Design Pepper

I’m tired of web designers equating minimalism and good design. I suppose the final straw was when I saw Dmitry at Usability Post say this: [Minimalism is] a trend in design where the subject is “reduced to its necessary elements”? As opposed to a design …

While Shopify provides a great ecommerce solution, the built-in blogging software isn’t as feature-rich as WordPress or Blogger. One of the more annoying issues for me was lack of avatar support. Fortunately, the Shopify staff recently made it much easier to show user …

Version control systems are a foreign concept to a lot of designers and front end developers. I've known about Git and Subversion (SVN) for quite a while, but as a one man shop, never really saw a need to use them. That changed when I began to develop themes that would be used …

Here's the latest and greatest from the world of design and the web... Less Talk, More Rock In this beautifully illustrated post, game dev superbrothers argues that more often than not, talk gets in the way of doing something awesome. Revisiting Conspicuous …

Working in web design can feel incredibly confining at times. Header goes here. Sidebar here. Duplicate your base HTML and CSS templates. Rinse. Repeat. In a field so governed by conventions, what can we do to breathe life and originality into our work? Focus on just one thing. A …

Thanks to their excellent articles in 24 Ways, Meagan Fisher and Andy Clarke have kicked off another round of controversy about designing in the browser. While many web designers are excited about this "new" way of working, others seem to fear an invasion of blocky, boring …

Selected from our ever growing stack of RSS feeds, here are three great articles we came across this week. In Defense of Lorem Ipsum Good old lorem ipsum text has been taking quite a thrashing in the design community lately. But Karen McGrane argues that it's not all bad, …

In a recent article, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov reflected on an experiment designed to create the most competitive chess games ever played. In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a "freestyle" chess tournament in which anyone …

One of my favorite things about the new Design Pepper site is the background images. What's so special about the background images? They rotate every hour. While the concept isn't particularly groundbreaking I think the different images add a touch of freshness for returning visitors. …

As I've mentioned before, the Design Pepper site recently switched from WordPress to Expression Engine. So I thought that I'd put together a high level overview of the differences between the two systems. 1. EE requires a lot more configuration With a typical WordPress …

If you've visited the Design Pepper website in the past couple of weeks, you probably noticed that it's sporting a new look. It's also been updated under the hood. Here are a few of the highlights. (If you're using a feedreader, you might want to click through to …

We'd be lying if we said we scoured the web on our hands and knees for these links. With more than 900 RSS feeds pouring content into the Design Pepper monitors, it takes highly skilled technicians working around the clock to snatch the best fish from the stream for your …

The end of this article has something remarkable in it. Scroll down to see what I mean.  Did you see it? There's nothing there. No pleading for you to make us go viral or begging you to be our RSS homie. There's a simple choice: Leave a comment or bounce. This makes …

I was recently introduced to thesixtyone, which is a great way to discover interesting new music, especially if you appreciate indie efforts. They have a great user interface. But what most intrigued me was the way they had built a reward system into the site. As you explore, you …

Confession: If you want to see me respond in a dramatic and possibly amusing way, drop a few ice cubes on my kitchen floor and watch my face when I place a sock-covered foot in one of the resulting icy puddles. Actual Content: What makes my admission of eccentricity useful and …