TYPESETT » Top Lists

5 Innovative CSS Techniques You Should Know About

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 02:49:59 +0000

We all love CSS but keeping up with the latest techniques can be quite difficult at times. So for your convenience, I’ve compiled five tutorials that showcase useful and innovative techniques that you should know about.

[Just to be clear, I know some form of probably all these techniques may have existed for awhile but I feel these five choices can still be used/improved upon by us developers and/or not fully adapted yet even though they are known by many to be productive. A bump and a nod, if you will.]

1. Perfect Full Page Background Image

by Chris Coyer of CSS Tricks

For a project I worked on in the past, I tried to implement a full page background image via CSS and it is much more difficult than you’d expect. First of all you’re dealing with the scaling issue (because we don’t want white space) and then you have the proportions to worry about and then on top of all that you have to deal with the scroll bars and browser compatibility issues.

Thankfully, Chris Coyer takes you through two techniques (albeit only one technique truly fulfills all the requirements above).

http://css-tricks.com/perfect-full-page-background-image/

2. CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

by Dave Shea of A List Apart

If your “images” folder is about to burst because of the sheer quantity and complexity of its contents, we have a winner for you! CSS sprites are basically a grid of images in a single image file that you position and re-position as necessary. You do this to help your production efficiency as you only need to maintain a single file. This technique is an absolute godsend for navigation links states effects.

ALA all-star, Dave Shea outlined these techniques as far back as 2004 and re-visited the subject in 2008.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites2/

3. How To Recreate Silverback’s Parallax Effect

By Paul Annett of Think Vitamin

I first saw Jeremy Keith show off the Silverback website at An Event Apart in San francisco last year (2008) and was blown away. Not so much because of how exciting it looked but more because of its elegant coolness factor. The parallax effect can basically be described as multiple background images set at individual visual levels to acheive a nice movement effect when the user changes the browser window size.

British developper, Paul Annett is responsible for the original implementation of this technique for Clearleft (who makes Silverback) and gives us a rundown of how he implemented it for them.

http://carsonified.com/blog/design/how-to-recreate-silverbacks-parallax-effect/

Other ways to accomplish this technique:
http://forthelose.org/examples-of-and-how-to-do-the-css-parallax-effect
http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html

4. CSS: Add a “Loading” Icon To Your Larger Images

by DynamiX Labs

The tricky thing about dealing with large images (or multitudes of images that hog bandwidth) is that during loading it can really mess with your layout and confuse your viewers until the image loads. In other words – a bad first impression with your audience. To remedy this, use a preload image so that they know something is coming and they won’t be alarmed that the page is broken.

DynamiX Labs has a nice solution that is multi-browser compatible and requires no javascript.

http://www.dynamixlabs.com/2008/01/17/a-quick-look-add-a-loading-icon-to-your-larger-images/

5. Create a Lightbox Effect Only With CSS – no javascript needed (except to close the windows)

by Emanuele Feronato

I am an advocate of Lightbox, Greybox and the other jQuery options to achieve the pop-up effects for opening new windows within a webpage. As they mature, the options for them become more and more impressive. However, sometimes all you need is a simple lightweight option that gets the job done for you without a whole lot of fuss. That’s the beauty of this mostly CSS solution (rudimentary javascript is used to close the window).

For a landing page project that I worked on that had a shelf-life of about a month, I decided to use this technique for a registration form and it worked out great. it was easy and fast to implement and had I appreciated the tiny footprint.

http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2007/08/22/create-a-lightbox-effect-only-with-css-no-javascript-needed/

You may also find these articles useful:

3 Fresh Web Design Ideas
CSS Rehab – 3 Step Program To Getting Clean
Why I Love Expression Engine (CMS)

Did I Miss Something?! Let me know in comments!

Great Book Cover Design Showcase

admin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:21:14 +0000

My friend Debra posted on her Daily Dose blog about some of her favorite book cover designs a few months ago. It reminded me of how clever and inspiring this design niche is.

One of my favorite all-time designers is of course Chip Kidd and I love the work he’s done over his career. If you’ve read Kidd’s books you’ll geek out reading the troubles and tribulations he’s been through designing his covers.

A book cover has to stand out at a bookstore because of the competition on the shelves. I chose books based on a combination of cleverness, aesthetics and originality. Here are Debra’s 10 and 47 of my own handpicked favorites separated into Conceptual, Typographical, Illustrative and Miscellaneous categories.

DEBRA’S PICKS

She tried to cover a range of styles in her post to show the variety of great book covers that people have done.

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

Secret Lives of Great Artist by Elizabeth Lunday

Against Happiness by Eric G. Wilson

Hotheads by Steven Pinker

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

Oil by Matthew Yeomans

Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me edited by Ben Karlin

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane SatrapiXX

Conceptual

You’ll notice a simple metaphor is all it takes to make a great conceptual book cover. The type of book doesn’t matter much either as you’ll see novels, trade-books and non-fiction.

Lovesick by Alex Wellen

The Best of Brochure Design 9 by Jason Godfrey

A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

The Book of Dead Philosphers by Simon Critchley

TYPOGRAPHICAL

Is it just me or does it just seem right that a book would feature great typography on it’s cover?

Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Rusell Rich

Gig by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter

1984 by George Orwell

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Love the One You’re With by Emily Giffin

Finger Lickin’ Fifteen by Janet Evanovich

The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd by John Hitchinson

Vertigo by Dan Auiler

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff

I included this because it felt like it was designed in a very minimalistic style but it intensely highlighed the name of the book. I couldn’t stop looking at it so I feel it’s worth sharing.

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

ILLUSTRATIVE

Book covers with illustration usually work out well because the style of the art can really translate what the book’s tone is.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine

Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Paperback)

Abandon The Old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

Comic Book Tattoo

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert

Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Sleepwalk by Adrian Tomine

Lullaby Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

Buddha 8 by Osamu Tezuka

The Book of Vice by Peter Sagal

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Ice haven by Daniel Clowes

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

MISCELLANEOUS

Something Missing by Matthew Dicks

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict

In Hanuman’s Hands by Cheeni Rao

Stiff by Mary Roach

Maya Angelou

Bonk by Mary Roach

The Political Unconscious by Fedric Jameson

Let me know what I missed! Comment!

Top 40 Indie Band Record Covers

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:10:04 +0000

Get it? Top 40?… Anyway, strolling around a record store, there’s usually a couple of record covers that always catch your eye. Whether it’s bold coloring, illustration, photography or typography — it’s one of the most popular outlets for creative design. Here is a showcase featuring 40 recent covers in the world of indie artists for your inspiration in alphabetical order.

Jenny Owen Youngs

Alphabetical after this… love love love the typography on the logo badge.

Amesoeurs

Airborne Toxic Event

Art Brut

I love these guys, check them out at their website: http://www.artbrut.org.uk/

Au Revoir Simone

Bat For Lashes

Beirut

Bishop Allen

Bob Dylan

Dylan’s “indie”" in spirt…

The Breeders

Brighton Port Authority

Camera Obscura

Carolina Liar

Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood

Not exactly “indie” but I like the cover as they can legitimately go retro…

Death Cab For Cutie

Deer Hunter

Not their newest album but I always loved the bold simplicity and weirdness of this cover… I had to include it.

Decemberists

Doves

Fever Ray

Ida Maria

Isis

Kind of out of character for Isis but it’s a beauty none-the-less.

Lily Allen

I immediately liked this the moment I saw it.

M.Ward

Maximo Park

Merge Records – Various Artists

Metric

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Currently my favorite band of the last few years, check them out: http://www.thepainsofbeingpureatheart.com/

Peter Bjorn and John

Peter Doherty

Ray Barbee

Seeland

I like covers like this that pay homage to Pink Floyd’s abstract pseudo scientific look…

St. Vincent

It’s just a simple portrait but I love how they do it in a unique way (for a record cover). Reminds me of the 40-Year-Old-Virgin poster.

Super Furry Animals

SFA always has insanely great covers.

Swan Lake

Telekinesis

So simple, yet so cool…

The Bird and the Bee

My co-worker likes this band but I like the retro movie poster look even better.

Viva Voce

White Rabbits

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Love this cover.

Agree? Disagree? What’s your favorite? Comment?

25 Inspiring Indie Band Websites

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:41:50 +0000

The Arts & Crafts Record Label in Canada is my favorite record label. I support many artists including Broken Social Scene, Feist, Stars, The Dears, The Stills, Brandan Canning and Kevin Drew — so I know this label and what they are about. They are truly interested in making creatively expressive music just as we are interested in making creatively expressive design. So let’s see what happens when one crosses paths with the other.

The 25 Artist Websites of Arts & Crafts Record Label:

Amy Millan

The American Analog Set

Apostle of Hustle

Bell Orchestre

Broken Social Scene

BSS presents Brendan Canning

BSS presents Kevin Drew

Charles Spearin

Constantines

Feist

Gentleman Reg

Gonzales

Hidden Cameras

Jason Collett

Los Campesinos

New Buffalo

Phoenix

Stars

Still Life Still

The Dears

The Most Serene Republic

The Stills

Years

Young Galaxy

Zeus

What’s your favorite website from A&C? Rock that pick in the comments!

10 Shockingly Beautiful US Government Websites!

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:39:09 +0000

Beautiful? Government Website? Is that even possible? Oxymorons aside, we had to dig deep to surf our way through some of the most mind-numbingly aesthetic and usability challenged un-noteworthy websites of all time. At some points, I kind of felt like George W. Bush designed and Cheney programmed these themselves they were so bad!… but I managed to make it through without too much alcohol to bring it to you all with some honorable mentions to boot.

Air Force

This website is first class. It’s a recruiting center meant and it does it’s job perfectly for the demographic it’s aimed at.

USA Service

Obama has been harping about taking our country’s problems into our own hands. This was launched recently to support that initiative.

Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institute is a Government administered and funded organization that includes research centers, museums and magazines.

White House

The now famous re-designed website home of the President.

United States Postal Service

From personal experience I can tell you all the major delivery companies have streamlined websites that cater to user experience. I… *holds breath* …prefer it over both the FEDEX and UPS websites on a aesthetic basis.

Change.gov

Obama’s website during the transition.

Army

Army recruitment website is pretty clean and cool. Doesn’t give off any hint of being Stop Gapped for 3 years.

Recovery.gov

Obama’s website to disseminate information on the road to recovering from the economic crisis.

Whitehouse YouTube Page

This is important because the Government is reaching out to people where they are.

Barack Obama

This website arguably won the election for Barack Obama.

Honorable Mentions:

These websites were more impressive than what one would think of as the classically horrible government website but showed some promise. They had something about them the led me to believe that some Government monkey that knew nothing of user experience didn’t ruin them completely. I also included some I liked but wasn’t exactly sure how/where I could get them in to show you mofos:

Central Intelligence Agency – C.I.A.

This is a little circa 2002 but that’s a compliment considering some of it’s brethren.

Department of Homeland Security

I included this one because you can see it’s trying really really hard.

Go Army

This is the ROTC Army website.

Change.gov YouTube Page

Once again, nice treatment for the YouTube page. Had to include because that’s Mary J herself Obama’s getting some sugar from!

Air Force – Learn More

This is a interior page of the Air Force website. I just wanted to end on a BEE-YOO-TEE -FULL note. That’s all folks!

Did I Miss Anything?

Let me know in the comments below so I can add it into the article! Thanks!

SEO Checklist – 10 Simple Steps

admin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:48:59 +0000

Spiders, the economic crisis, an angry Chris Brown and a woman scorned are all things you should be scared of. Thankfully for web developers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not on that list. We’re going to go over some simple SEO techniques that are easy to incorporate into your web development production routine. These are the things you should be doing before doing the more advanced stuff which we will cover at a later date.

Search engines basically index the internet and allow you to search for specific data in that index via a website. We know those websites as Google, Yahoo and Ask.com. Each one of those websites has a unique algorithm that is supposed to do a better job indexing and then searching the indexed data for you. The technique of making your website easy for the search engines to index and then search for data is called Search Engine Optimization.

Step 1 – Name Your Files The Right Way

The search engine algorithms look at the file names and see if the names are relevant to the content on that web page. For example, this website is a design and web dev blog. Here are the names of the last few articles I have written.

30 Awesome Designerly Band T-Shirts
FREE Vector Twitter and RSS Icons!
5 Classic Sans-Serif Fonts

You’ll notice that they are all in the realm of design and web dev. in this example, I’m showing you what a good url looks like but it applies to everything including something as simple as naming an image:

typesett-logo.png
twitter-roll-eye-bird-icon.png

is better than

logo.png
followtwitter.png

because logo.png is generic and brings little value to SEO. Atleast typesett-logo.png verifies the domain name. followtwitter.png is worse than logo.png because it’s not a word. You may be able to decipher “followtwitter” but to a algorithm, that is 100% gibberish. twitter-roll-eye-bird-icon.png is better because it’s separated by dashes which the algorithms can parse out into separate words. (The roll-eyed twitter bird is my unique creation for this web site, so I’m trying to get it indexed as “twitter-roll-eye-bird-icon” so they’ll come here to download the snarky dude.)

Step 2 – Use Meta Description Tags

The search engines are not gullible, you won’t get far with trying to pull one over on them but you should absolutely have a meta description tag in your HTML header. Here’s ours:

meta name="description" content="typesett is a useful and amusing resource for creatives to learn, browse and entertain themselves with design and web development themed topics"

here’s Digg’s:

meta name="description" content="Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users"

Just keep it simple and try to state the purpose of your website as concisely as possible.

Step 3 – Use Meta Keyword Tags

Some argue that the search engines have given up and now completely ignore this meta tag. My personal guess is that they play a part in establishing the context in which the website will be ranked. If your website’s meta keywords say you are XYZ… you better back it up with all the other indicators otherwise you’ll be punished or ignored in page rank. Same as with the meta descriptions, you should be concise and relevant as possible. Here’s ours:

meta name="keywords" content="Design, Typography, Web-Developer, Creatives, Advertising, Marketing, Web Design, Print Design, Design News"

Step 4 – Name Your HTML Titles

This one is big. Those title tags for each web page are actually a huge indicator to the search engines. Unlike meta tags, these are front and center to the users so they know it’s in your best interest to truthfully state what is on this page. As usual – be precise and concise and make sure each unique page has a unique title and you’ll be sitting pretty. Here’s ours:

typesett - Amusing & Useful Resource For Creatives

Step 5 – Style Your Text

See how this sentence is bold? And this sentence is in italics? Do this as much as possible when it’s relevant for your content and it will pay dividends not only for your users who like scanning through text but search engines will look at the text and take it into consideration when parsing it through the algorithm.

Step 6 – Use Alt Tags For Your Images

If you have a image heavy website, your job is going to be tough enough because search engines for the most part can only parse text (whether it’s visible to the user or not as in code, file names, directories, url paths and HTML text). So the only way you can turn imagery into a positive SEO contributor is by using Alt tags. As always – be concise and precise and you’ll feel good that it’s a good accessibility exercise as well. Here’s an example:

Alt=Sub Pop Tee

Step 7 – Use HTML Hierarchy

This one is so simple and makes so much sense that it wows me that everybody doesn’t take full advantage of it. HTML has a built in hierarchy within itself. The Head, Body, Headings (1 thru 6) and and the text modifiers like bold, italic and etc are all example if Hierarchy. If done right, a search engine can practically look at all the headers and put together a table of contents for that page purely based on where and what is the headers! So make sure you organize your content, use headers properly and separate and logically place content in order.

Step 8 – Use a Meta Robots Tag and Robots.txt File

The idea behind this is simple. There are things you want the search engines to look at… and thing you don’t want them to look at. Like that folder on your web host where you post pictures of your cats for instance. Yes, that one. Very cute, but it muddles what you want the search engines to see and find relevant. Just put a robots.txt in the main root folder with the code:

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /MyCuteCatMrSnuggleFluffy/
and that should keep your cat photos off the search engines and your real website sparkly clean.

Step 9 – Frequently Updated Content

You know that bar down your street with all those cute chicks every weekend? The one where you met your psycho ex-grilfriend but you’re cool with it because looking back she was still kinda fun despite being insane? Well, think of your website as that bar and the search engine is you going to index the hot chicks there. If it was the same girls every week, you wouldn’t really have much to index right? Same thing. make a section of your website dedicated to content that is updated regularly like; a news section, blog, portfolio or some kind of photo album even.

Step 10 – Validate Your HTML

This one is a no-brainer. If you can’t validate your code, just try to come as close as you can. We understand it can be tough depending on what CMS or blog platform you’re on or trying to get your page to render on IE6 with all those crazy hacks. What you can’t have is fatal errors that will cause your website not to be indexed correctly. The standards compliance movement these days has come a long way in getting the browsers to be consistent with each other and therefore search engines to recognize a proper way to write code. So do it!

What do you think? Comment and let me know if you want to see some typesett cat pictures. Or not, for that matter.

30 Awesome Designerly Band T-Shirts

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:04:55 +0000

*UPDATE* The author of the 25th comment gets the shirt of their choice in this post. Including comments. Yay!

Get your lighters ready! Today, we’re looking at designs commissioned by bands/labels – usually meaning they are some of the most creative, expressive and innovative illustrations, layout and techniques. Most often they are applied to cover art and gig posters but some of the most memorable era of a band can often be summarized by “that” t-shirt. For Weezer, I think it might have been the Adrian Tomine ladies tee. Nirvana had that weird looking Daniel Johnston alien looking line drawing thing that they were known for before they blew up.

We have a selection of Illustrative, typographical and just plain ol’ interesting categories for you to peruse from (surprise treat at the end):

ILLUSTRATIVE

Sub Pop representin’ the other white meat…

Blitzen Trapper loves them gosh darn angry bears…

CSS has the craziest shirt yet…

Patent Pending is thinking in the radius towards the exterior of the box…

Sleater Kinney is leafy…

Arcade Fire is three dimensionally blingin’…

Spoon hearts old hotness…

Spoon, I almost bought this one actually at pitchfork last year but I didn’t…

30 Seconds to Mars is badass, silkscreen wise atleast…

Brazilian Girls are my new “go to” for hot t-shirts

Pete Yorn dedicates this one to the ladies…

TYPOGRAPHY

Broken Social Scene, the beautiful sans-serif…

Radio Head gets texty…

I Blame You blames t-shirts…

Matador records loves pandas…

Black Keys gets all high school gym tee on us

ALO loves head(s)…

Wilco’s chirpy…

Wilco’s also sans-serify…

Rilo Kiley is dressed up…

Flight of the Concords is sky high…

Drive By Truckers is new typeness…

INTERESTING

Wilco is the punisher of love…

Foals is on the bird bandwagon…

Brazilian Girls are dirty! Muchacha Sucia…

Spoon and preserved zombie hands…

Spoon hearts nudity and pyramids…

30 Seconds To Mars goes oriental…

Matador is WTF?!?

John Tesh ummm… just checking to see if you’re still there!

Comment and let me know who I left out!

5 Classic Sans-Serif Fonts

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:39:17 +0000

HELVETICA

Created in 1957
A “Grotesk” sans-serif (any early sans-serif essentially)
Created to compete with Akidenz-Grotesk
Updated to be more legible and consistent in 1983 (christened Helvetica Neue)
A film was made about it
Thx, to simplebitsdan for CC photo! BTW, I met Dan at ALA SF in 2008. Awesome dude.

Gill Sans

Created in 1928 by Eric Gill
A “Humanist” sans-serif (a calligraphic sans-serif essentially)
Originally intended as a painted storefront lettering for a bookstore
Beloved for the quirks and personalities that each letter form has
Thx, to Y.Liu for the photo!

Futura

Created in 1924-1926 by Paul Renner
A “Geometric” sans-serif (geometrically oriented essentially)
It has a reputation of efficiency and straight forwardness. Logically, IKEA has a font based on Futura
Has roots from Bauhaus movement but much more useful and has aged better
Thx, to Nick Sherman for CC photo!

Franklin Gothic

Created in 1902 by Morris Fuller Benton
Some classify this as a “Realist” sans-serif (basically a generic sans-serif) but I don’t agree. FG can be badass. That’s why I choose this pic.
Was and is still used tremendously in newspaper/magazine ads. I would say the reason for that is the wonderful condensed versions that look great even capped.
Thx, to DC/WB for image!

Univers

Created in 1954 by Adrian Frutiger
Classified as a “Realist” sans-serif
A number system is used to describe weights
This family has 44 faces (possibly why it requires a dewey decimal system to pick out a thickness!)
Thx, to vistavision for the CC image!

3 Great Website Redesigns of 2009 (so far)

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:39:48 +0000

It’s only March and we’ve already seen a couple of high profile website redesigns. Most notably — on the day of Barack Obamas’ inaguaration, the new whitehouse.gov website was premiered. The difference was so bold that it captured big time attention from big media. In some instances it was used to signify the difference between Obama’s new hotness versus Bush’s old and busted. Since then, ESPN rolled out of their beta and pitchfork.com (indie music website) premiered their new website this weekend.

It’s All About Change

A comment that some made was that Bush’s whitehouse.org was absolutely perfect. It was perfect because it kept people disinterested in what he was doing! I can see the creative brief now: lull and bore the dissenters into a coma. It uses a traditional three column layout with nav on left, content in center and some call-outs on the sidebar. It’s competant but I think most people would agree it is not inspiring — which it should be as we found out this past election.

Obama on the other hand, is about change and his web team was not afraid to defy convention of what we think of as a government website. He uses many common website layout features such as:

“Hero” graphic — is the single most important visual element on page. Typically communicates the single most important message.
Blog — frequently updated content in a very accessible format.
Newsletter — keepin’ the old citizens informed.
Usability — trafficking people to where they want to go.

The Worldwide Leader in Sports Websites

Moving on to websites I’ve been visiting daily… ESPN has always been the big dog in sports websites in terms of everything. Technology-wise, they were first to move out of table based layout. Content-wise, they were the first to have staff writers for online reporting (I only have testimonial proof as I am a big sports fan but SI re-purposed writers, whereas ESPN had online only writers). New media-wise, they were doing video, fantasy and podcasting right before the other guys were doing it wrong. Even ESPN though was able to make some great moves:

New Media — they killed the stupid auto-play and just built the videos right into the main story area.
Headline Thumbnails — with sports, I think it benefits the user to visually browse the main stories.
Big Ass Scoreboard — nobody likes to scroll.
Big Ass Front Image — they have always had a good photography department. Nothing captures the emotion of sport like photography.
Simplified Navigation — trying to find anything on the ridiculous sport orgy they called a nav bar was “ridonkulous”.

9.2

Pitchfork, to those of you who don’t know are a Chicago based website that reviews indie music and publishes news of that genre. They are known for their ridiculously precise reviews (9.2 for instance) and clever writing styles (as well as their sage-like music knowledge). I liked the overall look of the former website but as someone who used it everyday… it drove me crazy after awhile. I found it hard to scan because some parts of the homepage was updated frequently, like the news and reviews but other parts remained static like the best new music header (contingent on an album coming out being better than what was previously there). Another problem was that I was getting eyestrain scanning the entire page trying to figure out what changed from yesterday. The main improvements:

Scan-ability — now it makes sense from going left to right. News > Reviews > New Media (Same as before you say? Yes, but now they share equal weight and the nav doesn’t get in the way.)
Equal Opportunity For Reviews — in the past they featured two thumbnails and left the other review crying in a corner. Now at least they show the cover and I can roll-over it to learn more.
Simplified Content Buckets — bigger text with more metro-sexual white space. It takes a real man to manscape his website.
Improved Search — the former search technology they were using sucked ass to the 100th degree. Now it works.

Top 30 Indie Band Website Designs

admin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 06:27:13 +0000

Creating a band website is a completely different animal than your normal run of the mill corporate or business website. Rules of usability and standards compliance go out the window in favor of creativity and innovation. Indie bands in particular do their best to portray how fresh they are and why you should listen to them. There is a fine balance between being functional and usable versus annoying and here is the top 30:

Random order and separated into 4 categories; illustrative, blog-like, photographic and miscellaneous.

TYPESETT » Top Lists

5 Innovative CSS Techniques You Should Know About

1. Perfect Full Page Background Image

2. CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

3. How To Recreate Silverback’s Parallax Effect

4. CSS: Add a “Loading” Icon To Your Larger Images

5. Create a Lightbox Effect Only With CSS – no javascript needed (except to close the windows)

You may also find these articles useful:

Did I Miss Something?! Let me know in comments!

Great Book Cover Design Showcase

DEBRA’S PICKS

Conceptual

TYPOGRAPHICAL

ILLUSTRATIVE

MISCELLANEOUS

Let me know what I missed! Comment!

Top 40 Indie Band Record Covers

Jenny Owen Youngs

Amesoeurs

Airborne Toxic Event

Art Brut

Au Revoir Simone

Bat For Lashes

Beirut

Bishop Allen

Bob Dylan

The Breeders

Brighton Port Authority

Camera Obscura

Carolina Liar

Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood

Death Cab For Cutie

Deer Hunter

Decemberists

Doves

Fever Ray

Ida Maria

Isis

Lily Allen

M.Ward

Maximo Park

Merge Records – Various Artists

Metric

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Peter Bjorn and John

Peter Doherty

Ray Barbee

Seeland

St. Vincent

Super Furry Animals

Swan Lake

Telekinesis

The Bird and the Bee

Viva Voce

White Rabbits

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

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White House

United States Postal Service

Change.gov

Army

Recovery.gov

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Honorable Mentions:

Central Intelligence Agency – C.I.A.

Department of Homeland Security

Go Army

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