | Smashing Magazine
  Great article about the challenges of maintaining corporate websites.
  by: Martin Ferrini | tags: business, corporate, design, development, howto, louddog, marketing, smashingmagazine, strategy, usability, web, webdesign

February 5, 2009

• Design View / Andy Rutledge - Gestalt Principles of Perception 2: Similarity
  More fundamental design principles from Andy Rutledge- it's always good to be reminded of why we do what we do as designers.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: design, layout, usability, webdesign
• Recreating the button (stopdesign)
  Great article from Douglas Bowman on creating Gmail's new buttons with CSS only and no images. It's been a while since I noticed anything from Bowman - good to see him posting again.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: css, webdesign