We talk about design. In fact, we talk a lot about design. Graphic design, web design, illustrative design, typographical design, industrial design, and every other kind of design, because, here at We Talk Design, we love design.
September 7th 2009 | No Responses »
Press Photo of the Year,PPOTY, has a stunning array of inspiring and inspirational photos. While I do not want to link a photo in respect of their copyright, I do encourage you to take a look at it, for it is photojournalism at its finest. From pictures of riots to farming, sports to portraits, this gallery definitely inspires a lot of possible illustrations. Check it.
Check it: World Press Photo Competition
And: Winners Gallery 2009
September 6th 2009 | No Responses »
Grid systems help us organize information, providing alignment and order for the viewer. They use proportions to allow the designer to create something amazingly complex out of something incredibly simple.
Yeah the basic grid is lets you create some amazing designs on its own, but by simply breaking out of the grid, designers can make truly stunning work. They do not ignore the rules of grid systems but, instead, take the rules and create something more with only a little spark of creativity (great typography definitely doesn’t hurt). Here are some designs that do so:
September 6th 2009 | No Responses »
In the course of designing and coding several things, I have learned a few very important things about planning. Designing is a process of creativity; it flows from the brain to the paper. But, in a jumble of ideas, this flow often gets contorted into a knot that destroys the original creativity. Thus, I shall attempt to summarize my mistakes into a few succinct lessons for you.
Planning is one of the most important processes of design. This becomes especially true when designing websites. I have never been one to outline much, but after countless mistakes I urge you to plan your designs. Quickly you will find that without planning your design runs into problems as you head for disaster. The solution is quite simply to plan. While it may not necessarily save you, it sure does a good job of protecting you.
Planning with grids is a great skill. It has no doubt tripled my ability to align items. Thus, I recommend you employ the use of grids; they are one of those subtle details that will enhance your website…
April 16th 2009 | No Responses »
Recently, a new program grabbed my attention. Its stunningly beautiful way of presenting common social networking sites all together definitely took me by surprise.
“Skimmer℠ is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities. It improves upon your day-to-day interaction with multiple social networks, removing distractions and providing a rich experience that is particularly suited to multimedia content.”
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of Adobe Air applications, its too out-of-the-way. But I’m definitely going to get Air for this program (even though I only use a few of the offered social networking sites). Even just the screenshots are stunning:
“Any update in the aggregated feed view can be expanded in one click to reveal the content of the post. A Flickr set, for example, can be viewed in its entirety without ever leaving the feed view.”
April 15th 2009 | No Responses »
Let me just get some updates out of the way here. Starting off, I got a new web design, in case you didn’t see.
From this:
This theme, in my opinion, while having a nice header, lacked any decent typography. A decent theme nonetheless (if I do say so myself). Had a nice minimalistic feeling to it, with some decent illustrations to spice up the design. But anyways, look at me talk on about my own design. Bottom-line: it got the job done, but it lacked in different ways.
That was so yesterday. It’s the 16th of April now! We went from that pitiful design…
An amazing new minimalist design featuring great typography, comments, and my favorite feature: a working search bar I probably should have had awhile ago.
Anyways, moving on. It’s been awhile. I’ve been working on some illustrations and stuff, but that’s no reason to leave all of you here, with nothing to read. I know my writing has been more spastic than your grandmother’s colon but I will get back into the swing of it in a week or two.
Still don’t believe me? I’ve got an article lined up for Pro Blog Design already. In the meantime, go read some of my older articles, or click on that lovely feed button to the right; it’s your friend.
January 16th 2009 | 2 Responses »
Design, Typography, Coding, whatever, these articles are the MUST READ articles for web designers. Read them and advance your knowledge of web design.
January 15th 2009 | No Responses »
This web app has been around for a couple of years now, but I still feel its a great site to take a look at. We Feel Fine is a web crawler that searches blogs for the phrase “I feel” and then records the data about the sentence. Design-wise, it has a nice and very usable UI, and it presents its collected data in 6 different ways. Personally, I find it to be an aesthetically pleasing antidepressant. Anytime you feel down, just look over on we feel fine, under murmurs and you can easily find many people who feel a lot worse than you (helps to select “sad” or “depressed” from the list).
I think I should try to get a category made for you so here it goes.
I feel aargh.
I feel zygomorphic.
There, that should be the first and last options alphabetically. Tell me if I get on the list.
Anyways, check it:
Website: We Feel Fine
January 15th 2009 | No Responses »
Recently put together this 26 icon set of small icons that are illustrated using negative and positive space. The main advantage of these icons is their ability to adapt to any design with the simple shift of color. Just pop it into photoshop, hit the colorize button in the hue saturation menu, and there! you can switch it to any color by simply adjusting the lightness and hue.
Download: Here
January 14th 2009 | 2 Responses »
Although at first, from a nondesigner’s perspective, typography seems like a small field, it is actually a very extensive part of design; one that can be applied to many others. In order to apply typography to web design, you must understand some fundamental concepts.
In web design, particularly content-based web design, good typography mostly comes down to what maximizes readability (and doesn’t detract from quality). With cascading style sheets for fourth generation browsers, designers have many options in implementing typography, making it important to understand what to look for.
Size and Hierarchy
Starting with your main body of text, understand that you must have a font size larger than 10pt. While it looks stylishly minimalistic for someone with perfect vision, it is hard to read with weaker eyes. Also, with long articles, having a larger font (and line height) makes it easier to keep track of your place, as well as read from a distance (if a reader wants to lean back in a chair).
Size also plays an important role in hierarchy. Unfortunately, with web design, it is difficult to have much control of in line spacing elements to emphasize hierarchy, as well as control emphasis. This means, hierarchy is mainly controlled by size (and font choice, if you are willing to give different font choices to different headers).
In this example, we see that, with only size being change, hierarchy can easily be distinguished.
Emphasis
Emphasis and de-emphasis are both relative in web design…
January 13th 2009 | No Responses »
Intrinsic Nature Art Group consists of 13 artists who created a highly inspirational exhibition. Full of vibrant color, stylized technique and various themes, this gallery is definitely one to check out. If this doesn’t inspire you, I dont know what will.
Check it out:
Website: Intrinsic Nature
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