Easy Website Solutions

Now that we’ve delved a little bit into what the pros think about icon design, let’s hear some of your thoughts. What makes a good design? What kills a design?  If you had to compile the ten commandments of icon design, what would they be? Do you prefer Windows icons to icons produced for another OS?

From a user standpoint, icons should blend seamlessly into the background. That is, good icons, whether Vista icons or not, have obvious and unobtrusive meanings. Yet it’s difficult to anticipate a user’s reaction to an icon given the varying levels of computer and image literacy among technology users (e.g., just about everyone). Sometimes, the best solution for a company building an interface or product is to customize their application icons to their concepts. One company that will create customized icons is Professional Icons.com. Check them out and view their portfolio here.

It’s always interesting to glimpse into an artist’s process. On his website, editorial illustrator and identity consultant Felix Sockwell shares some of the incarnations his png icons went through when he was creating the NY Times graphic user interface (GUI) for the iPhone. Sockwell writes that his favorite icon design was the single lily that was used to signify the obituaries section. You might be wondering, “Lily? Why use a lily to symbolize death?” Apparently Sockwell’s original design was a tombstone, but the editors thought it was too morbid. Other prototypes included coffins, tombstones with flowers in front of them, and even a lily with a skull in the center.  I agree with Sockwell that a lily is an unusual choice. Among the other icons it looks more like a symbol for gardening or horticulture, but we’ll see how iPhone users respond.

Check back next month for more information about Vista, Mac, Linux, and XP icons. 

Tomorrow provides a chance to hear the man who dreamed up the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, at the Asian debut of the 10th World Wide Web Conference (WWW10).
Organised by the Web’s grassroots standards body - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the conference is an annual meeting of minds about Web technology and standards. (more…)

The man who gave us the World Wide Web is now working on a way to make computers grasp the context of its information.
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. Nowadays we take the Web for granted, and we regard it as synonymous with the Internet. But they are different things. The Internet has been around since 1969, and Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1991. (more…)

Natcoll Design Technology’s new Diploma of Web Development has been created in direct response to industry feedback and student demand for a course tightly focused on building feature-rich web applications.
“We simply sat in a room with the whole national team, plus stacks of minutes from industry consultation, and set out to identify the best package of skills for a web developer,” explains national course co- ordinator John Jones. (more…)

It is not surprising that the Internet revolution is often likened to the Gold Rush. The stampede into Internet business has created a whole new industry made up of companies and individuals with wildly varying experience and backgrounds.
Web design is one of the most explosive areas of this new territory, and, as with other areas of Internet consultancy, it is not necessarily the design fraternity that is reaping the most rewards. (more…)

WHAT makes a great Web site? There is no simple answer, but everyone you talk to in the industry is an expert.
If you spend time with graphic designers, they will tell you technology dominates many Web sites.
They will also claim many sites ignore design, concentrating on delivering information. The design is either so bad that it hinders this process, or it is non-existent so the site is unattractive and does not benefit from the extra dimension that good design can add. (more…)

In the mid-90s when ‘HTML fever’ was at its height, everyone wanted to be a web designer. Back then, you could be a web designer from home as well as hold down a full time office job; you could be a web designer at 13 as long as no-one found out; you could web design from your laptop while enjoying your holiday in the Bahamas. (more…)