New Year's Resolutions for Designers

New Year's resolutions can sometimes be a little tough, especially in an industry that moves so quickly you pretty much need to make resolutions for every month of the calendar year. Looking for some ideas? Here are some suggestions, including some of my own goals for the year.

My 5 Essential Web Design Tools & Apps

When designing websites there are a few online tools that I regularly utilize. Thinking back on my growth as a designer, its hard to imagine what it was like before these tools were lurking in my web design toolkit. From typography and color to layout and design patterns, these tools help me cut down on time during the design process.

Create Headlines With Cufon

For years, web designers have been faced with two choices when creating a text-element on a page: 1) Stick with web fonts: Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, et al, and use HTML text, or 2) Use text as images.

The incredible shrinking main navigation

Recently someone mentioned to me the main navigation on cnn.com. I've read that site every day for about 6 years, but I couldn't tell you what even one of the main navigation items was. Lorem? Ipsum? No idea. What's interesting about this to me is that it was never a conscious decision on my part. I never realized that I never used it - I just didn't because, apparently, I didn't need it.

Now that I'm paying more attention, I'm noticing all kinds of creative ways that online publishing sites are de-emphasizing main navigation in favor of robust and well-designed homepages, user-driven navigation, and tag linking techniques. In this blog entry I share a few of these different techniques.

Considerations for mobile device-friendly design

A colleague here at Phase2 (Kelly) passed along a great link to an article in Smashing Magazine that outlines usability considerations and technical approaches surrounding mobile friendly UI design.

Imagine Alexandria: THE creative hub of our region

Our friends Dennis and Nancy at Belmont Group have a vision to see Alexandria become THE center for creativity on the Eastern seaboard. They want to organize the local community here to become a place where creative businesses thrive.

Mobile-friendly web design matters more than ever

The mobile web browsing audience is growing at an exponential rate, and many of the biggest players on the web are taking notice. It’s time to start taking mobile web design seriously, and fast.

Showing less while giving more

The finer points of “less is more” designs and why simplicity necessitates ingenuity.

Jakob Nielson's latest list

Make sure to take a look at Jakob Nielson’s recent post on application design. In it he stresses the need for iterative design and testing, something we at Phase 2 believe in and practice.