American Football Website Design Inspiration

posted on 4th February 2012 in Inspiration, Roundups   ·   0 Comments

Photo available on PhotoDune

In the spirit of it being Superbowl weekend, in this roundup I’m going to look at the best American Football website designs for your inspiration and the top ten NFL team designs.

Sports based websites tend to have information overload so a lot of these websites tend to look cluttered and not very user friendly, a big challenge then is to find the best way to display all this information whilst keeping a good user experience. The sites featured in this roundup seem to be able to balance information and user experience quite well.

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Places to get Email Newsletter Design Inspiration

posted on 21st January 2012 in Inspiration, Roundups   ·   0 Comments

Email Newsletter Design has become very important over the past few years as companies and websites realise the importance of sending out a well designed newsletter to their customers and visitors.

With the popularity of great newsletter management services like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, newsletters have gone from been very ugly emails that companies pushed out every month to beautifully designed emails full of important updates and information. It is not uncommon nowadays for a company to get their web designer to design an email newsletter to match their website design.

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10 Free Sans Serif Fonts to Make Your Designs Look Great

posted on 18th January 2012 in Roundups   ·   0 Comments

Last week we looked at the top 10 serif fonts to make your designs look great, this week we’re going to do the same, only this time with sans serif fonts. Sans Serif fonts are normally used for paragraph text because they are easy to read on a screen, but can also be used for headings.

I’m sure you know the difference between serif and sans serif but if you don’t then serif fonts have extra bits attached to each letter sometimes referred to as feet, Wikipedia explains it as “semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes”.

These are my personal favourite sans serif fonts available on Google Web Fonts, however it is worth mentioning that my actual favourite sans serif fonts (and many designer’s favourites too) are Helvetica and Arial.

The previews below are made up of a heading which is 24 pixels with a 34 pixel line height, then the top paragraph is 14 pixels with a 22 pixel line height and then the second paragraph is 12 pixels with s 20 pixel line height.

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15 Inspiring Conference and Events Web Designs

posted on 16th January 2012 in Inspiration, Roundups   ·   0 Comments

There are plenty of events and conferences around the world every year. A lot of them are business related so their websites tend not to be designed too well, however there are a fair share that are design related that do have nice designs.

In this roundup I’m going to look at the 15 of the most inspiring events/conference websites I could find.

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10 Free Serif Fonts to Make Your Designs Look Great

posted on 13th January 2012 in Roundups   ·   0 Comments

In a world with Google Web Fonts, it’s never been easier to add great looking fonts to your designs without having to pay a penny.

In this roundup I’ll bring you what I regard to be the nicest serif fonts available through Google Web Fonts. These recommendations are not meant for paragraph text as serif fonts are normally used for headings, it’s better to stick to a sans serif font for actual paragraph text as it’s easier to read on a screen.

All the previews below are set at a font size of 24 pixels and a line height of 34 pixels, they are screenshot in Chrome on the Mac.

When I was writing this roundup I found that I couldn’t link directly to the fonts on Google Web Fonts so the previews below will link to their specimen page, if you want to use the fonts then you need to go to the main Google Web Fonts site and then use the search field to find the font.

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Choosing the Right Menu for Your Site

posted on 11th January 2012 in Tips & Tricks   ·   0 Comments

Choosing the right menu for your design is very important, get it wrong and you could find that visitors end up leaving your site early, after all the menu is the main way that your visitors will navigate through the site and if they cant find what they came to your site for within a few seconds then that could be a lost visitor.

There are countless ways of producing these menus and in this post I am going to explore 6 of the best ways and give the best examples and explain why I recommend them.

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