Monthly Archives: January 2009

If you make everything bold, nothing is bold

If you make everything bold, nothing is bold

Art Webb

A quote that resonated with me so much. I can’t count the number of times I have seen things put in Red, Bold and Italic and on occasion adding a yellow background, just to attract the visitor even more!

When somebody wants to attract visitors to a particular piece of text, make sure that only a couple things are subtly highlighted. By making everything bold, italic and red there is no more contrast to the text than was there before. Try experimenting with spacing, the addition of headings and putting your content into smaller chunks.

What has been the worst example of this you have seen on the web? I’m interested to see the most ludicrous example on the Internet!

Design Work on FootyTweets

A site I have recently done some design work on has been launched by Ollie Parsley this week. FootyTweets allow you to follow your favourite football team and get tweets of news and goal updates as they happen.

Ollie has also been working on a Rugby and Cricket version and I think there are plans for a Motorsport version too.

I thought the project was a really good idea, and so volunteered my services to produce a quick PhotoShop mockup and XHTML design, from which Ollie could base the sites on. I initially based the site around a 12 column grid design, with each team crest taking up column and used a template from the extremely useful 960.gs site.

footy tweets grid design

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How I Got Into Web Design

My love of web design really started when I got my first car – a bright yellow Mini. Aged 17, and still at Secondary School I bought the domain paulsmini.co.uk and created a simple, frame based website.

Then a competition was launched by Channel 4 called ‘Webit’ aimed at 13-19 year olds. I heard about the competition from my School, and I thought about redesigning paulsmini to enter the competition, but in the end, I decided to just submit the site as it was, and was shocked to be a runner up for the whole competition.

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