Some interesting examples of beautiful sketches for website prototypes for your daily inspiration, collected by Antonio Lupetti on woorkup.com.

When you start designing a new website it’s very useful to sketch out a first idea of page layout using paper and stencil. This approach help you define easily a working draft of the final version of your website. In general this is a top-down process: you can start sketching first the main sections and then adding more details progressively.

If you are a graphic or web designer you should understand the importance of color combinations. Nice colors and color combinations are much coveted among graphic designers, interior designers and landscapers. You must have used Kuler in Photoshop CS4. ColoRotate is a similar kind of online color palette creator that lets you browse through the color palettes, create new palettes and share them with the online community.

There is a sliders mode as well. This will bring up color sliders for editing the colors. You can choose various modes like RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSV, HLS, NCS while adjusting these sliders. You won’t need to remember the color values and jot them down as you can download the palettes directly in .act format.

You can also browse through the palettes , sort or search for palettes based on tags. There’s also a very information description about colors and how the human eye perceives colors, color models. Checkout Learn Colorotate

Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper, but the goal is to use small folds and creases to bring about delicate and intricate objects.

Origami Web 2.0 Logos

Paddy Donnelly has turned the Web 2.0 Apps/Sites Logos into origami style. You can download them here.

Tutorial

If you want to learn to make a simple origami logo you can start with Zen Elements tutorial: Create an Origami Logo

A better ways to organize fonts by creating a spoof of the Periodic Table of Elements.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces covers a number of major fonts and includes information about the family and classification of each, the designer, the year the font was designed, and a ranking as cribbed from a number of internet sources.

As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically.  The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces:  sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.

Punchcut is explaining some of the things we need to consider when designing UIs for touch-based interfaces such as the Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, HP’s TouchSmart tx2 multi-touch laptop, Microsoft Surface.

One of the elements that need to be translated are the buttons. They are very fancy, with icon and glow effect so I’m implenting them using the full-button-resize technique that I described in a previous post. Everything is going ok but I have some problems with Safari, the height of the button should be with 1px less that the Firefox css code, so I search for a css hack.  Nobody likes css hack but most of us have use of them once in a while.

Here is the way that I solved my problem:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
/* Safari 3.0 and Chrome rules here */
}

Clive Howard, has a interesting post where he talk as his personal experience with a project without a plan and wireframes.

Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and arguably it’s one of the most important ones. This is when the idea starts to take shape as an application, becoming boxes and buttons that users will interact with. This article will take you through a wireframing process; who should be involved, the tools to use and tips to enable you to make better wireframes.

Here are 20 short tips that you should take in consideration:

1. Be Clear About Your Objective
2. Make it Functional, Not Pretty
3. Draw on Your Experience
4. Decide Who’s in Charge?
5. Involve Everyone
6. Set a Deadline for Completing the Wireframe
7. Keep it clean
8. Avoid Designing Your Wireframe Too Much
9. Remember that UI is not UX
10. Think About the User
11. Don’t Get Lazy
12. Organise Your Wireframe into Sections
13. Number Your Pages
14. Look for Repetition
15. Check it all Makes Sense
16. Ads are Functional
17. It’s Not Just the Public Site
18. Know When to Stop
19. Choose the Right Tools
20. Consider Dependencies

Do you have any other tips to add to the list?
What do you think about wireframing?

]]> http://www.candesprojects.com/usability-seo/ui-screen-patterns/feed/ 0 http://www.candesprojects.com/usability-seo/useful-web-application-user-interface-techniques/ http://www.candesprojects.com/usability-seo/useful-web-application-user-interface-techniques/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:26:02 +0000 Cristian http://www.candesprojects.com/?p=523

SmashingMagazine presents the first part of an extensive research on design patterns and useful design solutions in modern web applications. You’ll find a collection of 10 useful interface design techniques and best practices used in many successful web-applications.

• The use of buttons in web forms
• Buttons on Forms – where to put them, and what to call them
• Previous and Next Actions in Web Forms
• OK–Cancel or Cancel–OK?
• OK and Cancel Buttons: What’s the Right Order?
• Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms
• 50 Add To Cart Buttons Compared
• Submit Button Usability Split Test Results: Size DOES Matter!

If you know more or have a suggestion add a comment please.

Interestingly, a good portion of the top 15 issues the survey identified matched the list of factors limiting the organizational influence of design Tom Chi and I gathered after presenting our Influencing Strategy by Design workshop to designers across the World. The top five issues from Scott’s survey were:

• People in non-design roles making design decisions
• Managers making design decisions w/o design training
• Designers don’t seek enough data before designing
• No time is provided for long term thinking
• Not receptive to critical feedback

Scott concluded that “many top reasons for failure are not typically considered design issues, such as collaboration skills, persuasion skills, and receiving critical feedback.” This has another interesting corollary to Influencing Strategy by Design.

As represented in the image above, we focus the course on teaching designers skills required for organizational effectiveness. Once designers reach a certain level of design learning (interaction design, typography, etc.) they need to master additional skills outside the design cookbook in order to gain strategic influence within most organizations.

Is this true? Should we all designer learn from this survey?

Source: Fuctioning Form blog

Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. It’s also a community of friendly artists to share and collaborate with.

You can choose from a variety of tools:

• Image editor
• Vector editor
• Pixel pattern recognition
• Smart image resizer
• Painting simulator
• 3D modeler
• Audio editor
• Music generator
• Video editor
• Word processor
• Desktop publishing,
• Color swatches and palettes
• Visual laboratory

Is missing something? This is the best online tool for designers.  You can check some work http://a.viary.com/popular. They are really super-mega-beautiful for a web tool.

Some of them are releases and some are beta, I suggest that you should sign up.

http://a.viary.com/

I don’t know why they didn’t include also 16x16px icons, so we don’t need to resize and lose quality …. anyway free to download:

http://wefunction.com/2008/07/function-free-icon-set

Lisa Wess, Director of Community Services at ExpressionEngine has started a series of tutorials to How to build a Bug Tracker using the power of Expression Engine.

As some of us may know, ExpressionEngine is a very good blog platform and strong alternative to WordPress. EE is an incredibly flexible system, capable of handling many different types of data. The reason for this is the underlying power and flexibility of the Weblog Module, its Custom Field Sets, Category Groups, and Statuses. The tutorial is showing how to create the Bug Tracker using the power of the Weblog Module.

This series does assume that you have gone through the Quick Start Tutorial and have a basic understanding of how to create and assign custom field, category, and status groups. Here are all her posts and the list will continue as the Bug Tracker is not finished.

• Setting up the Infrastructure
• Setting up the Templates
• Template Groundwork
• Diagnostics
• Creating a List of Reported Bugs
• Structuring the Navigation
• Bug Submissions
• Bug List Layout
• My Bugs Section
• Filtering by Severity
• Filtering by Status
• Filtering by Assignment

I am sure you will find them useful when designing user interface for your website / web application. All of them are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

As well as sharing tips from her design experience, Denise discusses the important role that copy plays in building a credible, web app too. She delivers some advice on making your web app seem more human, confident.

WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peek – A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste. For [...]

After reading the above post I downloaded the Release Candidate of WordPress 2.5, installed on my local machine and test it. I wanted to see how the interface looks and what is new in WP 2.5. I must admit that I wasn’t very surprised. I was expecting more changes in the good way.

There are some good stuff and bad stuff that I will post about.

Good stuff:

• I like that they are using jQuery, as main js framework, with lightbox and jQuery User Interface
• Adding the media tools are excellent, with very nice tooltips.
• The “Save and continue” button is gone, the “Save” button it’s doing both jobs (reducing elements it’s good in general)
• That they moved the category from left side, to follow a hierarchical structure, a usual way to follow/post the informations.
• I like the way how you can use widgets and customize them. I think it’s more easy and fun.

Bad stuff (need improvements):

• I don’t like the way that they grouped the menus. At my first impression, I thought that are 4 menus groups, one in each corner of the header, all with different font size. And the “Visit site” button could be moved near “Dashboard” link.
• The “Publish” button could be bigger, it’s one of the most important action on the page and it should assign more importance.
• That they don’t use the media tools tooltip for other content, actions etc.
• Edit post content is not full width, (max-width is set for 980px); It looks pretty strange on the a wide screen. If they use the full width header, why content not.
• I don’t like how you can add new category, the previous was much better and fun.
• I notice also that the plugins screen hasn’t a easy way to tell if a plugin is activated or deactivated.

As a conclusion, I think the new interface is a great improvement, but there are many things that leave me the impresion that need more polish. I am sure the WordPress team will review the interface and make the final release a great experience. It’s good that they release it, so people can feedback their work.

What do you think about the new interface?

I must admit that the selection is good and I put on the banner the logos that I likes most and that are creative.

View all logos

Great article and usability tutorial!

Read more

For beginners to WordPress design, it can feel like a daunting task trying to compete with other, more-experienced, designers. To help, here’s 5 quick ways which I’ve found invaluable in creating a more complete theme.

http://blog.themeforest.net/wordpress/5-ways-enhance-your-wordpress-theme/