clear.your.mind

I had to go over rounded borders once again for a client’s site I’m working on; and doing a quick search at google I decided to update my skills founding this: CSS Juice wrote an article with 25 techniques with css to create rounded borders, almost all the CSS techniques out there to make rounded borders can be found there. Really exiting!

From Nifty corners (with Nifty Cubes included) to this one called CSS Teaser Box from 456 Berea Street which is really interesting because it comes in fluid and fixed flavor:

Enjoy!

Why every designer I come across wants to be “the best designer out there”? I think people should reconsider where are they aiming their skills. If you want to be “better than…”, forget it, you probably will make it and you will end up seeking for someone else to beat in the battle field.

You can experiment, of course, and create excellent designs to be look at, but that’s art, not webdesign. I have designers mates, like you probably have; and every single one of them (or most of them) want to “build a portfolio”, that means making awesome designs to show everyone, so they take a client’s website and build something that is truly piece of art, but from the user’s perspective, is totally useless.

Start and end with the user

If you are building a portfolio, and you want to impress someone; impress your client’s users. If your client’s users start sending him congratulations letters for what you have made, that’s a “home-run”. If they don’t, is a “home-run” too; but what you surely want to avoid are emails saying “nice site, but I can’t see where your X section is located”, or “I love the design, very sharp indeed; but where I can find more info about your company?”.

I had that experience with CYM; first I prioritize the design and I spend almost one week doing it. I went through several designs until I found something I really liked and I went with it. After a couple of days, I decided to post a pool about the design and for my surprise, half of the people visiting this blog didn’t liked it. I was outrageous, I worked very hard to come up with a design which 50% of my visitors didn’t found interesting or cool enough to be considered even as a nice design.

Change your perspective

Then I decided to change my perspective and design for the user, not for my own taste. I start gathering ideas on what everyone’s want to see when they visit a blog, and you are seeing it. All the info you are seeing here today, was carefully planned. The big header text, the CSSelite banner at the right, etc. All was thought to be easy for the user to read and interact with.

The result?, well, everyone loves the design so far and I didn’t even thought about it. I just played with the color palette I thought it will be better for everyone to handle when they are reading this blog. Even the please wait… effect when you post a comment here at CYM has been very well received. People love those little details (or big details, in this case).

So, to sum up: if you want to be better designer than anyone, be better designer than yourself. Try to beat your own mark over and over; don’t try to build a “mona lisa”, but instead, try to create, to design something that everyone will enjoy using. Design will come up from your inside, believe me.

Hello there!

On the 3th, I updated CSSelite gallery (CSSelite), for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, CSSelite is a CSS gallery where I and other folks show you what’s hot on design right now. We saw so many sites daily, and some of them are just amazingly well done, others need more work and others, are the best of the best out there. That is why I created CSSelite, not to show quantity, but quality.

If you want to learn how to design, if you never look excellence with your eyes, this is your chance!

Hey there. I used Newsvine last week and it was pretty cool. I noticed a feature I never found before and I thought it was cool enough for making a small tutorial. Here we go:
UPDATE: anty just sent me a better one, “no-repeat” (I forgot it!)! Thanks Anty!
What is it?
It’s a way to show your users and visitors they already have visited a link (or subpage) without the ugly purple default color scheme, instead a cool “ok” graphic is shown at the end of the link. It’s pretty basic and simple, but you can grow it from there.

Come here to try a functional demo.

So, how’s the CSS code?

This baby goes right into your CSS code. Now, it all depends on your current font choice (verdana, trebuchet, serif, georgia, etc) so don’t be surprise if the CSS doesn’t work right away and it look overplaced, you should play a little bit with the red value in the code below to get it right; but usually you don’t need to.

And that’s it. Pretty easy uh? and you can use it everywhere across your site.