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Articles by Lucian Slatineanu
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Setting your font size
Browsers have a great built-in usability feature: they allow users to set their own font size according to each individual’s needs and preferences. Unfortunately, lots of websites make this feature useless by setting the font in absolute values.
When setting absolute values for font sizes across your website you ensure that everyone will see the website at that font size. While this might make sense for designers coming from the print world, we must keep in mind the important aspect here: websites are not printed materials. The web is an entirely different medium and the power to adjust to the needs of the user is one of its strong points. For a lot of different reasons, users will want to increase or decrease the font size on their screens at some point or another so why deny them this right? -
Yet another web design trend?
A website’s main navigation has always been featured someplace near the top of the page. Nowadays, people are questioning that. So, where should your navigation be placed?
It started a couple of weeks ago with websites such as This is Powazek and Keegan Jones. Great designs but what usability results can this new approach have? For years now, usability gurus such as Jakob Nielsen or Jared Spool have argued that users hate to scroll. Their findings, based on numerous user testing sessions, were the base on which everyone positioned their website’s main navigation either on top of the page, or on its side. It’s what everyone does without spending one minute to think about it and, most importantly, it’s what users expect.
There are times, however, when designers, fed up with doing things the same way over and over again, will try and challenge the state of things. It happened about a year ago when the web saw a massive surge in using the Trebuchet font. Designers were trying harder and harder to break away from the rule of Verdana and Arial so they went for something new. For a while, I’d say around 90% of the websites designed at that time were using Trebuchet. It was something new, different and it followed the “cool†trend. Things eventually calmed down and people started going back to Verdana and for good reason: it is currently the single available sans-serif font (the other one, serif font, being Georgia) that was designed specifically for the web. This provides improved legibility at small font sizes and on the low resolution of today’s monitors. But this isn’t about fonts. It’s about trends. I agree that sometimes a trend can bring something good and useful to the table but I’m not convinced that placing your navigation on the bottom of your screen is one of those trends. -
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 – The review
Viewed by many as the world’s best Web editor, Macromedia’s Dreamweaver just got an upgrade. Part of Macromedia Studio 8.0, Dreamweaver 8.0 brings in some improvements over the last version, but is it worth paying for the upgrade?
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Are websites software?
The other day I had to optimize a website so it would work flawlessly in older browsers such as IE5.x (Win & Mac). Needless to say this is not the most creative task out there and one can get really frustrated really soon. When hitting a wall it’s sometimes best to just take a break from the task at hand so when you come back you can approach it in different and perhaps more successful way. That’s exactly what I did.
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Is Web Design overrated?
This one might seem like an interesting question coming from someone who makes a living out of designing websites. And no, I’m not planning on shooting myself in the leg here.
Take a moment and think about what does Web Design mean? Is it just whipping out a few colors and shapes in Photoshop (or your favorite graphic software for that matter) and then translating this magnificent work of art into XHTML, CSS and images, or is it a bit more than that? There are lots of websites out there that promote web design–the so-called “showcase websites‖some providing better content than others, but that’s not the point of this article. The point is that it’s strictly about the design and the way these websites look. Should someone come across a good looking color scheme on a particular website, the next day it’s featured on a dozen showcase websites and everyone’s giving praises to its designer. Sounds familiar? -
Remember your tables
If CSS layouts taught us one thing is that tables are bad. We now look down upon those who haven’t taken the leap into the 21st century and still use them on their web pages. In fact, the old
<table>tag has become so hated that sometime we pretend it doesn’t even exist. But are we right in doing so?
Tables serve one purpose and they serve it well–that is to present tabular information. Let’s pretend for a minute that all that bastardization of the table tag did not occur and it was never used so wrongly for layout purposes. Let’s try and rediscover the way we code and rediscover the table tag. In doing so, we might come across excellent examples of table usage, and most important, correct examples of table usage. Not for layout (that never happened, remember?) but for presenting data, just like any other tag would be suitable for describing and presenting various bits of information.
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