Odds and Ends

This is a common question asked by web designers in forums and emails. The most common resolution is changing, and unfortunately there are few reliable ways to get statistics on browser display resolutions. One of the few reliable sources is the W3Schools website. Here are some statistics gathered from the logs of W3Schools. (note: the statistics may not be entirely accurate; because W3Schools is visited mainly by people with a web development interest, there probably is some bias toward higher resolutions.

Continue reading What Resolution Do I Design For?

I dropped by my local Barnes and Noble today, and picked up a few books. Two of them are from the hit Web Design: Studios series (books 1 and 2 of the series, infact), and they are truly AWESOME pocket sized books. Note that I call them pocket sized books only because they’re 8×5.6 inches and although you couldn’t really fit that inside your pocket, they are quite small.

They feature 90 or so Web Design Studios, giving the name, “mission” or services that the studio provides, year founded, team size/members, tools used, location, awards, clients, and contact details. Each design firm has 2 pages to itself (you open the book and all you see if one studio), and there are full color screenshots of websites and work that the studio has done.

These books are excellent and a must for a web designer looking for inspiration or a web studio looking to scout out some community members/competition.  I think it’s great to see what the best studios out there are creating on print, and how’s this for an idea for taschen, the publisher of the book: Create a book with the best designs out there on the web. Get 100 of the best of the best from CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) galleries, Smashing Magazine, and any other sources and put it all into a full color 8×5.6 book. Brilliant! 

Earlier today I was playing a game of Band of Bugs on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a fun and addicting game, but there is no shortage of dialogue that you have to “hit A” through before, after, and even during a level. Yet it is possible to scan through the dialogue and still learn what they’re trying to teach you or what you’re supposed to do, because of the way the designers emphasized important words in the speech bubbles. They change the color of the text, and I thought that a slight modification would make an excellent idea for the web. Instead of changing text color, I propose slightly changing the background to emphasize the words more.

Because so many people scan web pages instead of reading them, wouldn’t it be great if all the most important terms or points in an article were highlighted? Yes, I know some websites/blogs already do this. I just wish the idea to get around and see where people go with it. Hit read the rest of this entry if you’d like to see some example markup to make this possible, as well as how to modify the Wordpress Visual Editor to display a background color button.

Continue reading Highlighting- Improving Scan-ability