Marketing Sherpa has recently published a study which resulted in some intriguing results. The key objective of the research was to see whether putting an instruction like “click here” in your link text would make the link more effective—would more people click on it? (Click to read more)

While there is a lot of information, research and guides on light and color theory, I do not see much writing applying this to user interface (UI) design—especially how to effectively use light in interface elements. What I mean by light is actually the brightness levels of the individual UI elements—in other words, how light or dark something is, something like a button or the window texture itself.

Lighter shades are perceived by the human eye to be brought forwards—to feel closer to us. Darker shades are pushed back—they appear further away from us. In UI terms, we must apply this to (Click to read more)

The first version of our business cards has arrived. Here they are:

Today we’re looking at the MX Revolution, the wireless rechargable laser mouse from Logitech. I’ve purchased the mouse a while back and would now like to share my experiences with it as I believe it is a very advanced mouse and has several advantages over the competition—advantages that can have a big impact on (Click to read more)

This is a little rant on something I keep noticing around the place in people’s work—especially when somebody is trying to sell a pre-made website template, be it already coded and ready to go or simply a sliced Photoshop image. The fonts are all jagged due to no font smoothing applied. This results in something which isn’t very pleasing to the eye. Here’s an example of one such instance (Click to read more)

For today’s Friday Review I’m going to look at a fairly new web development/design application for the Mac called Coda that is made by Panic. The main selling feature of Coda is that it integrates everything that web developers, and in particular designers, may want—all in one neat little package. This mix includes: (Click to read more)

Ever wanted to lay out content on your website in a newspaper column style using CSS but quickly discovered it was actually very difficult and required almost as much code ‘bloat’ as using tables did?

Well, I have for sure, and am very happy to read that columns and grids are getting (Click to read more)

I’m pleased to announce yet another new tutorial. This time I’ve got a Photoshop tutorial for you. It’s an illustrated tutorial on creating “engraved” style text that seems to be ‘cut-out’ from a metal/plastic surface, creating a nice 3D feel to it. It’s a very quick and simple to follow guide, that can achieve nice some nice effects if used in the right context. Click here to read it. Here’s what the results look like:

Not so long age, the tool of choice of the web designer would have been a visual editor like Dreamweaver. The web designer could see the design being updated live as they tweaked the structure and the formatting of the document. The process would be similar to that of desktop publishing—you place the text and graphics on the virtual canvas and change stuff around until you’re (Click to read more)

Horizontal navigation seems to be all the rage these days, especially across the Web 2.0 sphere, so today we’re releasing a new tutorial that covers the development of a horizontal navigation bar using XHTML and CSS.

I’m using the Pixelshell navigation bar as the example, and will walk you through all the steps I took to implement it—so if you want to discover a technique for making horizontal navigation bars, or are interested in how the Pixelshell navigation was created, check out the: Creating a Horizontal CSS Navigation Menu tutorial.