Webstock 2008: More WOW Please

by February 16, 2008

At Webstock 2008, Dan Cederholm discussed some of the details on the Web that personally “wow” him and why.

  • Web craftsmanship: need to know which details to focus on in Web design and which to not focus on.
  • Color: people get attached to it.
  • Ways to pick color: color pickers, colors from nature, pixel-ator function, Flickr photos, illustration & cartooning blogs
  • Blending background colors creates integration.
  • Reuse colors from elements throughout interface.
  • Typography: when done well can be invisible. Anyone can use typefaces, but only few master typography
  • Can do many things with only two fonts: uppercase, spacing, line height.
  • To discover new typefaces, sign up for catalogs: Veer, myfonts
  • Favicons: show up in lots of different contexts. Scale down to 16x16, use fragment, try something unique
  • Microformats: easy to add, can lead to interesting things. Can be read by people and machines and be styled. Microformats take the guesswork out of how to mark-up information.
  • XFN & FOAF can be used to link social graph through mark-up.
  • Bulletproof: another level of detail in design. Run integrity tests run to make sure flexibility is there. Turn off the images, turn of CSS, bump up text size -see what happens.
  • Letting Go: it’s ok with letting go of some styling. You don’t need to make Web sites look the same in every browser.