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.

Design is in the Details

May 2, 2008

Best Practices · Design (Web) · Tutorial / How-tos

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 to my per­sonal site and have inte­grated into my design process.

  • Let your lay­out breathe — CNN.com is a great example
  • Con­sis­tency of spac­ing or use mul­ti­ple scale
  • Use range kern­ing in head­lines (with larger font size)
  • No hang­ing wid­ows — Shaun Inman’s Widot plugin
  • Align­ment — align­ing ele­ments can make a huge difference
  • Black is not black and white is not white — con­sider using #333 or #CCC instead of default black and white
  • Flat is bor­ing — cre­ate some depth
  • Adding a pixel to add inter­est — as one bor­der (they used exam­ple of Mint’s dashboard)
  • Know when to quit

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