Category Development

Skeuomorphic. The state of derivatively retaining design elements from an original source. Adding things simply because they were there in the first version. We see it every day: spokes in hubcaps, rivets in jeans, wooden texturing in laminate flooring. In digital design however, skeuomorphism can take on a dark guise, forming artifacts such as the new iCal for Mac OS X 10.7. Thoroughly overwrought and fragrantly anti-digital; companies like Apple are taking digital design and flooding it with an abundance of real-world analogues and metaphors, often to a disadvantage.

For the past decade of web design, we've painstakingly crafted images to serve as illustrated background and form to our content. With the advent of CSS3 in all modern browsers, this is rapidly becoming unnecessary. Follow me as we enter the Zero-Image Zone and see how layout can be achieved without any images at all for greater consistency, load speed and ease of testing and editing. Box-Shadow

We love working with print designers. Really, we do. Designers with a strict print design background have ways of changing the way we look at web conventions, and that is always a welcome point of view. Truth be told, we also take a good deal of inspiration from print design magazines and resources. If we love working with print designers so much, what's the purpose of this guide you may wonder. The purpose is to outline some very basic web guidelines that will help the designer translate print based design principles over to the dynamic nature of the web.

With the recent push for HTML5 & CSS3 support amongst the popular browsers, we can be assured that @font-face is here for the long haul. @font-face allows us to push aside the notion that only a handful of "web-safe" fonts are to be used, and instead allows us to use almost any typeface we see fit for a design. I say almost because there are quirks and limitations to be aware of.