Search by category: design

Anything related to web design, but not usability (that’s another category) unless there’s overlap.

Keeping a collection of screenshots for inspiration

Back in late 2008 I read an interview with a Web designer who advocated keeping a scrapbook of cool designs that you’ve seen so that when the time came for Needing Inspiration™ you already had a volume of stuff to look…

Improving navigation on the University website

We are currently working on a project that will provide a subtle but significant improvement in the navigation of the internal University websites (for current staff, students and postgraduates). What we have just now…

Developing a new theme for Moodle 2.0

At the start of the current academic session (2010-2011) the University introduced Moodle as its preferred learning management system (LMS), also called a ‘virtual learning environment’ (VLE) and began the move away…

When wireframes attack

Look what has happened on the whiteboard at Web team HQ! It started as an innocent enough looking wireframe showing a tabbed main content area and then … well, it turned into a monster. Ain’t that true of a number of…

The University homepage, Placekitten style

Last week I wrote about Placekitten, a service that automatically generates pictures of kittens as placeholder images in web designs. I decided to put the service through its paces by testing it on the University…

Fabulous icon set for library projects

A couple of years ago I was asked to be involved in a project to redesign SAULCAT: the St Andrews University Library Catalogue, which uses the WebPAC Pro online catalogue service of Millennium from Innovative…

Creating quick and easy placeholder images

We have all been there. You are working on a test webpage, and you need to create a placeholder image to test out how it would look. What can you do? You could always go on the hunt for a suitable stock image. But this…

Printing out webpages

Did you know that all University webpages print out in a print-friendly format automatically? From time to time we are asked if we can add ‘print-friendly’ pages to the website. But this functionality has always been…

Wordle ‘word cloud’

While redesigning the Contacts homepage this morning I was looking for a background image to make the heading “A-Z” look a little more interesting. I searched iStockPhoto for a while with some success, but nothing…