InspirationTime was inspired by Jack Herbert‘s desire to gather and tag inspiring design from across the web, and his dissatisfaction with existing web design galleries. The website is designed to make it easy for designers to find exactly the kind of inspiration they want. Find massive inspiration @ InspirationTime

Cufon, Sifr and Flir are very powerful tools for designers and developers: They allow you to embed any font in a web page. Though, you have to be careful with font licences. In this article, I’m going to show you 10 very good looking fonts that you can embed in your websites. Scripts like sIFR, [...]

Usability Form Design And The Fallacy Of The Required Field I was on a mailing list today, and this came across: “Use red asterisks — they’re the standard for showing required fields.” Standards are wonderful, but if I asked my mom with is the international symbol for a required field, she would look at me [...]

20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Typography In a previous article here on Web Design Ledger, I broke down 20 do’s and don’ts of effective web design and today I would like to keep up with that topic and go over 20 do’s and don’ts of effective web typography. It’s an important part of [...]

A trademark application filed earlier this month has quietly revealed a new logo for Microsoft’s online content brand MSN and, presumably, also its many regional subsidiaries. Unfortunately with only a black and white preview to work with, it’s not fair to judge the new logo just yet but its obvious it still retains the now [...]

Wireframing is one of the most valuable parts of any web design project. It can save a designer tons of time by hashing out the details of a site’s architecture, functionality, and content prior to actually starting a visual design. But if done inefficiently, it can end up costing more time and can even create [...]

Software packaging isn’t exactly the epitome of great design. And, as the world’s most used operating system – and being from Microsoft – Windows has had some rather dull boxes designed for it to sit within. Also read: the best and worst Windows commecials ever But it’s also had some great packaging designed for it [...]

@font-face — what it is exactly? B @font-face is a CSS rule implemented in Firefox’s latest 3.5 browser release. It allows web designers to reference fonts not installed on end user machines. (NOTE: John Daggett has written a lovely primer article on @font-face. It serves as a fine reference into the nitty gritty of @font-face [...]

It’s worth repeating that the single most important thing you can do to build appeal, mood, and ambiance for your site is to select an appropriate color scheme. There really are no awful colors—any color can look attractive when placed with appropriate color companions. Even though web colors are mixed differently than traditional media, that [...]

via uxmatters.com Symbols and icons can be both friend and enemy to UX designers. They can convey a great deal of information in the span of just a few pixels or utterly confuse users, depending on the context. The careful application of icons, however, can greatly enhance software, enabling quick access to a feature or [...]