Penton Web Design

Web Icons

2009-03-16T10:16:00.003-04:00

Since we have been using icons more and more in our designs, I thought this was an interesting article to take note of.

How to Use Icons to Support Web Content

Usability and Form Design

2009-02-19T16:27:00.005-05:00

There were some really good posts that I found today in regards to usability and form design and here are those links!

Common Usability Blunders from Smashing Magazine

Form Designs from Usability Post

And here's one that I've mentioned several times, but here it is again... Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design Tips

The Transition from Looking into Reading

2009-02-17T10:55:00.008-05:00

So a few of us have been chit chatting about how we have to enlarge our text these days to really read an article on screen. Here's a good article that I've read (in it's entirety... woa!) that touches on the many other points of engaging our audience on article pages. Hopefully these ideas can help you create a 'sticky' article page > http://alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofreaders

Making the Creative Process More Social

2009-02-07T14:52:00.003-05:00

Thought some of the gang in NYC might be interested in attending this event:

About: With traditional design and organization tools available online, the creative process is inherently more social. Information can be accessed and shared from wherever you are. Collaboration, especially in the workplace, has become the new standard. Michael and Scott will showcase their respective applications as well as lead a discussion.

Panelist(s): Michael Galpert - Founder, Aviary. Michael is one of the founders of Aviary, a suite of collaborative web based creative apps . In his day to day he works on strategic business development, expanding Aviary's footprint and product offerings. He is driven by a passion to help others do what they love and currently sits on the advisory board for Web 2.0 Expo New York, is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Helps organize Barcamp New York and is actively involved with the NYC-based tech community group NextNY. Scott Belsky - Founder, Behance. Scott believes that the greatest breakthroughs across all industries are a result of creative people and teams that are especially productive. As such, Scott has committed his professional life to help organize creative individuals, teams, and networks. Scott is the founder of Behance, a company that develops products and services that boost productivity in the Creative Professional Community.

I Lego N.Y.

2009-02-04T12:46:00.001-05:00

This might be interesting for 2 or 3 minutes, especially to you guys in NY.
Linko

New Years in Chinatown

2009-02-02T15:47:00.002-05:00

Hey everyone,

I took some pics (and still uploading more) from this year's festivities in Chinatown and have them up on my site at genelu.com. Due to the cold, I was forced to seek shelter after a few hours because I lost all sensation in my toes and hands. :L anyways, enjoy!

Web Design Trends of 2009, Part 2

2009-01-22T10:48:00.001-05:00

If only I'd waited an extra day, I could have included both links in one post. Oh well. Here's part 2 of Web Design Trends of 2009 from Smashing Magazine...

Common Browser Fonts

2009-01-21T17:26:00.003-05:00

So I had been thinking that Palatino Linotype was a common enough font to be used on Windows and Macs, but it turns out it's not really as common as I thought. A lot of Macs will default it to Georgia, and as a certain boss-like person was heard to say recently, "I hate Georgia Bold!"

This led me to dig in and do a bit more research about common web fonts. I found this pretty handy chart of common fonts that also includes Unix fonts, for what it's worth. That page led me to a site which contains surveys of most common serif and sans serif fonts installed on Macs and Windows machines. (alternately broken down here by all Mac or all Windows fonts.) While the sample size is kinda small, it was still interesting to see... For instance Palatino on Macs came it at just under 80%. So what would people say is the right threshold to consider a font common enough for general use? 90%?

...and just when will we design a site using only Comic Sans and Impact?

Web Design Trends for 2009

2009-01-21T13:38:00.002-05:00

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's part one of Smashing Magazine's Web Design trends for 2009. (Of course we want to be trend-setters and not trend followers, but it's always good to see what may be hot this year.) In particular, I found the trend of 'the magazine look' to be of interest. I'll keep an eye out for part 2 since it's supposed to be posted this week...

Lucida Grande != Lucida Sans Unicode

2009-01-16T11:06:00.002-05:00

For the stylesheets, you need to specify "Lucida Grande" before "Lucida Sans Unicode".

The reason for this is because FF3 on Macs picks up the Lucida Sans Unicode and makes it a lot more bolder and blockier than usual. If we have Lucida Grande before, MACs will pick that style up whereas for PCs, that first font will be ignored and then will move onto using Lucida Sans Unicode.

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I discovered this when I was doing a newsletter design and got really annoyed with how Lucida Grande didn't look like Lucida Grande whenever we used it in a site design. Tada!

Newsletter Designs

2009-01-15T12:06:00.001-05:00

"Newsletter design should be challenging, not limiting" -

Anyways, check out this link from Campaign Monitor featuring newsletter designs: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/.

Min's Best of the Web Finalists

2009-01-15T10:48:00.002-05:00

Just announced this morning - the 2009 finalists are:

Nutrition Business Journal - Design & Premium site

ChiefMarketer - Redesign & Blog

Congrats to everyone for their hard work!

300 Million Dollar Question Answered by Mr. Spool

2009-01-14T17:18:00.002-05:00

Here's a great article from Jared Spool about the impact of the "Register" button on an ecommerce site. I wonder if this has any relevance to regular community sites... http://tinyurl.com/6sqar7

BTW, Terry, definitely check this out since you're working on some ecomm (so I hear)!

Introductions

2009-01-13T15:14:00.005-05:00

I realized I haven't added to the blog yet so I thought I would post some links to show where I am coming from, what I like, and some projects I have worked on.

Culturestrike
My Drupal based pet project

MF Videos
Some video work I did at Men's Fitness.. Hopefully my redesign of this site may live one day.

Lucien Lagrange
I love a nice functioning portfolio done with pure CSS.

Mandarin Design
An ugly site with great CSS tricks.

Azure Magazine
While not perfect, this site has some interesting approaches to a magazine site..

That's it for now. I look forward to posting some work and getting your input.

What Colors Mean What?

2009-01-13T14:19:00.001-05:00

Thought this was an interesting article about the meanings behind different color choices.

A Guide to Choosing Colors

Electronic Design mockups

2009-01-13T10:19:00.005-05:00

They are 99% leaning towards the left nav version. Here it is w/ some minor edits from yesterday's meeting. The publisher is very pleased so far so we'll see what the final feedback is when he opens it up to his team. I am digging the way the Current Issue stuff is displayed at the bottom (stole that idea from Tiffany's FI). I am wondering if there is a way we can combine the Current Issue box w/ the big yellow subscribe box (from Terry's Windows IT Pro) into one module.

Functional Ingredients Mockups

2009-01-13T10:19:00.004-05:00

New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-08T08:33:00.003-05:00

I know... I know. This is a tired cliche post, but I wanted to spur on some activity and thought it would be a good idea. You don't have to share your personal resolutions, but what are your professional ones? What are your goals for this year? (See image at right for Jennie's response.)

Here are mine:

My personal resolution is to be a better and more dedicated friend this year. Last year, I focused in on my family more and stopped my habit of letting work get in the way of family. This year, it's time to make sure that I make time for my friends as well.

My professional resolution is to focus on execution this year. Reducing waste in time and effort can create the efficiency needed to succeed in this economic environment. I want to use those efficiencies to continue to pursue excellence in the face of an industry threatened by collapse. Where others may cut corners to save costs, I want to deliver unparalleled value (which will hopefully become easier as they cut corners).

My goals for this year are to launch two to three new b2b online communities, with most of them generating over $300k in revenue. While not a goal, a hope of mine is to buy one of them from an established player.

OK... your turn!

Webby Duty

2008-12-22T21:14:00.015-05:00

Another Monday night... and the second round of the Webby's has started. Below are some notable links (not necessarily for design). I'll be updating this list as I move through the candidates. Enjoy!

Magazine Sites
http://www.smartmoney.com/
http://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/
http://www.bahighlife.com/
http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh

Movie Sites
http://miramax.com/home.html
http://www.disbeliefnet.com/ (interesting use of a rotator. gives you a sense of past,present, and future when navigating the content in the carousel)
http://www.ifc.com/
http://www.veryfunnyads.com/index.html?id=26199
http://www.pangeaday.org/ The nav on the right

Ads
http://216.31.180.181/entries/beAware/man.htm
http://awards.digivault.co.uk/volkswagen/londontogeneva/
http://client-projects.com/mtv_vma2008/tuneinpeel300x250.php
http://screensaved.co.nz/toyota/ (requires a new apple laptop... ehem, jennie)

Interactive Sites
http://www.talkingpets.org/
http://unscrewamerica.org/
http://archive.collemcvoy.com/paintthatshitgold/
http://www.luckybuckoff.com/

Blogs
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/black.in.america/

Emails
http://twisedesign.com/clients/recipes/webbys/cookie_countdown/index.html

Newsletter
http://twisedesign.com/clients/recipes/webbys/cookie_countdown/index.html I liked how this particular newsletter lends itself to spanning over several days

TechRepublic.com

2008-12-21T23:47:00.004-05:00

Did they just slightly redesign that top portion? I'm definitely digging that topics/comment section to the right. Seems like it's working ...

Oh, and check out that oh-so subtle rotator below the 3 featured stories. Interesting...

www.techrepublic.com

Looking Back at the Blog Template

2008-12-17T18:35:00.003-05:00

Ok... so I'm currently working on a blog site for Business Finance Magazine and was reviewing some of our previous blogs and noticed a few things.

1. The pagination navigation at the bottom of each page should probably be designed a bit more (i.e. spacing out each link and perhaps giving it a button-like look?). According to Omniture, this area is frequently used and what's wrong with making a link a bit more clickable?

2. On the Big Fat Marketing Blog, no one clicks on the "more" link. I'm going to see if there are any other sites out there have similar traffic patterns. Based on Omni's report from Dec 1st to today (17th), all of Big Fat Marketer's article traffic come from users clicking on the title and not the "more" link.

3. On NBJ's blog, no one clicks on the "Related Topics" at the end of each article. Albeit, NBJ displays the entire article without the blurb & read more link, which in itself is bad from a usability point of view. On the Big Fat Marketing blog, some people click on the Related Links, but after the first page, this barely exists. Should these links belong at the bottom of the full article and not below each teaser?

Anyways, those are my thoughts for now. Let me know what you guys think.

Bridging The Distance Between Strategy & Design!

2008-12-10T10:12:00.002-05:00

This was a pretty interesting slide show that gave a good overview of brand, what it is and how it is built, maintained and promoted. They leave out some aspects of brand like the difference between what a brand represents and what it sells as an image compared to actual products and services but overall a nice presentation. Over a hundred slides though. Some good ideas that might help us as we work with publications to uncover their brand perspective in relationship to the work we produce for them.

Here

The Original Book

New Eyetracking Study: Digital Storytelling Effects Lab

2008-12-10T08:31:00.004-05:00

Interesting study from DIESEL. Download the power point at the bottom to see some of the findings. Jennie, ever think of doing some user testing?

Energy Matters > Design Process

2008-12-09T16:58:00.014-05:00

When I first approached this project, I was constantly thinking "green". I had a general idea/direction for the initial mockup, but found myself not fulfilling the brand. My initial mockup came off as being too soft for the B2B energy industry.

Another issue that I found distracting was the logo and the colors used for the media kit. In my opinion, the logo looked like it belonged to a holy scripture and the colors were just not 'right', especially for the energy industry.

With the deadline looming, Jennie suggested typing out the logo in a different font while maintaining the general shape of the logo. As for colors, I stuck with grey tones because it enabled me to think a bit more clearly without the distractions (look below).

With only a day and half remaining (or something like that...), I was able to crank out the following mockup. I initially had it all grey tones, but Tiffany took the time to swing over and suggest some colors (thanks Tiff). I brought the logo back into the design along with a few colors that were used in the media kit. Here's what I ended up with...

Now Presenting...

2008-12-08T15:22:00.001-05:00

The Functional Ingredients Moodboard!