Some cool demos first

These should give you a good reason to be interested in using these new techniques.

CSS3 Flash Light

3D SearchBox

CSS3 photo effect

CSS3 iOS icons

Page Flip effect

CSS3 overlays

CSS3 solar system infography

CSS3 Tools

Now that you’ve seen some of the cool things your can do with CSS3, here are some tools you can use to make your own.

CSS3 Pie

PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features.

CSS3 generator

CSS3 made easy, generate any .

CSS3 Cheatsheet

Downloadable in PDF format for better printing.

Modernizr

Modernizr uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming features like rgba(), border-radius, CSS Transitions and many more. These are currently being implemented across browsers and with Modernizr you can start using them right now, with an easy way to control the fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support them.

Toggle CSS3 Bookmarklet

By installing and clicking this bookmarklet, you can turn off (and back on) the most common CSS3 improvements.

Web Designer’s checklist

Before using a CSS3 property or selector, check out which browsers support it.

Gradient generator

Easily generate some CSS3 gradients.

Font Squirrel @font-face generator

Get your fonts ready to be included in your web designs.

CSS-Tricks’ button maker

Quickly create a pure CSS button that includes some CSS3 properties.

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CSS3 demos and tools

Grzegorz Kozak

With the single column portfolio being halfway down a very, very long website, the designer has used a curiosity device to keep you scrolling down. Very clever.

Kyle Meyer

An example of clean grid design with a bit of typography. Perhaps a little too clean. The large spacing on the title pushes the portfolio elements below the fold on a 768px display.

Nico Hagenburger

Clean design using a carousel above the fold. Portfolio contents then continue vertically. The dynamic element of the carousel adds to the interest of the website. An initial cycle of the carousel on load makes its purpose clear.

Justin Wanstall

A little bit of a dynamic banner, plus some color catch the eye. The portfolio is in a four column grid format using crop-shots rather than screenshots.

Cozette Lehman

Simple stylized design without clutter. The designer’s own style lends itself to an uncomplicated, even stark, website. The first row of the portfolio contents is above the fold.

Sam Taylor

Using some typography and a gentle texture, this uncluttered website maintains the user’s curiosity. The first row of a three column portfolio matrix is above the fold. The designer also attempts to use humor to maintain interest.

Tres Interactive

An example of the simplest form of portfolio, where the samples speak for themselves and the designer has minimized all other aspects of the website. Focus is left on a 4×2 grid of screenshots.

Dom Design

Another simple portfolio. Here the designer has used a mouse-over highlight, but until the mouse-over occurs the website has a washed out look.

Monk Design

A portfolio for a graphic designer rather than a web designer. The web design takes back seat to the portfolio elements.

Jeremy Mitchell

Choosing a dark, gently textured background, the designer has given over the site to a vertical gallery style portfolio. Minimal website to set off the portfolio contents.

Shloka Pics

With a significant banner and introduction, the first elements of a one column portfolio grid just make it in above the fold. With a single column the designer is able to include additional information, aside from the graphic.

Design 977

An impact site, using a bold color and sacrificing half the screen. Combined with a little typographic design of the logo this design makes big claims. The four column portfolio grid offers little detail, but you feel obliged to click through.

Ousmane Ndiaye

Textures and breakouts lend interest and help direct the flow of the website. A huge single-element carousel forms the portfolio. Simple arrows on either side control the navigation, maintaining focus, but thumbnails might make it clearer there is more on either side.

Giorgio Molinaro

Bold typography grabs and holds you. A click through is required to the portfolio, which uses a large vertical accordion. The accordion is so large the next elements are not visible above the fold and navigation is not immediately clear.

Eric Steuten

With crop-shots rather than screen-shots, forming the portfolio grid elements, they stand out clearly. This allows the designer to be more creative in the web design, without detracting from the portfolio.

Deren

Perhaps more functional than pretty, this website uses a highlight mouse-over, which only fades the other portfolio elements when the mouse-over occurs. Better than #8 where everything is faded until mouse-over occurs.

Jonahl

A dark background website. An example of simple grid design.

Vandelay Design

A design shop portfolio, this website uses a textured background for a little depth but otherwise does not detract from a big two column portfolio grid. The elements being double height screenshots.

Lelia Thomas

As exemplars, the designer has used textures, typography and grid design. A single column portfolio grid leaves room for a large tag cloud and navigation on the right. Note the column width ratio.

Kyle Haskins

With textures that do not detract from portfolio, the designer has given over the full width to a single column portfolio grid with each element being a large screen shot, title, a little information and links.

Gummisig

Large margins give a good framing to a two column portfolio grid, but also caters for smaller window browsers. A header graphic guides the eye and creates a contrast to an otherwise minimal design.

Fly Guy Designs

With a massive banner and byline taking up most of the website, the top a single column portfolio grid barely makes it above the fold. With the website being wide, the portfolio elements comfortably include wide screenshots and blurb.

Juan Diego Velasco

With textures and quirky style the designer invites you into the website. The banner and graphics dominate your attention, until you notice the portfolio elements, in a wide single column with blurb and screenshot, starting only just above the fold.

Geng Gao

The typography based banner is direct and effective, but takes up the entire height of a 768 screen. Scroll down to reveal the narrow single column portfolio grid.

Alexandra Tong

An unpretentious design with crop-shots in a two column grid. Primary focus on the portfolio.

Final Thoughts…

Do’s and don’ts are not clear cut, as they depend on individual styles and design types. But some salient points can be drawn from the above examples:

The vast majority of these websites use a portfolio grid to display screen shots. A cluttered look is difficult to avoid with four column grids. Even three column grids need work to make them look good. The use of too much exemplar design also clutters the page and as can be seen above, textures have the potential to dominate the page and should be chosen with care. Forgetting where the fold is on a typical display can leave your portfolio grid out of sight! The use of crop-shots rather than screen shots allows for better graphical composition of the portfolio grid and creates space for blurb. A little bit of a dynamic element helps set the focus or convey understanding about navigation.

As any web designer worth their salt knows, it’s tough to get a good reputation. But a good portfolio website is the first step.

About the Author

This article was written by Liz Tran, a freelance web designer from Australia. You can also follw her on Twitter.

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Showcase of 25 brilliant portfolio websites

Typography rich sites

With the proliferation of tools such as Cufon, sFIR and Typekit designers can now much more easily put a bit of typography into their websites. But it’s not just these JavaScript tools that are out there.

HTML5 uploads fonts to the server to be downloaded to the client on request if required. This means the designer can rely on the site being displayed as he or she intended. So now we are seeing an art form that was once the domain of the print media coming across to web. Typography design is closely linked to structured grid design, which has also come across the print media.

Grid based layouts

As with most controversy, the arguments for and against the use of Grids in web design becomes redundant when one understands more about who wants to use grids and why. For a designer designing a typography based website, they are looking to lay the site out in a structured manner and will typically use tools to help them do this. A grid template is an example of one such tool. The grid philosophy and the associated tools are becoming widely accepted amongst web designers and this trend will continue into 2010. The grid philosophy, such as the golden ratio, has been used in print for centuries and where there is overlap between print and web, it will also be used in web.

Big headers and introductions

With the coming of the LCD, in the last few years we have seen the almost complete disappearance of the CRT. Every user has been using any excuse to lose the behemoth display and put a sleek new widescreen LCD in its place. Design lags hardware, and we’re now seeing changes to web design that accommodates these higher resolution, widescreen ratio displays. Headers that run right across the screen for example.

Further, as more and more people come online, the demographic of the typical user shifts. Their content consumption habits are different and their expectations of how information is delivered are also different. We’re seeing bigger headers and simple, paraphrasing introductions in bold type. This shift in the average user will continue. Individual websites will cater to specific audiences, but more and more mainstream sites will be catering to easy consumption style.

Flash/interactive sites

Interactive sites have been on the rise for a while now. For example it’s now expected that a website for a children’s movie will be interactive. For that matter, websites for movies for adults too! On mainstream business websites some level of interactivity is also becoming expected. As customers try to navigate their way around the modern business website, they are helped in their mission by a horde of created animations.

Retro Websites

Retro design is coming across into web design in a big way. But retro is such a broad word. Old style themed websites are drawing there inspiration from any of the decades of this century as well as even older. From 80′s tech back through 70′s and 60′s hippie to 50′s and 40′s austerity. The ever popular steam punk, which could be called future retro, slots in at this point. Then Art deco and turn of the century old timer styles. Our love for yesteryear is only growing and we are going to see more and more of this styling coming through into web design.

Carousels

Real estate on a website is always at a premium. It is the age-old problem of presenting many options to the user in a small a space as possible. Laying out all these options down the screen looks cluttered and is just too expensive it terms of real estate use. The Carousel is becoming a popular tool for this solving this problem. More and more websites are using carousels, not just for showcasing and for features, but also as a navigational tool. Other tools that also achieve this, like accordions and tabs, are still a growing trend.

And Much More

Users want clarity without clutter and what better way to give it to them but with icons! This has been more and more the trend of late with more and more icon use for navigation and simple graphic designation. But not just icons are being used to give a website graphical depth. Textures are also being used on backgrounds and graphical elements to give a layering effect and depth to websites. Textures are being used in combination with typography to make very effective websites.

As can be seen there’s a lot going on and there’s a lot for the busy web designer to stay on top of. Forewarned is forearmed. Good luck out there!

About the Author

This article was written by Liz Tran, a freelance web designer from Australia. You can also follw her on Twitter.

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The Way Ahead for Web Design in 2010

Creating a minimalist design may look simple to non-designers, that’s why it’s often so hard to sell minimalist designs to your clients: they have the feeling that they could do it themselves. However, achieving simple yet powerful designs is a time-consuming task. I’ve made a selection of websites that did a great job creating efficient designs.

What these sites did right

Content going straight to the point

Hard to design a minimalist site if you have to fit in every products of your client with descriptions, 2’000 words and two menus with a bigger logo. On the web especially, content will be more efficient if short and targetted, it will make it easier to design a simple website.

Grid-based designs

Not all of these sites did, but most of them have a grid based design. Using a grid makes it much easier to give balance to your designs when no extra visual elements weigh in the layout.

Clear hierarchy of information

Notice something on these websites? Yes, they are very easy to navigate and more usable than your average website. Removing unnecessary information forced the designers to really think what importance every element has in the website.

Showcase

1. Old Guard

2. Jez Thompson

3. Thing.be

4. Alan van Roemburg

5. Indie Labs

6. Ico Design

7. WP AntiVirus

8. Ideas on Purpose

9. Make Nice

10. iMac SOS

11. Max Wanger blog

12. Digital Mash

13. Matt Singer

14. Noon style

15. Sleepover

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Minimalism in web design: 15 awesome examples

What should your 404 page be?

Your 404 page should be branded

Don’t let your visitors in the wild, let them know that they are on your website by inputing some of the visual elements that make your website recognizable.

Your 404 page should be informative

When arriving on the page, the reader should know that he didn’t reach the page he was expecting right away. Inform him of what happened.

Your 404 page should be useful

If your viewers happen to reach a 404 page, it would be good to guide them through your site to let them find what they want. To achieve this, you can add some useful links and a search box, some will add links to popular posts or promotions.

Your 404 page should be tracked

Why don’t you add a tracker to your 404 page to know what happened, what people who stumbled on that page where looking for or where they were coming from?

Showcase of cool 404 pages

1. Blizzard

Probably the best 404 page I’ve ever seen, the visuals are great and just adapted for the kind of visitors Blizzard gets to its website.

2. GitHub

Simple, elegant and useful, the kind of 404 page we’d like to see more often.

3. CSS Tricks

Chris Coyer likes to reveal useful code on his website, he even shows you the source on the 404 page.

4. Dawdle.com

When you own a gaming website, is there any better way than this to appeal to your lost visitors?

5. 404 party

Beware: loud sound and nuts stuff on this one. Obviously not chosen for its visuals, but I had to admit that I laughed my ass off.

6. Springload

Cute and refreshing illustration, makes you a feel a little better about the missed page.

7. Scratchy cat 404

Either this is really cool, either it’s getting late and I’m too tired. (wait a bit before it starts)

8. iStockPhoto

Nice vector illustration by iStockPhoto for their error page.

9. 8bit People

Much cooler than Twitter birds, two 8bits birds not taking errors too seriously.

10. BlueDaniel

I mention this one for the originality, but I wouldn’t recommend doing the same. First, the sound is annoying, second it’s in Flash and not very usable…

11. Pattern Tap

A funny picture, keeps the navigation so you are not totally lost.

12. Robert Anton Wilson

One of the rare cases where the 404 page looks much better than the rest of the site.

13. Chris Jennings

Probably the deadliest 404 page out there.

14. Above top secret

Some humour and a useful page with links to the main sections as well as a site search.

15. Grooveshark

Grooveshard shows a sense of humor, interesting insertion of Twitter updates.

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The art of the 404 page

1. Jason Gray

2. BEN

3. Tor Web

4. i-avion

5. Instant Ad Legend

6. Cromulent Design

7. Bard Illustration

8. Tomas Pojeta

9. Adit Shukla

10. Okami Design

11. Web Design Beach

12. Creative Bytes

13. The Great Bearded Reef

14. Iwit

15. Design 19

16. CSS Cookie

17. Reduzino a pança

18. Floitdesign

19. Joby

20. WebTouchUp

21. Schneeballschl8

22. Moourl

23. Cloudia CMS

24. Gandr Web

25. Pampaneo

26. A Crayon’s Life

27. Tripping Words

28. Lionite

29. Communicator World

30. Cultura Positiva

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Illustration in web design: 30 wonderful examples

1. Spotify

2. The picnik blog

3. The Flickr Code blog

4. Network Solutions

5. Samsung Newsroom

6. Verio

7. Jane Monheit

8. Creative Spaces

9. Wilkintie

10. Ecoki

11. Intridea

12. Logo Realty Associates

13. Cow Says Moo media

14. Masato

15. Radium Labs

16. Web Maremma

17. Yuru

18. Flush

19. Wearable Print

20. Fergus Neilson

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20 great corporate websites made with WordPress

1. Andrea Ziino

2. Martin Iglesias

3. iWant iPhone

4. Spiffing Apps

5. Envisage

6. Webdesig-ne.ws

7. Selva

8. Sublimeo

9. RareForm Branding

10. Parabolic Playground

11. Michel Pawelczyk

12. Yomenz

13. Kenroy George

14. Dimitrov Tsenko

15. Chris Campbell

16. Pixel Lab

17. AL Web Design

18. Espen Espellund

19. Social Control

20. jQTouch

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20 great web designs with a dark background

1. Cubic

2. Miki Mottes

3. Soft

4. I Am Always Hungry

5. WaterLife

6. Kenjiro Harigai

7. Smart Grid

8. Switch Mediaworks

9. BubbleWood

10. Matthias Dittrich

11. JLern Design

12. Parasol Island

13. Quicksilver

14. Monoface

15. Packland

16. Maven Interactive

17. BeBop Jeans

18. Sour Sally

19. The Seen

20. Wawa Coffee

21. Tangled Decals

22. Milky Tea

23. UFC 100

24. Got Milk?

25. We Should Do It All

26. Daffy’s

27. Creaktif!

28. Cheese & Burger Society

29. Annick Tremblay

30. Drawing Art

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30 gorgeous websites designed in Flash

1. A Better Play

2. Blogfullbliss

3. Interag

4. Lanbruk’s Gunyah

5. Lipton Ice Tea

6. Nutrifield

7. The Organic Supermarket

8. Viget Extend

9. VLP TV

10. Version App

11. Food, Inc. Movie

About the author: Yann Graf is a multimedia project manager from Switzerland. He is also blogging on topics such as green marketing and art. Get in touch with him on Twitter.

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11 grass-based website designs