Inspiration For Your Design

When you are looking for inspiration it can sometimes be hard to know where to start. Sometimes you have been given a direction and requirements from the client and other times you get a clean slate. I love starting a design from new the clean blank canvas but every so often I go completely blank and struggle to get anything down and out of out mind to give me a tangible place to start. So where do I find my inspiration for design, I use all kinds of ways to generate ideas:- read more

Doodle 4 Google

Hello

I have always been a huge fan of encouraging design and just generally being creative from a young age, afterall this is where the future of design lies.

With the finalists of Doodle 4 Google in Ireland picked for each age group from juniors to 6th year students now is the time to vote.   Contestants enter from different schools within Ireland and then the competition (I think moves to English entries)

You can vote for your favorite on Doodle 4 Google online with the voting ending on Monday 16th February 2009.

Here are some that caught my eye:-

Age 5th/6th year

Evan O’Sullivan Glynn, aged 16

read more

Web design trends for 2009

Over the past few months we have looked at a number of web site designs. But which of the developments and trends that we’ve seen will continue, which will go mainstream and become a classic approach? Here are some of the web design trends that DDA think designers are beginning to accept as standard approaches.

Single Page Layouts

We visited single page portfolio designs in a previous DDA post on showcase and showreel sites but I felt it was important enough to include as a prediction for 2009 too, as I believe we will be seeing a lot more of these types of designs – not just restricted to portfolio sites.

Pikaboo.be


Paolo Boccardi – Photographer

Modal Boxes / Lightboxes

This method of displaying media or capturing data is fast becoming the norm for web sites. Modal Boxes enable the user to input information, make selections or view images and videos without having to navigate away from the page they are viewing.

The Typographic Desk Reference

read more

Google Chrome Review

It’s been 2 months since the launch of Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1 is on the way with IE8 hot on the heels – So what’s the difference? Which is the one for you? Will it finally get the remaining 20% of IE6 users to drag themselves into the 21st century and stop annoying our designers? Well after 2 weeks of posting about pretty gorgeous websites I thought it was time I sunk my teeth into something a little more substantial.

Ok so first things first – why should I use this newfangled Google Chrome? Google’s a search engine, what on earth makes them think they can develop a browser?!? Well they can, and they have, and not done a bad job of it to be honest. So what are the main plus points of Chrome that I miss when using the other browsers?

• Installation is both quick and easy and with the quick start videos you’ll be ready to go within minutes.
• Transfer both your IE and Firefox bookmarks, passwords and history with one click. Better than erasing/overwriting them like Firefox did last time I ran an update.
• Much more than an address bar – Google calls this the ‘Omnibar’ it doubles as a search box and gives intellegent autocomplete search suggestions.
• Multiprocess Architecture – Nothing’s more annoying than when you have loads of tabs open then one tab crashes and takes down the whole browser – This is no longer an issue when using Chrome as all of the tabs have their own ‘sandbox’ meaning that they cannot share information between tabs – so if one goes down you can close that within Chrome and leave your other tabs running. This is also benificial when it come to security – if one tab gets attacked by malware for instance, it will only affect that tab.
• Speed – Initially I didn’t find much to shout about with regards to the speed of Chrome – definitely not as noticable as the difference between FF and IE – until I tried running a heavey java script site on one tab and my hotmail on the other. Ordinarilly the java would slow down both tabs but not in Chrome thanks to the Sandbox.