Regardless of what you use your computer for, there’s one thing that’s in common with all set ups: a display. There are tons of different display manufacturers to choose from with varying standards of quality, and because of this, each of your displays may not have the exact same color accuracy. There is a remedy however: your Mac’s built-in Display Calibrator Assistant. Read on and we’ll show you how to ensure you’ll always see the most vivid, true color on your display.

1. Open Display Preferences

Navigate your way to System Preferences > Displays. Once there, click on the color tab.

This will open a listing of the display profiles on your system. Typically if you have an Apple display, there will automatically be a profile associated with this display.

2. Open the Display Calibrator Assistant

To calibrate your display, click on the ‘Calibrate…’ button in the Color tab of the Display preferences. A new application will open up to guide you through the calibration process.

This process will:
- Adjust the display’s brightness and contrast
- Determine the display’s native luminance response curve
- Choose a desired responsive curve gamma
- Choose a desired white point (warmth or coolness of white)

Keep in mind that some of these adjustment items may not be available for every display type and model.

The terms may seem daunting at first, but this assistant will tell you what each of the items means as you go through the different steps. For a beginner running this calibration for the first time, we recommend unchecking the box labeled ‘Expert Mode’.

When you’re ready, press the continue button to finish the calibration process.

3. Save your Calibration Results

After going through the steps to calibrate your display, you will come to a dialog window asking what you’d like to name the calibration profile you just created. Give it a name, then click the Continue button.

Your display profile will be saved in the Color tab of the Display preferences. You can delete the calibration profile that you just created by selecting it from the list and clicking the ‘Delete Profile’ button. To revert back to another profile, simply click it’s name in the display profile listing.

If your display still doesn’t look as sharp as it should after the initial calibration process, go back through the Display Calibrator Assistant, and turn on the Expert Mode to get additional options. Remember that if you mess up during the calibration process, you can always go back to a previous step, or delete the calibration profile once you’ve finished.

(Via Mac|Life all.)

Photo Grabbr makes it easy to download photos and photosets from a Flickr account. Features include:

• downloading from a Flickr user OR a group.
• easily pick photosets to download from a user
• easily download all photos from a user or a group (including being able to specify certain criteria for which photos to download)

Version 1.44:

• Any videos in a set are now downloaded if you’re downloading from your own account and you have a Pro account (this is due to limitations set forth by Flickr — there’s not much I can do about it).

• Updated the XML export to include any notes and comments on a photo.
• The XML export now also contains the file path to the photo saved.
• Photos of a Flickr user (i.e., photos posted by other Flickr users that contain the user searched for) can now be downloaded.
• Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
• Flickr account (optional)
• Growl (optional).

Download Now

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

The average adult spends around eight hours a day staring at a screen, but if you take a second to think about what’s on display, all too often it’s framed by a bland background.

Windows and Linux make it easy to display something more aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, Windows 7 comes with a wider selection of gorgeous images than ever before. However, this means the art of original desktop decoration is being lost.

Customising your desktop with a picture of the family cat is all well and good, but few of our own digital photos are actually suitable for the desktop – they’re either too busy and distracting to have icons splattered on top, or not high enough resolution, so the result is grainy.

And forget dedicated websites too – many wallpaper sites simply offer tasteless images of sunsets and models, and some are even designed to spread malware.

That’s why we’ve found 15 of the best places to get wallpapers on the web, whatever your tastes may be. Some are a little left-field and some are plain unconventional, but we’re confident that whatever your taste in art, you’ll find something that will make working on your PC much more enjoyable.

1. Wikimedia Commons
Webiste

Wikimedia is a free online community made up of millions of photos, movies and sounds that are free to use. There’s a myriad of images, some of which aren’t suitable for life on the desktop, but some are beautiful shots that are crying out to be displayed.

One of the best ways of hunting down great desktop images on the site is to use the Photo of the Day feature, and going back through the site’s long history, where there are some great images on offer.

When you find one you like, download the full-resolution version rather than the preview, as these will be much higher quality and will look better on your desktop.

2. Hamad Darwish
Website

Windows Vista may have been disappointed in nearly every respect, but one aspect that did impress us was the great-looking desktop wallpapers that came included. Those masterpieces were the work of Hamad Darwish, who travelled the world for Microsoft, taking wonderful snaps for our enjoyment.

Upon his return, he put all of the wallpapers that Microsoft rejected on the internet for free, and there are some fantastic vistas that will really brighten your desktop. Just head onto his website, click the Windows Vista tab and download the 30MB folder.

While you’re there, check out Hamad’s other work, which is really rather good.

3. Dual-Monitor Backgrounds
Website

If you have a dual-monitor setup then Dual Monitor Backgrounds is an essential wallpaper resource. All the wallpapers on the site are 2,560×1,024 or 3,840×1,200 and look truly stunning when spread out.

One of the best features on the Dual Monitor Background site is the ability to set your monitor resolution by clicking the link at the top. All the results will then be filtered to your specific needs, so you’ll only see the wallpapers that suit your desktop. There are loads of categories to choose from, but just remember to click on the preview shot first to get the full-resolution image before you save it to your desktop.

4. Space
Website

The Windows desktop: the final frontier. Well, not quite. But those with a passion for space, stargazing and sci-fi are well served for quality wallpapers. Head onto the Space Views part of www.space.com and click the Wallpapers tab to get an array of out-of-this-world shots.

They come in a range of sizes specifically designed for life on your desktop. Admittedly, many are mock-ups by artists whose impression of space, it seems, has been altered by hallucinogens. However, we love the Earth shots – some of them are truly inspiring.

5. National Geographic
Website

When it comes to incredible images, you can rely on National Geographic. It has an array of the world’s most gorgeous vistas on offer, and what’s more, they’re specifically designed for the desktop, and free to download.

From the National Geographic homepage, just go to ‘Photography | Wallpapers’ and start browsing the best that nature has to offer. When you click on an image in the Wallpapers section, you’ll see a ‘Get wallpaper’ link. The image will resize and you can right-click to apply, or save the image using the link at the top.

6. Gigapixel
www.gigapxl.org

If your digital camera is measured in megapixels, just imagine what a gigapixel camera can do! Miracles, that’s what. The images are stunning, and they can be enlarged to such an extent that you can make out the smallest details in huge vistas, as if looking through a telescope.

The Gigapxl Project has a huge collection of shots that show off the impact of gigapixel images, and they offer wallpaper-sized versions of most of their photos.

7. NASA
Website

NASA may be hard at work discovering the secrets of the universe, but it’s nice to see that between deep space explorations, they’ve found the time to put a couple of wallpapers up as well. There are close-up images of the darkest and weirdest corners of the galaxy, taken by space telescopes and satellites.

Interplanetary wonders on offer include the Orion Nebula, Lulin Comet and the Martian surface, to name but a few. If there’s a set of images guaranteed to give you a self-worth complex, it’s NASA’s, and we salute them for it.

To find the images, go to ‘View Image Gallery’ and scroll through the sets. The download links are in the right-hand panel, with a variety of sizes to choose from.

8. Porsche
Website

There are few sights as pleasing as one of the most expensive cars on the planet, and for fans of Porsche, these wallpapers are an absolute must.

Porsche has gone to the trouble of taking scores of pictures of its cars bathed in sunlight, dripping with decals and racing mods, and they’re guaranteed to get fans of the supercar excited. The Boxster, 911, Panamera and every middle-class parent’s favourite, the Cayenne, are all available, and there are multiple sizes to suit every desktop.

9. Bing
www.bing.com

Bing may be struggling to gain ground in the battle of the search providers, but it beats Google hands down when it comes to amazing pictures. Photos are so important to Bing that every country has someone in charge of selecting the images, so it would be a shame to let that go to waste without making some fantastic desktops.

10. Microsoft Official Themes
Website

One of the best parts of Windows 7 is its desktop themes. These enable you to select sets of photos and colour schemes with which to decorate Windows and change them on demand. While previous editions of Windows were fairly static in terms of appearance, Microsoft has been updating wallpapers and themes for Windows 7 via its Personalisation Gallery.

These range from country-specific scenery to the best of Bing. To access the gallery, right-click the desktop and go to ‘Personalize | Get more themes online’. All of the wallpapers and themes plug straight into Windows 7, so there’s minimum fuss and maximum enjoyment.

11. Enigma desktop
http://rainmeter.net

One of the most dramatic ways of changing your desktop’s appearance is the Enigma Desktop, which is easier than ever to set up. The Enigma mod is now fully featured in Rainmeter, and turns your desktop into a blank canvas for everything from storing icons to implementing a fully integrated panel that can alert you to new emails, RSS feeds and much more.

Just head over to the website to download the program, which now comes with a fantastic set of wallpapers by Kaelri from Deviant Art. Enigma is a great mod for anyone looking for a unique and functional desktop, and the wallpapers make it well worth the time investment alone.

12. Deviant Art
www.deviantart.com

For fans of independent digital art, Deviant Art is a great place to look. It’s a huge melting pot of creativity, with a mixture of graphically altered images and amazing digital drawings.

While Deviant Art is by no means designed to cater specifically for wallpaper hunters, there are some stunning images on offer that make fabulous backgrounds. You can download the original versions of the images for use on your desktop, although there isn’t universal support for every screen resolution.

13. Windows 7 Themes
http://windows7themes.net

Windows 7 Themes is so popular, it has a higher Google rank than the official Windows Personalization Gallery that’s linked to from every copy of Windows 7. Don’t be misled: there’s nothing official about this site, which even lists Windows 8 wallpapers among its wares!

That’s to take nothing away from its vast selection of wallpapers, though. If you like the swirls and colours of the official Windows backgrounds, then you’ll love the selection of tribute images on the site.

14. Flickr Wallpaper Group
Website

Flickr is fast becoming the best online source of images in the world, so it’s no surprise that there’s a section dedicated to wallpapers. The pool is contributed to by members of the Flickr community, many of whom are professional and semi-pro photographers, and the quality of the photos reflects that.

Many are arty, most are striking, and they’re all designed with the desktop in mind, with every image clocking in at over 1,024×768 pixels. To download, simply click on an image and then click the ‘All sizes’ button located at the top left. The next screen will offer a list of all the available resolutions, so pick the one that suits your display, or just click ‘Download original size’.

15. Wallpaper Stock
http://wallpaperstock.net

Wallpaper Stock is an apt name for a site that offers such a huge range of desktop images. They’re all free to download, and while they might be slightly generic and unimaginative in places, there’s a massive range of resolutions available, and a genre of images to suit every taste.

In a bizarre twist, you need to tweet about the site in order to download an image. Once you’ve spammed your followers with a tweet about how great Wallpaper Stock can be, you’re free to download. The full-sized image is opened in a new window, so just right-click to save it.

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

Seeing a lot of user-submitted artwork and animations via Blender, GIMP, and Inkscape enthusiasts (some of which you can see in 10+ Amazing Short Films Made With Free Software) has made me really appreciate images illustrated by hand, which includes wallpapers. Given the season, illustrated wallpapers shouldn’t be too difficult to find, and it might even get you excited for Halloween!

Here is a set of wallpapers that feature this exact illustrated-by-hand concept, though authors have not indicated that they used GIMP or other open-source image editing application. Also, some are from general wallpaper search sites, which I suspect don’t always link to the original author, but a number of these have a watermark (smart!) on them so they’re more traceable and attributable.

You can also find a few tutorials after the set of wallpapers, which may help guide you should you become inspired to create your own!

Wallpaper Collection

1. Halloween by Sandara

Download at: Deviant Art

2. Halloween

Download at: Zastavki

3. Halloween/Preparations For The Holiday

Download at: Zastavki

4. Halloween/All Saints Day

Download at: Zastavki

5. Untitled 2

Download at: Wallbase

6. Happy Halloween by Anthony Altamirano of ArtkasDesign

Download at: Slodive

7. Halloween

Download at: Wallbase

8. Halloween

Download at: Wallbase

9. Halloween/House Witches

Download at: Zastavki

10. Halloween by Hellen

Download at: Wallbase

11. Hallowmas

Download at: Zastavki

12. Untitled 3

Download at: Wallbase

13. Halloween Haunts

Download at: Wallcoo

14. Witchcraft Magic Night Cauldron

Download at: Halloween Web

15. Halloween Theme

Download at: Zastavki

16. Halloween/Holiday Decorations

Download at: Zastavki

17. Castle Witches

Download at: Zastavki

18. House At The Cemetery/Halloween

Download at: Zastavki

19. The Night In The Midst Of Halloween

Download at: Zastavki

20. Halloween Theme

Download at: Zastavki

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Mac doesn’t count nearly as many free image editors as Windows. This is something you won’t notice if you’re using Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator or Apple’s own Preview application. But you’ll need a second mortgage to afford Photoshop, and Preview doesn’t do much more than annotating and cropping.

Looking for freeware clears the stage of all but a few players, most famously GIMP and Acorn. We decided to take Seashore for a spin. It takes the middle ground between the advanced, but overly cluttered and complicated GIMP, and the beautiful simplicity of Preview.

Seashore

The Seahorse project has been out and about for quite a while, and aggregated a notable followership, but it was discontinued for the last three years. Only a couple of months ago, Seashore pushed out a working 0.5 preview, featuring drastic changes to the interface and functionality.

Seashore is based on GIMP and developed with the Cocoa framework, and proves once and for all that GIMP-based applications don’t have to be awkward. As an intermediate to advanced image editor, Seashore hasn’t ported all the available features, but enough for the average user.

All these can be found in the default application view, with a layer overview on the left and a feature-ridden ribbon on the top which, together with the pop-ups, allows immediate access to all features. These cover selection tools, brushes, filling, effects, nudge, stamp, color picker, crop tool, and more.

Now here’s where Seashore shows itself as an old-fashioned image-editor, but not in a particularly good way. The application misses tools for creating shapes, both free-form and basic squares and arrows. Typesetting is included, but rasterizes itself after creation – which, in human language, means that the text, font type and color can’t be changed later on.

This can be circumvented by using the selection tool to select part of an empty layer, and coloring it with the fill tool. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it allows you to create a quick square, rectangle, circle, ellipse and free-form shape. This can be made easier by ticking off the aspect ratio checkbox.

The effects menu, mentioned above, looks like a blurred dot and arrow. This feature makes up for the lack of freeform shapes, and is again focused around image manipulation. These effects cover a goodly number of things, both fun and practical. You can use the blur and distort tools, 11 total, and the generate and tile tools to create great backgrounds or warp your photographs. The transform tools are especially useful for manipulating multiple layers, including perspective, scale and rotation.

Summary

Compared to GIMP, using Seashore is an incredibly fluid and intuitive experience. It’s obvious, though, that Seashore isn’t intended for seasoned graphic editors, and it isn’t a match for the likes of Photoshop and Pixelmator. Seashore is also an old-school free image editor. Although the effects pane offers an incredible array of features, the absence of simple shapes makes this application mostly appropriate for working with ‘real’ photographs.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Simon points out that the official Titanic Expedition website is pretty darn cool. It’s run by RMS Titanic Inc. and basically gives you a virtual tour of the entire Titanic wreck site along with important historical facts and figures about the boat and the sea bed that it currently lives on.

The media portions of the site are worthy of a look so head on over to the Expedition Titanic site to check it out.

(Via Doobybrain.com.)

I guess it’s true that there’s a first time for everything. After years of watching people doing presentations, I finally got to create my own.

I wanted my first time to be special, so I tried to find ways to make sure that mine was not going to be ‘just another boring presentation’. I noticed that most people paid too much attention to data and sacrificed the appearance. On the other hand, there are others who create a presentation that is too ‘flashy’ which distracts the audience from the real content.

The perfect combination would be to use related beautiful images to complement the content of the presentation. Then your audience can digest your content without getting bored.

Creating The Perfect Images

There are many ways to acquire perfect images that go along with the content of your presentation. You can create your own, or find and use somebody else’s.

If you are a good photographer with lots of stock photos, then the first option would not be a problem. But for those whose image capturing skills are below par, the easiest method to create your own image is to make the text itself as the image.

This is a trick often used by one of the greatest presenters out there: Steve Jobs.

The key is minimal use of text and extra time on tinkering with font properties and background. For example, I would like to present the statistic of blogs from Technorati. Some copy and paste routines would give me something like this:

To modify the data into text images, I cut out the fat and deleted most of the text. I also changed the written numbers with real numbers to add some drama.

Then I did a quick change of the font type, size and color using ‘Formatting Palette‘. I assigned white for the title and dark grey for the content.

You can also use the ‘Format – Font’ menu for more comprehensive options.

I added some shadow and reflection to spice things up a little bit.

Centered text is so static and boring, so I moved them around.

And the last step was changing the background using right click and ‘Format Background’

I chose a simple 90 degrees linear gradient color fill from dark to light to further emphasize the text.

I clicked ‘Apply’ and here’s what I came up with.

Be sure to add real life context to the presentation. Using the blog statistic example, I’d show my audience the stunning slides while saying something like this: ‘In 2009, Technorati said that there were more than 130,000,000 blogs out there. That’s as much as all Japanese people in the world.’

Adding Real Images

To take things a little bit further, you can also use real stock photo images. My favorite way to get free to use and free to modify photos is downloading them from Flickr. Just be sure to use the Creative Commons licensed ones.

To find photos within that category, you can use Flickr Advanced Search while ticking on the CC boxes.

Or you can use Quix and ‘fc’ command for faster results.

Use the downloaded image(s) for the background of your slide(s), and you can get something like this:

Using text images (and real images) is just one of the simple and easy tricks that will boost your presentation several levels above boring.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Today Adobe Photoshop turns 20. While birthday celebrations for software might seem kind of silly, for a program like Photoshop — which has literally become a verb and has had a huge impact on the world of photography and graphic design — the partying seems justified.

Adobe is going all-out for the 20th anniversary, taking to Twitter and Facebook and holding parties around the globe.

It’s a Photoshop Party

Japan, Southeast Asia and Europe are also getting into the party spirit. Adobe Germany is going to do a 20-hour online marathon, with local experts showing off their favorite tips and tricks. France and India will also be celebrating, with contests to showcase the talents of Photoshop users.

Photoshop 1.0

Maybe the coolest event is Adobe TV’s special anniversary broadcast, which will air tomorrow at http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary. The original Photoshop team will reunite for the first time in 18 years to discuss their early work. They’ll also be demonstrating Photoshop 1.0 on a rebuilt Macintosh computer. Retro computing — I love it!

Social Media and Photoshop

On Twitter, Adobe is using a #PS20 hashtag to tweet about the anniversary.

A Look Back

(Via Mashable!.)

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

We’ve already talked about using RSS as a business intelligence tool, but how do you choose the right software to get maximum benefit out of your news reading? With a number of options and myriad features on multiple platforms, it can be a daunting task to even get started.

In this article we’ll take a look at some of what you might consider when shopping for a news reader. Do you need cutting edge, up to the second information at your fingertips? You might want to look at ‘ticker’ style applications that scroll new headlines continuously. Or maybe you need to monitor a large number of feeds but are primarily interested in a subset of specific keywords or topics. In that case, you’d want to look for an RSS reader that supports a Smart Folders or Saved Searches feature.

If you need to keep news feeds in sync across multiple platforms, from Mac to Windows or from the web to a desktop or mobile clients, there are solutions out there for you too. Many of these readers also help you share individual articles and posts with your colleagues and collaborators as well. Let’s take a look at some of the options available online, on your desktop and on your phone.

Online

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The reigning king of online newsreaders is currently Google Reader. One of the advantages of an online RSS reader over a desktop version is accessibility: you can use it from any web browser, even if it’s not your primary computer, and all your feeds will be exactly the way you left them. Of course, one of the disadvantages of a web-based newsreader is that you typically need an active internet connection to make use of them, whereas a desktop client can download feed items you can later read offline.

One of the areas Google Reader excels, however, is in its ability to also sync with various desktop and mobile clients. Not only does that give you some measure of offline access to your feeds (as does installing and enabling Google Gears), but it prevents you from having to sort through some of the feeds you’ve already read elsewhere when you switch from your computer to your phone, or even from web to desktop client. We’ll look at some of the desktop and mobile clients Google Reader syncs with in the next two sections.

Another potential option in this category is NetVibes. Though it’s officially classified as a Start Page moreso than an RSS reader, it can import and monitor news feeds along with a number of other apps or widgets designed to bring various types of information into one at-a-glance interface. NetVibes offers far more flexibility and customizability than a straight up RSS reader, but the downside is it’s not the best solution to monitoring a large volume of feeds. Google also has a similar product dubbed iGoogle worth checking out as well.

Desktop

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If keeping news feeds in sync between a Macintosh and a Windows computer is part of your requirements, you’ll want to take a look at two industry-leading news readers on their respective platforms: NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. Both of these readers sync with Google Reader, making cross-platform feed reading a lot more painless. Even if you don’t need cross-platform compatibility, both readers are full-featured and worthy contenders for your desktop feed reading needs. Both offer the ability to watch for specific keywords or set up saved searches that automatically bring up important topics in your niche to the forefront of your news reading sessions.

Another worthy option on the Mac is Shrook a free RSS reader that syncs back to the web to keep your feeds in line whether you’re reading from your Mac, iPhone, or any computer with an internet connection. On Windows, take a look at the free and open source RSSOwl.

For a news ticker type experience on either the Mac or PC, check out Snackr, an Adobe AIR client that continually scrolls headlines from your feeds across your desktop. This type of news reader can be handy for those who want to be able to see stories at a glance without having to switch back and forth between applications or browser tabs.

Mobile

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On the iPhone, Reeder is a solid mobile client that syncs with Google Reader. Newsstand is another iPhone client that does so, along with the ability to easily export or send stories to a number of external sources like email, Twitter, delicious and more. There’s also a special iPhone-formatted version of Google Reader you can simply use in the Safari mobile browser that works quite well.

On the Android platform, FeedR is a great option for reading feeds, with a free demo version and a reasonable $0.99 version that removes certain intermediary dialog boxes. You can import feeds from an OPML file and even cache feeds for offline reading as well. For a solid client that syncs with Google Reader, check out NewsRob.

Palm webOS users might want to see if the iPhone-formatted Google Reader works for your needs; it’s not specifically customized for Palm devices yet still tends to work rather well. BlackBerry users can also access Google Reader in the phone browser, or check out FreeRange or Viigo. Windows Mobile users can also use the browser method to access Google Reader, or try the free NewsBreak Lite or YoMoMedia, which syncs with its own web-based feed reading client as well.

Shop Around

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Don’t hesitate to spend some time shopping around and trying several clients before settling on your feed reader of choice — or even continuing to use more than one at a time. Thanks to the OPML standard, it should be a relatively simple process to export and import your feeds from one client to another. This means that building a master list of news feeds in one client is highly worthwhile, since it can travel with you even if you move to a new RSS reader down the road.

(Via Mashable!.)

There are many aspects of creating a website design. Web designers often have to play multiple roles and be very knowledgeable about building effective and usable site layouts.

Most of the lessons you’ll learn in web design comes from work experience; learning is an iterative process and there is no better way to gain knowledge than to make mistakes (and then and learning from them).

In this article, we discuss 10 essential and general tips that every novice web designer should know.

1. Optimize Web Graphics for Better Page Load Times

Learn how to optimize your web graphics by selecting the proper format and making sure that it’s as small as it can possibly be. Even though people are advancing to broadband connections, there are still quite a few who use dial-up internet connections. Additionally, with the emergence of mobile device technologies that don’t necessarily have broadband-like speeds, having slow page load times due to image file sizes can turn users off.

Here a general rule of thumbs for picking the right file format: images that have solid colors are best saved as PNGs and GIFs, while images with continuous colors (such as photographs) are best saved as JPGs.

There are plenty of tools available at your disposal that will help you further optimize your images and lower their file sizes, check out this list of tools for optimizing your images.

By limiting the number of images you use to the bare minimum, being smart about using images, and reducing file sizes as best as you can, you will significantly cut down page response times of  a web page and improve your web page performance.

2. Keep it Clean and Simple

A good web design is not just one that looks visually appealing, but also one that is user-friendly. A clean and simple web design typically ends up being a high-usability web design that is not confusing to interact with.

By having too many site features and components on a page, you risk the chance of distracting website viewers from the purpose of the website. Make sure each page element has a purpose and ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the design really need this?
• What does this element do and how does it help the user?
• If I remove this element all of a sudden, will most people want it back?
• How does this element tie into the goal, message, and purpose of the site?

Additionally, though it may be super awesome to come up with a new concept or interface design pattern for your website, make sure that the design is still accessible and intuitive to your users. People are accustomed to common interaction patterns, site features, and web interfaces – and if your design is truly unique, make sure it’s not too obscure and puzzling. Be creative, but also keep it simple.

3. Navigation is the Most Important Thing You Will Design

The most essential site feature is the website’s navigation — without it, users are stuck whatever page they happen to land on. With that obvious fact out of the way, we’ll talk about some important points to consider when constructing a navigation scheme.

First, it’s very important to put enough time and a lot of planning on a site’s navigation structure. This is common sense, but it’s still surprising how many web designs take site navigation for granted.

Placement, style, technology (will it use JavaScript or just CSS?), usability, and web accessibility are just some of the things you need to consider when creating the navigation design.

Your navigation design should work without CSS because of text-based browsers. Poke fun of text browsers all you want, but they are still prevalent in many mobile devices. Perhaps more importantly, navigation that works with CSS disabled is accessible (99.99% of the time) via screen readers.

Navigation should be accessible and usable without the need for client-side technologies such as JavaScript or Flash, which users may not have enabled or installed for various reasons such as security or company policy.

It is imperative that you have a good navigation system in place that is located at a highly-visible location. A good navigation is detectable as soon as the web page loads without having to scroll down the web page. This is where keeping it clean and simple plays a major role: a complex and unconventional design can lead to user confusion.

Users must never wonder, even for a split second, ‘Where is the site navigation?’

For sites organized in a hierarchical, multi-level manner, make sure that it is easy to navigate from between parent and child web pages. In addition, it should be easy to reach top-level pages (such as the site’s front page) from any webpage.

The main goal of your site navigation is to allow users to get to their desired content with as few actions and with as little effort on their behalf as possible.

4. Use Fonts Wisely and Methodically

Though there are thousands of fonts out there, you can really only use a handful (at least until CSS3 is fully supported by major browsers). Make it a point to stick to web-safe fonts. If you don’t like web-safe fonts, consider a progressively-enhanced web design that leverages sIFR or Cufon.

Keep font usage consistent. Make sure that headings are visually-different from paragraph text. Use white space, tweak line-height, font-size, and letter-spacing properties to make content pleasant to read and effortlessly scannable.

Perhaps one of the things that web designers often get wrong is font-sizes. Because we want to fit as much text as we can in a web page, we sometimes set font sizes to uncomfortably small sizes. Try to keep font sizes at and above 12px if possible, especially for paragraph text. While many people face no difficulty reading small text sizes, think about older users and persons with low-vision and other types of vision impairment.

5. Understand Color Accessibility

After talking about fonts, we also need to point out the importance of using the right colors.

You  need to consider color contrast of background and foreground colors for readability and for users with low-vision. For instance, black text on white background has a high-contrast, while orange text on red background will make you strain your eyes.

Also, use colors that are accessible to users with particular forms of color-blindness (check out a tool called Vischeck that will help you test for certain types of color-blindness).

Some color combinations work well only when the color is used as a foreground color instead of a background color. Take for example, dark blue text on a pink background versus but pink text on blue background, same colors but different levels of readability and reading comfort. It is important not only to get a good color combination but also to apply it to the right elements on the page.

6. You Need to Know How to Write Code Yourself

With various WYSIWYG editors flooding the market, it has become as simple as 1-2-3 to design a site. However, most of these editors insert unnecessarily code junk, making your HTML structure poorly designed, harder to maintain and update, and causing your file sizes to bloat.

By writing the code yourself, you come out with clean, crisp, and terse code that’s a pleasure to read and maintain; code that you can be proud to call your own.

Knowing how to use a WYSIWYG or an IDE with a visual preview does not excuse you from learning HTML and CSS. You have to know what’s going on in order to create effective, semantic, and highly-optimized web designs.

7. Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimization

A good designer should always remember to keep the basics of SEO in mind when designing a site. For example, structuring web content so that important text are represented as headings (i.e. page title and logo). This is where learning how to code properly comes in handy. Knowing correct, semantic, and standards-based HTML/CSS – you will quickly realize that divs are better than tables for web layouts not only for accurate representation of site content, but also for search engine rankings; you will also know that CSS background text image replacement is a good idea.

8. Understand that People are Impatient

People on an average spend only a few seconds before deciding whether they want to read more or navigate away to another site. Therefore, you as a web designer have to device a way for encouraging users to choose the former option within those precious seconds.

Know that not many visitors will scroll down to view the entire contents of the page if what they see at the top does not interest them. Remember to keep your important elements on the top where they are easily visible, but also do not overcrowd the top half of the page which can intimidate users and turn them off from reading further down the page. Consider the top half of a web design a selling point: be a salesman, make people buy into the notion that they want to see what else is on your site.

9. Learn About (and Be Aware of) Browser Quirks

One of the things you must know as a web designer is that your work operates in a finicky and unpredictable environment: web browsers. It’s not enough that your designs work on a few web browsers, they need to work in as many browsing situations as you can possibly afford. Before production – test your prototypes using tools like Browsershots.

10. Make Designs that are Flexible and Maintainable

A good web designer makes sure that the site can easily be updated or modified in the future. Designing websites that are malleable and easy to maintain is a sign of a great web designer. Make your work as modular as possible by separating style from structure.

Know that our industry is dynamic and still young – things change in a very short amount of time. Keeping this thought in mind will promote the creation of flexible web designs.

(Via Six Revisions.)