cam, 140 words, 0 comments, Usability, Whitespace, Hard on Eyes

I was confronted by this screen when uploading an image for Gary's site. My eyes took a while to work out where to look. There is edge after edge after edge. It is like the photobucket designers ran out of vertical and horizontal space, so just added another layer over the top.

The purpose of white space is to relax the eye and guide it across the areas the designer sees as important. When a website (or a news/magazine page) is easy to look at it normally is because it makes it relaxing for the eye to follow the main pieces of information or what the designer wishes to emphasize. This is made harder on the web as there is about five seconds before someone clicks away after glancing at the top left of a page. (reply)

cam, 68 words, 0 comments, Minimalism, Webdesign, Usability, Minimalist Sites

Minimalsites.com collects minimalist website design. Their philosophy revolves around less is more and doing more with less is the goal. Webdesign is a bit different than just design, especially design aesthetics, because people's browsing habits are better described as informed glances. So usability is exceptionally important. However, minimalism is consistent with high usability so there is a natural union there. This site was designed along minimalist lines. (reply)

cam, 159 words, 1 comment, Webdesign, Street Addresses, Google Maps, Mapquest, La Grande Orange, Usability

Webdesign has to deal with balancing the demands of usability with the aesthetics of good design. It is not an easy task and go too far into the usability side of things and look horrible. Or it can go into the design side - ie flash website - and be unusable but look very cool. One usability aspect which should now be universal is having street addresses as text, not images, as La Grande Orange has on their website.

Google maps has become universal and I cut and paste every address into it in order to have a quick look at where an address is. The other usability aspect from this is that an address should be on one line. While websites such as Mapquest take the old relational database approach where an address is split up into its components with each having a new textfield, google maps puts the address on one line. (reply)