Tesmond's Useful Design

Pure rectangular grid design is unsurprisingly a very popular website design strategy.  It allows clean simple easy to follow patterns.  However, it takes good design skill to stand out from everyone else who is doing this. If appropriate you can stand out with a more "organic" style.  Although you will probably end up building this using some from of grids the result can give a more "natural" feel.  It is important in a less formal design style to use colour and contrast to guide the user appropriately and to not make the style distracting and confusing.  Another technique to allow this naturalistic style is animation. Appropriate animation is probably one of the most under used techniques, perhaps because it is difficult to pull off, but when it is done well, such as in the transitions in iOS and Windows 7 phone then it can really help guide context and application understanding. Found a nice little demo  that can help with a useful transition highl...

2 years ago my company required an autocomplete function for their search function inside their application. Initially there was one real option, to use the Yahoo autocomplete utility. Well sadly this turned out to not be the best option. In fact most of our customer's ended up turning off the autocomplete function. Over this year I actually decided to learn javascript and I stumbled across http://www.jquery.com/ . I went practically overnight from novice programmer to being able to write an autocomplete tool that was guided towards exactly what our customers wanted, and had features that I have not seen in any other autocomplete solution so far. So what is "unique", and why did Yahoo's autocomplete tool not fit the bill. Well I will start off with the problems with yahoo's tool It is designed as an Autocomplete, what we really required was an "autosuggest" It created javascript errors intermittently when connecting to the data source, this would throw u...