paper & pencil

ColorBlender

What a nifty liitle tool this is! ColorBlender.com is an online tool for creating color palettes. Here's one of the random blends that came up:

"What is this site for?"

Greg Storey writes on the importance of developing a sound strategy for your web site. (Love the title of the article — "Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)")

When it’s finished, the strategy will outline the who, what, and why of the website.

As an example, the author created a strategy for the article:

To convince… ALA readers
to use… strategy to define the purpose of a website
instead of… ignoring it and moving right into production
because… strategy brings focus to the project and serves as a framework for all the components that make up a website (IA, copywriting, design, development, marketing, janitorial services, etc.).

Realign your site, not redesign

Cameron Moll talks about the continuing trend of incessant redesigning in an A List Apart article.

Like a kid in a candy store, we creatives redesign like it’s the new black. Why do we possess such an insatiable desire to refresh and remake? Why do we thrive on renewal? What tempts us to be seduced by the sway of renaissance?

And contrasts "The Redesigners" from "The Realigners":

Thus, the differences between Redesigners and Realigners might be summarized as follows: The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven. One approach seeks merely to refresh, the other aims to fully reposition and may or may not include a full refresh. (Note that by “reposition,” I mean strategy and not physical location or dimensions.)

Grid Systems

Mark Boulton wrote an excellent 5-part series on grid systems entitled "Five simple steps to designing grid systems."

1. Subdividing ratios
2. Ratios and complex grid systems
3. Grid systems for web design: Part 1
4. Grid systems for web design: Part 2 Fixed
5. Grid systems for web design: Part 3 Fluid

Onion Grid

Khol Vinh from Behavior, describes the sixteen-column grid behind the recent redesign of The Onion.com.

The site will never display sixteen individual columns of content, of course, but dividing the page up so rigorously helped us in making logical decisions when placing items on the page — there’s always a column edge nearby with which to align an element, so fewer intuitive placement decisions must be made. This is the “rational” part of the term “rational grid,” and it’s exactly the intellectual part of this craft that gets lots of design geeks — like myself — all hot and bothered.