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Vector Stories is the new home of Helen Gizi.
Helen is a Greek illustrator and the person who designed the cities of this website along with the icons and other design elements. She is extremely good at her work but more importantly is a great person.
Vector Stories is neat. And elegant. And fresh. It is so beautiful it makes me jealous.
Fontfonter provides an easy way to test a series of fonts on your website in seconds.
All the available fonts are good, so it deserves a visit. And it’s kinda funny to see Google run in FF-Tisa.
This working space in ilovedust is great and it reinforces creativity.
It’s not hard to see why:
I can’t resist cross-posting this video.
Steven Fry is someone I admire for his thought. I do admire him actually.
Find 30’ this weekend and see this man talking about technology, success and life. Explore the simplicity of his ideas and feel how these ideas can make this world a better place.
Enough said. Here comes the video.
Creating content is very easy. Creating good content, which leads to action is difficult.
D Bnonn Tennant wrote a guest article for onextrapixel where he presents us four mistakes web designers often make. Such mistakes make our websites less valuable and lead to less conversions.
A must read.
For those whose mother language isn’t English, writing in English isn’t always easy.
I catch myself rewriting the same simple sentence again and again trying to avoid mistakes. In the end I make the clumsiest ones.
However I don’t give up. There’s a lack of confidence but not a lack of endeavour. That’s why I bought Revising Prose.
Oh man, this book is not easy. It requires some grammar and syntax knowledge. It also makes you feel stupid because of your poor vocabulary. And you have to give to it 100% of your concentration.
I am in page 13 and I think I already have climbed Himalayas. I carry on. There’s a lot to be learned.
Oliver Reichenstein is the man behind iA, the famous design studio in Japan.
If you are familiar with the work of iA, you might have detected the somewhat strict design approach it follows. Oliver Reichenstein studied philosophy. I think there’s a connection between the particular design approach and Reichenstein’s background. Philosophy teaches how to be analytical and how to use the analysis you made to reach to solid conclusions. Philosophy also makes you be simple but not too simple. Last but not least, philosophy can add this important bit of cynicism in your life.
Now think a bit about design. Design aims to solve particular problems. The work of iA is focused on how will help a visitor read things, navigate easily and take the most of a website. Not how to make him feel happier.
Now add the prominent design minimalism of Japan.
See? The pixel perfect work of iA is explainable. I love this brave design philosophy. It is obviously important and explains the success of the studio.
By the way, Reichenstein gave an interview to UX Booth recently.
My favourite part:
- What can we learn from Japanese (interaction) design culture?
- Interaction designers should learn from product designers. And in that sense Japan is a little paradise. As much trouble as the Japanese economy is facing, Japanese product design is in many ways still a paradigm of craftsmanship, consideration and care.
Craftsmanship, consideration and care.
Web design is still mostly about typography.
FontShop offers us a lesson on typography. In details, it’s all about 4 different resources regarding the principles of typography.
One of them has been written by the sensei, Eric Spiekermann.
Another diamond from A List Apart.
Two lines of CSS3 magic are enough to make your background images scale and fit the window. More specifically, it’s all about adding to the background property the following lines:
-moz-background-size: cover; background-size: cover;
The relevant article expands the use CSS Media Types as well.
Three tools work for me when it comes to color.
What would we be without grids? Nothing.
CSS frameworks don’t seem very useful to me. So I go with a homemade very simple framework. However, there are two CSS tools I use every day:
My list might be quite short, but tools don’t make the designer. They are only a place to start. And to return to them with the beginning of a new project. Simple as that.