Design Pepper

Ah, the benefits of Twirling Brides. Just throw a few of them into your designs and you're sure to win accolades, increase return on investment, and become the most sought after designer in your industry. Well, maybe not, but it sure can't hurt. The question you're …

Though there has been a great deal of talk about typography on web design blogs recently, one area that hasn't really received much attention is the differences in anti-aliasing fonts across different systems. What is anti-aliasing? Because computer displays are based on …

Those of you who are regular readers may remember that I've been working on a free WordPress theme for a while. Today, you finally get to see some of the work. I call it Vitruvian Theme. Inspired by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the idea of balance and proportion is built into …

Photo by Coneee (license) If you've been following along with me so far, you know that content is more important than design and that the way you judge a website's content is by its purpose. So now it's time to start translating that purpose into great content. Here …

Photo by a VeCeS Veo… (license) Last week I talked about how a website's content is more important than its design. The point of a design is to support the website's content. But how can you tell if the content itself is doing it's job? You have to know what …

One thing that I've noticed about web designers who care about good design is that we often tend to focus on a design as if it were the most important aspect of a web site. The problem is that it's not. To adapt a phrase, "It's the content, …

Photo by ecstatisist (license) It is pretty common to hear web designers complain about clients' not understanding good web design. Sometimes the complaints are justified. But many times the problem isn't the client but the designer's failure to educate them about …

Photo by victor nuno (license) This past Saturday, I was killing a little time by watching Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. It was predictably cheesy, with the main characters as barely-held-together comic book stereotypes. But what struck me most was the character of the …

Photo by emdot (license) Besides being a web designer, in my spare time I also work on writing novels. While they're not Stephen King, actually going through the process has taught me a bit about what it takes to write a successful novel. What I realized the other day, …

Facebook is one of those sites that everyone seems to point to when demonstrating the transformative character of "Web 2.0″ and social networking. But I never quite understood why. I've used Facebook, but I came away hating it rather than loving its web 2.0 …

Since my previous post on 6 Web Design Tips from Leonardo Da Vinci was so popular, I decided to follow it up with another one, this time from Michelangelo. I'm considering making these posts into a regular feature. Let me know what you think! 1. Start young and study …

Jonathan Fields And The Art Of Building Many Businesses At Once — Jarkko Laine – Insanely interested A very interesting interview about juggling many ventures at one time. How I've Been Holding Myself Back And How to Avoid Stagnation In Your Business Time …

Photo by Zack Birkenbuel (license) If you spend any amount of time in the field of photography, you have probably come across the concept of the rule of thirds. For those not familiar with the rule, it states that compositions will tend to be more interesting if the areas of …

Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire artists, scientists and others. Here are six things we can learn from him about web design. 1. Be curious One of the most remarkable things about Leonardo is …

"Beauty is the splendor of truth." This was a saying of the medieval scholastic philosophers. The basic idea is that Beauty (capital B) always has its source in Truth. They weren't stupid about the way that beauty and falsehood is often mixed on earth, but they …