Interesting Church Tech Links for May 31, 2009

Some visual design links today:

Fluid Grids

One of the best pure CSS implementations of fluid grids I’ve seen.

O rule + golden proportion for calculating the gutter in the grid

A interesting experiment in picking spacing for grid systems.

Create a clean PSD layout with a 3D look

A really nice tutorial showing some easy techniques for those of us who aren’t graphic designers by nature – uses Photoshop but anyone should be able to adapt the instructions to their tool of choice (Inkscape for me).

How to Choose Colors Everyone Likes

An interesting way of picking sets of colors.

Interesting Church Tech Links for April 5, 2009

Some links aimed more at those of us who are more technical than creative but need to do quality visual design work:

The Golden Ratio in Web Design

A nice breakdown of good general proportioning in side design and layout

8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs

Excellent review of standard typography considerations and what we can do about them with CSS

50 Useful Design Tools for Beautiful Web Typology

A nice collection of font and CSS tools

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

This one’s a couple years old but still very much relevant for good CSS coding practices

A simple visual design assessment tool

Generally I’m more technical than creative.  Being technical comes freely to me as a God given talent while doing creative visual design stretches me.  So, I’m always looking for ways of assessing a design to learn what is working and what isn’t.  Visual design is often subjective, but there are definitely “strong suggestions” that we should at least recognize before we go completely counter to them.  Ross Johnson in the post “The Gutenburg Diagram in Design” shows us a simple tool that we can use to reflect on the overall flow of a design. Composing a good visual design is harder than merely following a diagonal line, but I’m adding this tool to my design assessment toolbox for future reference.