Typography is one of the most—if not the most—important aspects of web design. Some would argue that it takes up to 95% of web design,  so why do we often neglect its importance? The readers who come to your site will often decide whether or not to stay according to your typographic choices. After all, they came here to read in the first place. Think about it for a second: if content really is king, logically typography should be treated as the queen.

In fact, even some font names suggest that classification; Futura, Optima, Times New Roman (OK, that’s probably a dude), Verdana, Lucida, Georgia, Helvetica… There’s no question about it, Typography is the queen. Therefore, she also needs to be dressed up properly before going out: she should put on some kerning and tracking, maybe a different font-variant, and already she’s looking like a real lady.

Simply put, I am a minimalist lover. From the content focused layouts to the proper incorporation of color, there is nothing I don’t like. Despite its simplicity, it can be very difficult to properly implement. Since I realize it is a hard style to understand at first, I thought it would be a great idea to compose a list of some of the things that I feel are necessary for a great minimalistic design.

Before I go into the guidelines I follow when designing with this style, let’s talk about what a minimalism is.

Sometimes popular web design styles can deter us since we love to create something original. As designers we like to see variety, but of course, our clients like to mimic and see consistency. In this post we’re going to look into some of the more popular web design styles, and further examine why they work. Knowing the design styles that work as they are can be a great way to use those same principles in your next unique design.

All great designers are constantly improving their skills. There has never been a successful designer, or anyone of another profession for that matter, that has stopped at a certain point and said, “Good enough”. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to always be learning new things, and to always be improving.
In this post we’re looking into 20 different ways a web designer can improve their skills at any time. They involve everything from learning new abilities, to changing focus, and to revamping one’s mindset when it comes to design. Check out these 20 methods for improving as a web designer, and feel free to add your own techniques in the comments section!

I was recently working on the tour page for Vandelay Premier  and doing some research on other tour pages to gather inspiration. I decided to put this post together because it is a topic that can have a great deal of impact on the success of a web app or web business.

Looking at the analytics data shortly after launching Vandelay Premier it was obvious that the tour page will have an incredibly significant impact on the success of the site. When visitors arrive at a site that they are not familiar with the tour page is very inviting since it promises to help them get acquainted with the site very quickly. Many sites and apps place a link or a button for the tour in a very prominent location, so it provides a very valuable opportunity to sell.

By looking at the trends and examples of well-designed tour pages you can pick up some ideas for use in your own work. Here we will cover some of the most common trends of tour pages and we’ll include a showcase of pages for your own inspiration.

We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.

From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.

Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?

Ikea for example, starts with price and then work backwards. Their main concern is the price of the product to the end user. It’s up to the designers to create something appealing which fits within that.

37Signals wrote a whole book about how they operate with similarly heavy restrictions when building web apps; they set a date to launch and then they stick to it, no matter what.

Minimalism is a word that gets tossed around in a lot of different contexts. Whether it be a lifestyle or an art form, saying something is “minimalistic” can take on a variety of meanings.

In the web design field, minimalism is carving out an ever-increasing niche among designers that are looking to convey important content in a new way. Like just about any trend or theory in the web design world, minimalism can be easy to get wrong.

So what is minimalism in web design? Just as important, what is it not?

Speed is becoming an incredibly important factor for websites.  Creating a website that loads quickly can improve user interactions, reduce bounce rate, and also capture some of the growing mobile user market that would be unable to wait for a site to load.  Additionally, speed is now a factor in a variety of ranking algorithms.

There are a variety of methods that can be used to improve the speed of a website, and in this article, PixelCrayons will guide you through how to speed up your website with some helpful tips.

How do you ensure your website will be well-received around the world? At Lingo24, we’ve learnt some valuable lessons about how affordable – and profitable – it can be to dip your toes into the foreign language internet by building websites optimised for different countries and language groups.

Several years ago we built special sites for our translation agency that were optimised for the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese markets, and consequently saw a surge in our profits as our custom in those markets soared. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though, and along the way we learnt a few things about how to not only optimise your website for search engines in foreign markets, but also how to create websites and content that communicate easily across cultures.

You need to be aware that different cultures will have very different aesthetic preferences, based upon their own cultural biases, but by following a few basic principles, you can help to make your websites more acceptable across different cultures.

Designing websites that are simple to use can be a difficult process. Whilst the end result may be a usable and effective site that appears very basic and minimal, a lot of thought has to go into the goals of the interaction experience and the way in which it is presented to the user.

In this article I discuss the importance of simplicity in website design and why we should always strive to make our designs as simple as possible (whilst ensuring they are still effective).

Before starting though, I should clarify what I mean by a “simple website design” – it’s essentially a design where only elements that are are absolutely key to the goals of the website are included.

One of the most difficult (and arguably most important) metrics to accurately measure online is the actions of your users. Knowing how your readers move around online is paramount to increasing conversion rates, revenue and the overall success of your site. Over the years I’ve seen a number of heat mapping and conversion optimisation tools for attempting to measuring that sort of data, and even toyed with the beginnings of a solution for my own use.

With the exception of physical user testing web applications, a number of these tools concentrate on monitoring mouse movement, dump it in a database, and show it back to you overlayed on your site.  Simples. Problem is though, that the majority only work as self hosted solutions, only providing access to the data for the owner of the site in question.