Tag Archives: Design

Making Smarter Thumbnails

Leave a reply

I was recently tasked to improve the look and functionality of a site that lets users upload images. One of the area I looked into was how it handled automatic thumbnail generation, because I found the thumbnails that were being generated to be, well, plain ugly.

The method they used was a standard resize to max width and height. The uploaded photo is scaled down proportionately to fit into a box of specified width and height. This resulted in irregularly sized thumbnails and even more so when users upload photos with strange dimensions. Not only does it make the page look messy and disorganized, Continue reading →

Quality within Web Design

Leave a reply

What is quality web design and what makes a quality design look good? We’ve heard the stuff about spacing and organization, but liam went all out in this article to find precise examples from all over the web, each well edited to emphasize the respective points of interests, and even before-after comparisons.

The result? Beautifully illustrated old design principles clear enough for anyone, designer-or-not, to figure out for himself. Another great article on wefunction.com

Designing For Flow

Leave a reply

Recently, while I was researching into user interface design, an interesting article from A List Apart gave me a new way of looking at this UI business:

Flow, as a mental state, is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.

Fortunately my current project is still in the design stage and I shall try to apply this concept and see how it turns out .