Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Design Consistency and Redesign

October 14, 2009

An impor­tant design les­son was rein­forced by a visit to my Wal­mart Neigh­bor­hood Mar­ket. Wal­mart has recently changed their pack­ag­ing design.
As I looked for some items that we fre­quently buy, I had to look a lot closer because I was not able to use the visual cues that I have come to asso­ciate with these […]

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Great Designers <del>Steal</del> Practice

April 15, 2009

Last week, Cameron Moll posted Good Musi­cians Copy. It was a follow-up to a post he made sev­eral years ago, Good Design­ers Copy, Great Design­ers Steal. In that arti­cle, Cameron was:
“…attempt­ing to describe the idea of becom­ing a bet­ter designer by dis­sect­ing, ana­lyz­ing, and ‘copy­ing’ the works of other design­ers.”
In his follow-up arti­cle, he talks […]

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A Well-Done Critique

October 17, 2008

I also posted this on http://wearethelab.com
A cou­ple of week ago, I read Jared Spool’s arti­cle, What Goes into a Well-Done Cri­tique. One of Jared’s obser­va­tions is that teams that felt they go the most out of cri­tiques were those that con­ducted them the most. Cri­tiques have ben­e­fits for both the designer and those look­ing at […]

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Web Design Best Practices Rap

May 22, 2008

This YouTube video fea­tures a rap about Web design best prac­tices. I found this via The Riss­ing­ton Podcast.

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Design is in the Details

May 2, 2008

Here are some mem­o­rable points from Dan Rubin and Bryan Veloso’s talk, Design is in the Details from Web­mas­ter Jam 2007, get MP3 of talk from RSS feed. I lis­tened to this talk over my Christ­mas vaca­tion. I lis­tened to it again this morn­ing. I had imme­di­ately applied sev­eral of the things they talked about […]

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What can brown do for you?

November 9, 2007

I found this site through Design Melt­down, a gallery of design styles. This site is a good exam­ple of nice design which gets rec­og­nized by a gallery but has some usabil­ity issues when you actu­ally use it.
First, You have to go to the top right to a “home” graphic to link back to the home from […]

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Homepage the least important page on your site?

September 7, 2007

Last week, I was lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast from UIE on Home­page design. Jared Spool pointed out that the home­page is the least impor­tant page on your site. He believes the con­tent page is the most impor­tant because that is what the user is look­ing for. I see his wis­dom in this.
Jared also talked about how […]

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Embracing the Medium

August 21, 2007

Khoi Vinh wrote an arti­cle for print design­ers who want to get into Web design. I think he makes some good points about how design­ing for the Web is a dif­fer­ent dis­ci­pline than print design. He addresses one of my pet peeves of an over reliance on Flash that I have observed many print designers […]

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Some Best Practices from Jared Spool and UIE

April 11, 2006

One of the blogs that I fol­low is UIE’s BrainSparks. There were two best prac­tices that Jared Spool posted recently that I found inter­est­ing and would like to con­sider inte­grat­ing into my practice.

Two sim­ple post-test ques­tions — these are two ques­tions they ask users after a usabil­ity test. I could see using […]

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