Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Crafting Web sites since 1999

I am a Web designer passionate about creating elegant, inspiring, and usable Web experiences that connect with an audience and fulfull business objectives.

Best Practices

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 […]

Read entire post

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, […]

Read entire post

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 […]

Read entire post

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.

Read entire post

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 […]

Read entire post

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 […]

Read entire post

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 […]

Read entire post

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 […]

Read entire post

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 these questions […]

Read entire post