Golden Ratio in modern CSS

The styling of a website is not just the looks, it is much more than that. It is the thing that makes the visitor feel comfortable, the thing that will make him subconsciously love it, make him feel like home.

Perfect design is the one that is subtle and helps the visitor use the website and not just admire it.

Let’s see for example a news site. Visitor should not spend time looking your delicious gradients and your sexy rounded corners on every element. He should spend him precious web-time reading the valuable content. We must help him find as fast as possible what he is looking for. Help him read as many articles as possible. Make him stay more. Transform the first time visitor, into a loyal fan.

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Health And Beauty Photoshop Brushes

The release Health and Beauty Photoshop Brushes: a free set of 67 Photoshop brushes ranging in resolution from 69 to 2463 pixels. The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET, too). The brushes were designed by Silvia Bukovac Gasevic, the creative mind behind graphics-illustrations.com.

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How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business

Many e-commerce sites these days tend to be loaded down with too much information on their landing pages. The reasoning for cluttered e-commerce sites is simple: the more information you can cram on the page, the more the user will buy. Unfortunately, web buyers are a finicky bunch.

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10 Beautiful Things For A Beautiful Life

There are a lot of beautiful things in world. Once we understand how beautiful they are, the life is becoming better and more interesting… and when not… well, then they still make our life more interesting! There are some truly beautiful things to make our life a little bit more unusual and vivid. Most of them are quite usual but they can make our life and the lives of people around us a little bit more spectacular. The question is: do we need these things? – Of course we do!

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Top 10 Killer Photoshop Combo Moves

Is time kickin’ your ass? Well, learn to defend yourself! Master these killer Photoshop keyboard combos and you’ll find yourself with more time for the important things. These combos assume you’re using Photoshop CS3 on Windows platform with default keyboard shortcuts.

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How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients?

You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a “backlash” against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such circles unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance.

This article provides you with 5 guidelines you can use as a designer to “speak business” — even if it’s just to get your foot in the door or land a big project.

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CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know

The concept of floats is probably one of the most unintuitive concepts in CSS. Floats are often misunderstood and blamed for floating all the context around it, causing readability and usability problems. However, the reason for these problems isn’t the theory itself, but the way the theory is interpreted - by developers and browsers.

Still, if you take a closer look at the float theory, you’ll find out out that it isn’t that complex as it appears to be. Most related problems are caused by the older versions of (take a guess) Internet Explorer. If you know the bugs, you can control the way information is presented in a more sophisticated, profound way.

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Google Gives Search Volume Data With Keyword Tool

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of decent keyword tools out there. Give 'em one or more terms, and they'll spit back a number of related phrases for which you should optimize. Only now Google's giving search volume data along with traditional Keyword Tool responses.

Real numbers, in addition to rough illustrations, will show up so long as you disable your ad-blocking software. (Adblock Plus people and/or Googlers might want to look into that.) The abbreviation "Approx" also appears, which is a little bit disheartening.

Google Keyword Tool Provides Search Volume Statistics

On the Inside AdWords blog, however, Trevor Claiborne states, "These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords' monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool."

If this proves to be the case - we'd recommend doing a little testing - most keyword tools that don't come from Mountain View will be of comparatively little use. Webmasters and SEOs who stick with the old favorites may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Claiborne adds, "Remember, the Keyword Tool also provides several other keyword-related metrics that can help you select highly relevant keywords to improve the overall performance of your campaigns. You can easily view data on advertiser competition, search volume trends, estimated average CPCs, and estimated ad positions for keywords."

The 10 Commandments of Web Design

Since the Internet emerged as a major force, altering everything from the way people work to the way they date, it has been a roller-coaster ride that made the world giddy. Microsoft (MSFT), Netscape, et al. fought the browser wars, Web standards were championed, and the Web became community-minded and social, ushering in the reign of Facebook, Flickr (YHOO), and YouTube. From boom to bust and back again, with staggering amounts of money changing hands at every point, the online industry rides on with no end in sight.

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Should Links Open In New Windows?

At first glance the decision to open links in new windows or not depends on the given site and the preferences of its visitors. Visitors of the sites with heavy linking are more willing to have links opened in new windows than open dozens of links in new windows manually. Visitors of less-heavy-linkage-sites are more likely to open some specific link in new window to remain on the site and continue to browse through it afterwards. However, this is not true.

Users also don’t like to deal with dozens of opened tabs and some visitors tend to quickly become angry with the disabled back-button. Furthermore, some visitors may not even realize that a new window was opened and hit the back-button mercilessly — without any result. That’s not user-friendly and that’s not a good user experience we, web designers, strive for.

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Beautiful Brochures and Booklets

In corporate design brochures and booklets are a standard tool for promotion and advertising. They are tiny books or magazines which lay around in conference halls, offices and waiting rooms. Sometimes they contain an annual report of the company or showcase the portfolio of an artist. Brochures can also be included in CDs and DVDs; however, usually they are given away as freebies (e.g. they may contain a calendar or some poster inside).

In either case, booklets serve advertising purposes and since they are usually short (max. 25-30 pages) they need to look good and be informative in order to focus users’ attention and effectively convey the message. Unfortunately, only few brochures are indeed designed with close attention to details. However, there are a number of options for creative and appealing booklet and brochure design.

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Beautiful and Expressive Packaging Design

Packaging design has the primary goal to attract customers’ attention. For this purpose, package designs can not simply inform the customers, but also provoke feelings and communicate emotions. An effective packaging looks attractive, impresses with its creativity and is just nice to have on the shelf.

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