Visual Design

I woke up this morning with a kink in my neck. The kind of kink that can't be cured. No amount of massaging, twisting, or rolling will get it back in line. And so my head is tilting slightly to the left today. I figure if I rest my chin on my hand, I'll just look like I'm in deep thought, like I'm really considering what you just said. But in fact, I am too distracted by the discomfort of my unaligned vertebrate.

When reviewing a designer's mock-up of a web site design, my job as an interface engineer is to look for areas of the design which will be challenging or impossible to implement. Such areas aren't always obvious. In theory, a mock-up and the final site should look identical, but in reality a mock-up and a web site are very different animals.

Nicely-cropped images help any web site look more credible and finished. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to fancy, schmancy photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop. But don't despair. Beautifully-cropped photos can be yours with a few simple steps.

One of the building blocks of visual design is contrast. Contrast occurs when two elements are different. Therefore, when you want two elements to be different from each other, you should ensure that those differences are obvious. Robin Williams eloquently reminds us that

This weekend I started playing around with two advanced CSS properties I had never used before -- @font-face and text-shadow. The property @font-face allows the embedding of non-standard fonts, resulting in text that is rendered normally in the browser in the font of your choice (achieving the same visual goal of more complex solutions, like sIFR). Text-shadow is a CSS3 property that adds drop shadows to text.

As humans, we are visual creatures. We understand information best when presented visually (versus verbally). Below we discuss and share examples of how trends have shifted over time in the quest to communicate data effectively.

First there was Edward Tufte who revolutionized how information (particularly data) was presented on paper and screens. To learn more about Tufte's perspective on visual literacy and information design, visit edwardtufte.com.