Design ◆ 24 ways

24 ways to impress your friends
Coloured crayons for felt-tip fairies. [Ed: What has got into you? Sort this out.] Alright, alright. Sheesh! There’s much more to web design than mere surface. Markup minutiae and clever CSS techniques; art direction and photography; inspiration and theoretical application; layout and typography; systems of design and modularization; even music gets a look in.
Eric Meyer gift wraps the most awkwardly shaped of boxes using nothing but CSS, HTML and a little curl of ribbon. No matter how well you plan and how much paper you have at your disposal, sometimes you just need to slant the gift to the side.
21 Dec 2019 No comments
Rob Weychert reaches for the top notes to sing us a song of typographic scale. A little attention to scale and to the mathematics will help you to hit a high note with your designs this Christmas and beyond.
19 Dec 2019 1 comment
Stuart Robson rolls up his sleeves and begins to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that is design tokens and component based design. Starting with the corners, and working around the edges, Stu helps us to piece together a full picture of a modern design system.
14 Dec 2019 No comments
Mel Choyce explores how the new WordPress editor (also know as Gutenberg) can be used to create more carefully art directed posts. Like gifts carefully arranged beneath the Christmas tree, it’s the contents that matters but the presentation that sells.
13 Dec 2019 No comments
Andy Clarke digs deep into snow to find ways flat design can be brought back to life in CSS with the use of techniques to create a sense of depth. Like spring after an everlasting winter, perhaps it’s time to let a different style of design flourish. What a relief.
10 Dec 2019 No comments
Molly Wilson & Eileen Wagner
Molly Wilson and Eileen Wagner battle the age old Christmas issues of right and wrong, good and evil, and how the messages we send through iconography design can impact the decisions users make around important issues of security. Are you icons wise men, or are they actually King Herod?
7 Dec 2019 No comments
Mandy Michael turns the corner on our variable font adventure and stumbles into a grotto of wonder and amazement. Not forgetting the need for a proper performance budget, Mandy shows how variable fonts can free your creativity from bygone technical constraints.
5 Dec 2019 No comments
Ruth John lets the bells ring out for Christmas with a look at a selection of inspiring sites with creative and effective use of audio. The days of jangly MIDI tunes to distract and annoy are thankfully long behind us, with browser APIs offering new and exciting ways to generate sound. Ahead is a beautiful sonic landscape. Ding dong!
22 Dec 2018 No comments
Val Head delves deep into her Christmas sack to find two very important deliverables. With animation forming such a crucial part of interaction and brand design in modern interfaces, you may not want to leave its implementation to chance.
8 Dec 2017 No comments
Andy Clarke unpacks his tinsel and untangles the Christmas illuminations to add some brilliance to the subject of style guides. Whether you choose a boxed pre-decorated tree, or lovingly choose each adornment to your Norwegian spruce, just remember to switch the lights on.
13 Dec 2016 No comments
Rebecca Cottrell sharpens her trusty HB pencil and sketches out the steps to making a comic, before inking and colouring the whole deal with a few Photoshop tips for anyone unwilling to part with a screen over the festive season. Put that eggnog down and get drawing!
20 Dec 2015 3 comments
Paul Robert Lloyd runs his finger along the seam between interface patterns and design systems, exploring how a visual design language can underpin and inform a web style guide, with judicious use of CSS preprocessing. Like a good Christmas jumper, sometimes you need to get creative with the rules.
16 Dec 2015 No comments
Meagan Fisher casts a thoughtful glance back over her work this year and considers what it means to design a product rather than a marketing experience. Pour yourself a cup of eggnog, grab a mince pie or two and gather around the fireside. Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then we shall begin.
14 Dec 2015 10 comments
Mark Mitchell casts coarse salt upon the pale icy sheen of recent web design aesthetics to sound a warning that we may be on thin ice. The tension between low contrast tastes and high contrast needs is a story as old as the <font> tag, and yet it bears frequent retelling. For snow has fallen snow on snow.
13 Dec 2015 7 comments
Val Head squeezes more animation into responsive design’s Christmas stocking with some strategies for getting the most out of animation at any screen size. Set your robin a-rockin’, no matter what size the dance floor.
9 Dec 2015 4 comments
Richard Rutter adapts an extract from his forthcoming book on web typography and encourages us to be brave with type choices. By allowing type to express a website’s intentions from even before the moment a visitor starts to read, we can help set the tone and our users’ expectations.
4 Dec 2015 1 comment
Donovan Hutchinson stamps his snow-caked boots, unwinds his scarf and eases [See what we did there? Did you?] us into December with some tips and resources on integrating animation into our website style guides. A warm animated welcome to 24 ways 2015!
1 Dec 2015 9 comments
Geri Coady bends low the Christmas tree branches with bright and contrasting baubles. This isn’t some gaudy seasonal distraction, though. It’s responsible accessibility advice you can work with throughout the year.
22 Dec 2014 No comments
Jina Anne lets the Christmas spirit of generosity and goodwill flow freely into open source projects in need of good design. It’s work free of charge, perhaps, but not for nothing.