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How to Make Your Popups Irresistible (And Not Annoying)

April 26, 2016 by Douglas Bonneville

From the dawn of civilization, there have been commercials. If you look close enough at the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, you’ll likely find an ad for a chariot dealership mixed in with the picture stories. (Seriously, though: papyrus wall posters in Ancient Egypt were some of the earliest advertisements.) Flash ahead to our modern age and you’ll find there could never have been television without commercials. Now that the world has truly become Internet-centric, businesses want to utilize your time by offering some form of advertisement.

At first, it was a banner ad dropped onto a website. The clever marketing device soon evolved into the popup. Today, tech savvy websites generate popups in hopes of capturing an email address or providing a direct click-through to sales.

As a web designer, your goal is to create popup tools that will make the client happy and not annoy the user. Too tall an order? Perhaps it’s not as challenging as you might imagine. Before getting to the gorgeous graphics that you’ll create to go with it, you might want to consider some functionality.

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Web Design

4 Speed Boosting Strategies to Try for Your Site

March 16, 2016 by Douglas Bonneville

When considering modern web design, you want your site to not only look good but perform well too. By that, I mean a site should load in a decent amount of time, offer a pleasant user experience and have as few bugs and errors as possible.

One of the most important elements of a well-performing site are the page loading times. Speed can really suffer when you spend more time worrying about the aesthetics of a site by trying to add slick functionality, animations or content. Some administrators even overlook slow loading times because they care more about the way their site looks than how using it feels.

In truth, page loading times should always be one of the first things you work to improve. Speed now factors heavily into search engine rankings, but consumers want to see speedier sites too. According to an infographic from Kissmetrics, 40 percent of people say that they leave a website any time it takes more than three seconds to load.

Furthermore, an additional one-second delay in page loading time can lower your conversion rate by seven percent. If this happens on an e-commerce site that brings in $100,000 per day, that page delay translates to a loss of $2.5 million in sales each year.

Page loading times matter — there’s no question about that.

What can you do to ensure that your site is streamlined and doesn’t run into these performance issues? It depends on what kind of content you have on your site, how well it has been put together and how many plugins or add-ons you have loading at one time.

We’re going to take a look at five general ways you can improve site loading times. Keep in mind that these tips may not apply to every site, but they offer a good place to start with improvements.

site-speed-1-cdn

1. To Speed up Loading Times, Use a Content Delivery Network or CDN

A Content Delivery Network or CDN is not the same thing as a Content Management System (CMS). They can actually work in tandem to deliver a fully optimized site.

A CMS is a platform that can be used to create, schedule and publish content. It includes services like Magento, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and more. It can also include a custom-made CMS designed with PHP or HTML.

A CDN, on the other hand, is a server-based system spaced throughout various data centers across the internet. It can essentially be used to store files and data from a website — like your web server — and deliver these files to visitors. It works better than a traditional server system because it takes into account a person’s geographical location. It delivers content and data from a local server, so the site is rendered much faster. When used in combination with a CMS, the system drastically improves page loading times for a site.

The other benefit of using a CDN is that it alleviates some of the load on your actual server. This doesn’t necessarily make a difference if you’re using a third-party hosting provider, but if you’re running the site from your own servers it can give the hardware a break.

The most popular CDN services include CloudFlare and MaxCDN. CloudFlare also offers DNS provider services.

2. Enable the Apache “KeepAlive” Feature

Apache is a server platform that is one of the most commonly used by most providers. More specifically, it’s deployed for a lot of shared hosting setups and can be run for a relatively low-cost. It also happens to have a feature that can increase HTTP request limits for visitors.

The feature is called “KeepAlive,” and it allows multiple HTTP requests for a single connection, a process that allows a website to load much faster for visitors because it relies heavily on HTML.

You’ll need to check with your host provider first to see whether or not they have the feature active. If they do not, you’ll also need to make sure you have access to the httpd.conf file in your Apache setup. The location of this file will differ depending on what kind of server system is running (Windows or Linux).

If you do have access, open the file and check whether or not “KeepAlive On” is located somewhere within. If it is not, don’t worry: You can activate it using your .htaccess file. Include the following piece of code in your htaccess to turn the feature on:

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
 Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

The KeepAlive feature is great for improving performance on all sites, but works miracles if your site is running WordPress or a similar CMS.

If you cannot use this feature for whatever reason — perhaps your server is not running Apache — then consider minimizing the amount of HTTP requests your site calls for. This is also a good general maintenance task, as it can speed up load times.

There are several ways to minimize HTTP requests: combine CSS files, merge Javascript files or combine images into data sprites. Ultimately, you’re reducing the number of files that need to load. Yoast has a great guide on this if you’re running WordPress, but the guide can be used as a general reference for all sites.

site-speed-rocket - loading times

3. Optimize Your Images

This next bit of advice shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has worked with websites or web development. The bigger your images are and the higher their quality, the longer they’re going to take to load. It doesn’t matter if you resize them using HTML or shortcode, because they still have to load in full.

Use a photo editing tool like Photoshop, GIMP or even something simple like Microsoft Office Picture Manager to resize them. Try to not to keep images on your server that are bigger than what you need. For example, there’s no reason to keep a raw image file in excess of 5000 pixels if all you’re doing is displaying it within your content. Three online tools that work great for resizing include Optimizilla, Kraken and Free Image Optimizer. They work by compressing an image in size, essentially making them smaller so a site can render them faster.

If you’ve already resized your images and just need to cut filesize, you can try running them through JPEGmini or TinyPNG. These tools cut out colors and meta data to shrink the space an image takes up without making its dimensions smaller.

Ultimately, you’re looking to trim down the overall size of the image itself and the storage size. Anything 2MB and above is pushing the limits, especially when you have a ton of images that your site needs to load.

4. Enable Caching for CMS

If you host a WordPress powered site — or a similar CMS — then by all means, look into a cache plugin or add-on. Caching works pretty much as you’d expect: The plugin builds a cache file of your entire site server-side and then delivers it to a client for faster loading times.

This is the same process your web browser uses to cache sites you visit. Your browser downloads images, CSS and Javascript files the first time you load up a site, and for each subsequent visit it simply loads those cached files so that the site may render faster.

When caching is enabled for a CMS, it builds a cache file of your entire site — or select pages — and every time a new visitor arrives it sends them the cached content. This is so that the site doesn’t have to be generated in full every time someone new lands there. Any time you make changes to the site, you’ll need to refresh your cache, but this is usually handled automatically by the plugin.

If you’re using WordPress, recommended plugins include W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Fastest Cache. These are by no means the only ones out there. Have a look at the WordPress plugin repository and you’ll see at least a dozen more.

You can also define a browser caching policy for all server requests to your site. Google recommends keeping a cache time of at least one week for your site assets that aren’t changed often. This can include CSS, images and javascript files.

You can ensure this happens by including a cache command snippet in your .htaccess file.

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
 ExpiresActive On
 ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 7200 seconds”
 ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 864000 seconds”
 ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 864000 seconds”
 ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 864000 seconds”
 ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 864000 seconds”
 ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 864000 seconds”
 ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 864000 seconds”
 </ifmodule>

Other Ways to Speed up Your Site

This list is merely a handful of techniques you can use to boost loading times on your site. There are hundreds — if not thousands — of other things, large and small, that you can do to both improve performance and make your site look more professional.

You can do a simple web search to find more information. If you run a WordPress powered site, a ridiculous amount of guides and resources out there can help you boost performance, like Gregory Ciotti’s.

One thing to make a habit: checking whether or not your site meets Google’s webmaster guidelines. Sites that don’t follow the guidelines will often experience performance issues. You can check up on this using Varvy’s tool.

With a little invested time, you can have your site running in tip-top shape. Eventually, this should translate to lower bounce rates and more visitors!


Yo, Font-Addict! Make sure to check out The Big Book of Font Combinations. Go grab a copy from Amazon or B&N, or grab the DISCOUNTED ebook PDF digital download version (40% OFF the hardcover retail price!) from the BonFX Store, and stare at all 350+ examples of informative font combinations for web and print. You know you want to!


Filed Under: Web Design

10 Emerging Web Design Trends for 2016

February 16, 2016 by Douglas Bonneville

Web design is always on the flux, the shape of the web changing as leading companies have major redesigns or new toolsets like Bootstrap make web development more accessible.

In 2016, we’ve got faster connections and more variety in screen sizes than ever before. More users are browsing on the go, but still expecting media-rich, tailored experiences.

The following ten web design trends are all either making an explosive rise to popularity, or the technology has finally solidified and become advanced enough for them to be in full swing this year. You probably will recognize a number of these features from the websites you use every day.

1. Background Video

How many times have you found yourself scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed just to stop at a quick video?

Video draws attention. This is important in today’s Internet of short attention spans. Having a background video playing on your home page draws the attention of the user and makes them stay on your website.

Background video is also very effective at quickly establishing a mood. For example, a background video going through shots of your employees collaborating, hard at work, and then relaxing after work over a couple beers gives off the vibe of a fun office that works hard and plays hard.

trends-1-video-bg

When you go to IUQO’s website, you are immediately greeted with an enchanting background video of the sky. The video is high quality, interesting and immediately establishes a peaceful atmosphere.

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Web Design

SEO services in Rhode Island – a recommended source

October 14, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

BonFX has spun off a child company: Oxbow SEO! If you need qualified search engine optimization services, please visit Oxbow SEO here! You might also pop by our SEO Meetup in Providence for high-value content, networking, and killer coffee. We have a very cool space to meet in for the first few Meetups, thanks to very cool art gallery ArtProv. We’ll take you from the humble example from antiquity of how to stretch pizza dough up through the most cutting edge SEO methods that work today.

rhode island seo

So, check out OxbowSEO when you need a local SEO consultant in the Rhode Island area!

SEO Rhode Island

Search Engine Services in RI

 

Filed Under: SEO

A boatload of squeeze and landing page template designs and elements?

June 26, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

“Graphics Sifu” –  Everything you need from a squeeze page templates package

squeeze-page-templates

Every now and then I come across a crazy deal as owner of this design blog. I don’t know how people make money on some of these packages they put together, but this one is LOADED to capacity! Let’s not ask how they make money, but rather, how can we take advantage of their hard work to put this together.

If you are like me, you are tired of wasting time 1) searching for the right product and 2) discovering you bought the wrong one.

The best product for something like putting together squeeze pages is one that has EVERYTHING you need in it, and it shows you in a transparent way. Fonts, graphics, templates, HTML snippets, buttons, dividers, text-effects, ribbons, etc. In short, all the standard items you know you have seen on squeeze pages (that YOU yourself have bought things through!) are right here and you can “see what’s in the box” before purchasing! Boom! Transparency works for you in this case.

Look at all the value they packed in this deal! If you need all the pieces to slap together a squeeze page template or a landing page template, this one dinky purchase will save you a ridiculous amount of time. Here is a list of what it contains. It’s too long to read so just skim it. Basically, it’s in there:

Order Buttons
Blecher Buttons
Guarantee Seals
Guarantee Certificates
Comparison Tables
Screen Captures
Sticker Shapes
Number Displays 1
Number Displays 2
Box Shadow
Highlight Graphics
Divider Graphics
Minisite Template (Wood)
Minisite Template (Futuristic)
Minisite Template (Plain)
Minisite Template (Envelope)
Minisite Template (Grunge)
Credit Cards
Signature Fonts
Handwritten Fonts
OTO Graphics
Step-By-Step Graphics
Doodles
Squeeze Page 1
Squeeze Page 2
Squeeze Page 3
Squeeze Page 4
Squeeze Page 5
Squeeze Page 6
Squeeze Page 7
Squeeze Page 8
Squeeze Page 9
Squeeze Page 10
3D Text Effect
Photoshop Text Styles 1
Photoshop Text Styles 2
Photoshop Text Styles 3
Web Ribbons 1
Web Ribbons 2
Banners Pack
Star Ratings
Headline Graphics
Order Buttons 2
Dvd-Rom Mockup
Book Mockup
Card Mockup
Box Mockup
Bullet Point Graphics
Header Graphics
Minisite Template 1 (Health)
Minisite Template 2 (Dating)
Minisite Template 3 (Money)
Minisite Template 4 (Secret)
Minisite Template 5 (Real Estate)

And look at these previews! Yep, it’s all there and then some. Click below to see them all:

best-landing-page-templates

So, take a look at this deal up close. You can download all this for HOW MUCH? How can this be possible? Click through for the price (we hid it because you have to see it to believe it…and you’ve read this far!).

landing-page-templates

P.S.: Remember, in the time it took you to even READ this article, much less read another, what, 20 more, you can download this sucker and start playing with it. Don’t waste any more time: this is the squeeze page templates and landing page templates package you were looking for 🙂

P.S.S.: Click the “instant access button” and stop looking for “better” free ones. You haven’t even seen the price yet! Once you see it, you’ll regret having wasted time looking in other places. Click above!


Yo, Font-Addict! Make sure to check out The Big Book of Font Combinations. Go grab a copy from Amazon or B&N, or grab the DISCOUNTED ebook PDF digital download version (40% OFF the hardcover retail price!) from the BonFX Store, and stare at all 350+ examples of informative font combinations for web and print. You know you want to!


Filed Under: Graphic Design

A Free Expired Domains Scraper?

June 4, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

UPDATE: 12/14/2105: Big updates and price drop – head right over to Oxbow Domains to check it out!

Elliot and I have been working on “Ox” for months! From concept, code, logo and brand identity, to typography and e-commerce! There are a lot of disciplines all wrapped up in our beta release of Ox, our expired domain scraper. The free period is only during beta, but check it out and get on the list for updates on the commercial release. Note that every beta will have a free trial period! Whatever expired domains you find you get to keep! So check out the latest entry into the realm of expired domain software with a modern, clean-design, cross-platform twist.

free expired domains scraper..Current release is 0.9.3. This is the free (as in beer!) beta release of Ox, our standalone domain scraping app, which can find hundreds or even thousands of expired domains in just hours. Ox supports proxies and automatically returns DA and PA for each available domain, and domain availability checking is provided by Namecheap (you can check their supported TLDs page to get an idea of what’s available. Basically, just about everything).

…

Ox is in beta so it’s a totally free expired domains scraper during this time. But when it goes on sale…[s]ay goodbye to subscription payments–Ox will pay for itself the very first day. No caps: Since Ox is running from home, you don’t have to worry about arbitrary limits being placed on your searches. Run it as long as you want! Searches 1m+ are quite easy and you can find thousands of domains from one URL.

…

Oh, and the beta expires June 7th, so don’t waste time and free domains. Give it a shot now!

Source: Ox Expired Domains Scraper

Filed Under: Graphic Design

The 100 Top Typefaces (in a Huge Sortable Table)

June 2, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

top best fontsAn Inspiring Collection of Fonts

FontShop sold a typeface collection called “100 Best Fonts” for a limited time in Germany a little while back. The website for this special promotion generously listed the names of all 100 best typefaces for graphic design with background information in German. When the typeface collection was no longer available, the promotional site itself retained a life of its own, serving as a go-to reference for graphic designers looking for inspiration. The PDF on the promotional website is a beautiful piece of design work, a nice visual resource, and just plain fun to look at even if you don’t read German. (NOTE: You can click the typeface names for more info)

How could this great list be improved? I was interested into what categories and classifications these classic fonts were placed, what foundries they were from, and what interesting insights might avail themselves if I could see all the data in one place. I also wanted one place to see examples of all these great typefaces, so I put those together too. Enjoy, and leave a comment!

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Typography

Fonts that go with Century Gothic

May 25, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

Fonts that go with Century Gothic

If you do a google search for “what fonts go with…”, you’ll see Futura, Century Gothic, Bebas, and a few other suggestions pop up in the auto-suggest tool. We just did a post on fonts that look great with Futura, and now we are continuing on to Century Gothic.

Century Gothic is similar in some fundamental ways to Futura, but has some very unique differences that clearly set it apart. For instance, notice how the terminals of the letter “C” (and other letters) differ from each other in this illustration (which I reconstructed from an uncredited source on Pinterest):

Century Gothic vs Futura: Fonts that go with Century Gothic

The perpendicular cut of Futura seems to make it feel more “serious”, where Century Gothic feels a bit less formal. If you compare Century Gothic and Futura in a variety of settings, you’ll see that to a large degree they can be used interchangeably. So, let’s see what fonts work with Century Gothic, pulling from a list of classic typefaces we keep handy, and see what kind of look and feel we can get going.

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Typography

What Fonts Go Well with Futura?

May 24, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

Futura Pairings

It’s back to the future with Futura and the well time-travelled question of what other typefaces go with it! As with any typeface with a lot of personality like Futura, you have to choose what to pair it with carefully. No matter what typeface you are trying to match, you have to repeat that golden rule to yourself. So let’s get right to it. I’ll toss out some suggestions and a few words about each font. As usual, we are going to stick with the most popular classic typefaces and not venture off into the world of random free fonts.

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Typography

500 Drawing Prompts: Octopus – Douglas Bonneville

May 22, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

I’ve started a drawing series over at douglasbonneville.com…I’ll post some highlights here.

Next up, Octopus. This was really fun to work on.

Source: 500 Drawing Prompts: Octopus – Douglas Bonneville

Filed Under: Drawing

What are the most popular web fonts in the world?

April 10, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

popular-web-fonts

Update 1/2019: We shut down our tracking stats! Sorry to see it go, but we moved on to other projects!

We are tracking nearly 2000 of the most popular web fonts across 10,000 of the most visited websites ranked by Alexa. Head on over to Fonts of the World to see and explore the data, and click some examples to see what you are missing!

The data is very interesting. Arial has the lions share of usage. Will Arial be the most popular font…forever? And look at how widespread the usage of icon fonts has become: as of today, the fifth most popular web fonts in the world is an icon font.

Most popular web fonts usage trends: coming soon!

We are adding weekly data and trending charts so we can track web font usage over time. It will be fascinating to see what the data reveals as the weeks go by and the data piles up.

Stop by Fonts of the World, and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter!

Filed Under: Graphic Design

Providence SEO: Dominate the Ocean State

April 6, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

rhode-island-seo

We got involved with local SEO in Rhode Island back in 2004. We moved our freelance graphic design business from Columbus, Ohio, and needed to optimize our website to pick up local clients. Back in those ancient days of the web, it took very little to rank highly in the categories we wanted. Those were they days! Search engines have changed a lot since those halcyon days.

Our Providence SEO adventure

Years later we are still highly ranking for any term we need to for our graphic design blog, BonFX. Our media has sold at the top of it’s category for over 5 years. For instance, google “font combinations” and buy our book 🙂 Our Rhode Island design agencies post is still our most visited local, Rhode Island-optimized post. We have had thousands of visitors to that page, for years. That is not going to change any time soon. It’s safe to say  you need this kind of “web traffic” too.

More leads through website optimization

It’s very simple to get started using the form below or visiting us here, and we now offer this service to you as a part of our expanding web and design business based in Warwick. Our methods are simple, proven, and powerful! You can rank your local RI business, in most cases, very easily if you know what to do. And you need a real Providence SEO to pull it off.

And yes, you really do need the kind of traffic from being in the top 10 of the search engine results (watch our 30 second video: SEO RI).

Well, what do you do? You hire us, and get going to work for you. Our powerful domain software coupled with our exclusive trade methods can get just about any local business in on the first page of Google in a very short period of time. Each client is different, but the method is the same.

Yes, you are interested.

And what is the final question?

Do you have too many clients for your local business?

This is a problem you probably don’t have, right? Our job is to give you that problem, by getting positioning you as highly as possible through our proven methods.

Help us do our job for you!

Talk to us!

So please have a little chat with us. We invite you to look at how the process will work for your site.

 

Your Name (required - It's not "Buddy")

Your Email (required - e.g. "iggy@coffeemilk.com"

What is the top SEO Question burning in your mind? (0ptional - but it's not "Where do I get milk and bread?")

 

 

Filed Under: Graphic Design

The 14 Most Popular Free Sans-Serif Fonts That Are Actually Useful

February 24, 2015 by Douglas Bonneville

Free fonts can be sourced from innumerable free font websites these days. Most free fonts, however, are of dubious quality and limited practicality. One of our devoted interests is collecting the most useful free fonts for use in our own projects. And so you, our dear reader, get to benefit from our research that we give away free!

Today we have fourteen of the most popular free sans-serif fonts that meet our criteria for usefulness. Our criteria is very simple, and yet it is very difficult to find free typefaces that meet them. Let’s have a look at the criteria.

A useful free sans-serif typeface must have these qualities or attributes:

  • It must be good looking
  • It must not have any overly-deviant or idiosyncratic glyphs that limit it’s usefulness
  • Have Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights
  • It must be proven to be already popular: this is an important part of the vetting process. In matters like this, the crowd’s opinion matters tremendously

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Free Fonts

Graphic Design Quote of the Day: Creativity, not Computer Savvy

November 27, 2014 by Douglas Bonneville

design quote jul 8

Today it is a challenge for designers to avoid being seduced by technology. As sophisticated as computer applications may be, they  are only tools for the creative mind. Truly successful designs begin with ideas and concepts. As you execute your designs on the computer, your knowledge of typography, combined with your trained eye and aesthetic judgment, will provide the path to the most creative solution.

-James Craig, Designing With Type

Filed Under: Graphic Design

Hostnine Review – It’s time to give these guys some credit!

October 28, 2014 by Douglas Bonneville

Hostnine shared hosting review

It’s time to give a healthy dose of credit where it is due! With so many places to buy shared hosting, reseller hosting, and various VPS services, and with wildly-crazy levels of service and value among the myriad choices, I know it’s helpful to read reviews about web hosting companies from trusted sources. BonFX has been around long enough and has been hosted long enough with the same hosting company to offer a very qualified review. To say the least, Hostnine has been a partner for us and I want to tell you a little about them, and I want you to sign up for them if you need a new web host, reseller or shared, or a cloud VPS.

… [Read More]

Filed Under: WordPress Blogging

Where to buy expired domains

October 16, 2014 by Douglas Bonneville

Where to buy expired domains

Simple: at our new sister site Oxbow Domains – the expired domain specialist!

If you need high-quality, no-spam expired domains for your PBN, SEO work, or affiliate sites, please check out Oxbow.

Logo, Branding, and Design

We had a blast working on the logo and branding for the site. The logo is a stylized ox bow, and references our crawler software, Ox.

The website is designed at and hosted by Squarespace, and uses their Pacific template. This is the first time we’ve used Squarespace Commerce and it is really an excellent product. Highly recommended.

Even if you aren’t on the market for expired domains (yes, it’s a niche market to say the least), do stop by and see how GREAT the design is, and how flexible Squarespace can be.

Explain in a few words, what are expired domains for?

Links from quality sites to your main website are the main factor in how Google ranks the quality of your site. If you can’t easily get natural, organic links back to your site, you can create a “network” of websites using domains from sites that themselves had a naturally strong set of links  pointing to them. If you acquire these domains, add new content, and generally make them look like “real” sites again, Google will allow the “link juice” from those reconstituted sites to flow down to your main site. So, if you collect a little set of these “expired domains” and fluff them back up, you can reap the benefit of the hard work of the previous owners, and Google’s ranking method is glad to help your main site that these “network” sites now point to! It’s a simple yet powerful concept that takes advantage of how Google works.

Filed Under: Graphic Design

A book of free wedding font combinations?

September 15, 2014 by Douglas Bonneville

Free Wedding Font Combinations

We get a lot of traffic about font combinations because of our typography book, font app, font articles, etc. One of the most popular searches that we don’t have any posts or books on is for “free wedding font combinations”. So this is a shout out to anyone searching for some help on how to put together typography for wedding invitations, professional or otherwise, using only freely-available typefaces. Would you be interested in a book dedicated to this topic? From what we can tell there is a lot of interest, but we aren’t sure if it’s enough to justify a dedicated book. Take a look at The Big Book of Font Combinations to get an idea of what a wedding invitation focused book might look like.

… [Read More]

Filed Under: Font Combinations

Re-redesign of nbcnews.com gets it right, sort of

August 4, 2014 by Douglas Bonneville

The widely-panned nbcnews.com website redesign from February 2014 is getting a facelift—after a really bad facelift!

You read it here first. In my previous article highlighting the flop redesign of nbcnews.com, I excoriated the horrible design misfire and left it at that. In private conversation, I told friends how such a bad user experience was going to impact their reader stats negatively. Well, the numbers are in:

nbcnews.com redesign

The nbcnews.com website was already declining when the silly redesign was launched in February. They had a functional site, but the hyper-partisan cheerleading, I mean news reporting, was the real issue behind their decline in the first place. The overly-picturesque giant-comic-book redesign effort, which was an attempt at a branding turnaround, simply hastened the continued decline in visitors because it was simply unreadable as a source of news. Apparently, some Very Smart People™ at nbcnews.com thought mixing partisan news, coloring books, and Flickr, would equal a turnaround in the decline of their viewership. It did not work.

So how does the new design look, which is available for the moment in a preview opt-in section of the site? In a word, improved:

nbcnews-redesign

There are now 17+ story links above the fold, and a full suite of site navigation tools to quickly get you some place else. And if you flip to a mobile device, you get a very-workable no-nonsense sans-comic-book layout and typographic treatment (hidden pun in there, for sharp-readers only).

The mobile view looks good too:

nbcnew-redesign-mobile

Overall, we can see it’s very much a work in progress, but progress in the right direction.

What about Search? Let’s quote my previous post on this:

“BTW: Don’t even click “Search” unless YOU ARE READY FOR SOME SERIOUS SEARCHING! WOOHOO!

You clicked “Search”, didn’t you. You were warned.”

Hopefully they’ll fix that search box before the real site goes live :).

In the meantime, if you want a ton of news in a legible format, try Real Clear Politics (for desktop) or the Real Clear Politics app (for mobile). You’ll get a cross-section of headlines from all major news outlet in a cohesive, news-focused UI that knows what it is trying to do.

 

Filed Under: Web Design

Redesign of nbcnews.com gives “mobile-first” strategy a black eye

February 5, 2014 by Douglas Bonneville

Visit nbcnews.com now. The “news” site has 5 headlines. I’m on a Mac with a 1080p display. This is what 5 headlines on a 1080p display looks like:

news

This is what happens when someone doesn’t get mobile-first.

Mobile-first should mean optimizing the content and design starting with mobile, not starting and ending with mobile. I’m looking at a formerly desktop-friendly news site that is 100% unusable on a desktop device.

This is such a goofy misapplication of mobile-first methodology that it’s goofy.

Let me just say that I wrote a little piece called 52 Question Checklist for Responsive Web Design Projects that was written to prevent goofy misapplications of mobile-first, or responsive web design, exactly like what we see at nbcnews.com. It annoyed a few people. I wonder if any of those people are on the design team at nbcnews.com?

Ok, so the world should design websites mobile-first. We get it. It’s right. It’s “how to build websites” now. But someone in charge of nbcnews.com only read the table of contents to “Mobile-First Web Design for Dummies” (is that a real book?), stopped there, not realizing they didn’t get it. This is Windows 8 all over again. Truly mobile paradigms are….mobile! They don’t translate to desktops! Hasn’t anyone on the design team at nbcnews.com been paying attention…to anything?

Oh well, another day, another deleted bookmark to a formerly relevant or usable site.

BTW: Don’t even click “Search” unless YOU ARE READY FOR SOME SERIOUS SEARCHING! WOOHOO!

You clicked “Search”, didn’t you. You were warned.

 

Filed Under: Web Design

Font Combinations

October 5, 2013 by Douglas Bonneville

Here are the three (well, four) best resources for creating classic font combinations that we know of:

  • The Big Book of Font Combinations (our book)
  • 29 principles for making great font combinations (our big list of principles)
  • 14 Top Typeface and Font Combinations Resources (our big list of resources)

The resource page has pretty much all the classic font combination pages and resources from over the last decade. If you start there, you are going to get all the info you need. There are other more modern sites that focus on examples rather than principles, such as I Font You, but they tend to be a bit random. A book like The Big Book of Font Combinations takes a systematic approach and limits itself to a core subset of the most popular fonts of all time.

BONUS REFERENCE: You can also find many of the classic fonts, pre-typeset and mixable on the fly in, our iPhone App, Font Combinations 2.0.

font-combinations

 

Filed Under: Font Combinations

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