The Elements of Style = The Elements of Design

I love simple tips that help me become a better designer. Today, I love Christina Wodtke from Boxes and Arrows. Christina has translated a “List of Reminders” from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style into tips for designers to keep in mind.

It seems that good style is universal. Christina says:

“…what is good […]

Design like a pro: 20 web design tips

.net magazine offers 20 pro tips to help neophyte web designers do it like the pro’s. The tips emphasize writing clean, organized code yourself, rather than using a WYSIWYG editor like DreamWeaver or GoLive.

.net magazine’s 20 pro tips:

Planning Do it by hand Stylesheets: importing vs linking Smarter gradient backgrounds Commenting Use simple PHP to build sites Set fonts using ems IE Box […]

How to accurately layout your website

Khoi Vinh details how to get accurate alignment on web pages. The technique uses a background image of columns that sits behind all the page elements. The visible columns make it easier to see when elements aren’t lining up, allowing you to precisely make adjustments. Once everything is aligned, you can turn off the background.

Christian […]

How to design grid systems in 5 simple steps

The brief, vague introduction to grid systems I received in school left me puzzled. These invisible “underlying structures” seemed more like arcane runes than rational design tools. Thirsty for understanding, I googled and found Mark Boulton’s fantastic series of articles on the basics of grid systems.

I had always thought that things looked nicer and were […]

Firefox turns 2.0! (almost)

A public beta release of Firefox 2.0 is just around the corner. But for those impatient (nerdy) souls who just can’t wait any longer, go ahead and check out the current beta release candidate available now from Mozilla.

Notable new features include:

The ability to undo closing a tab
A built [...]

Better typography without (or in spite of) design school

There are two types of people in the world: those who can tell the difference between Helvetica and Arial, and those who can’t. If you fall in the latter category, and are typographically-challenged, you are not alone.

Based on portfolios I reviewed for the AIGA’s Portfolio Day recently, even many design schools fail to teach […]