We love our friends across the pond! DesignFridge UK has included billupsdesign.com among its best Web 2.0 sites of 2009. That’s a pretty nice tip of the old derby. If you have time, visit DesignFridge UK, and see their entire gallery of 2009 outstanding web sites designed and developed in html/css. To view our feature page, go here. Thanks, gentle people!
Read More1. Using Pre-made Form Elements
Often when designing a web comp we need to incorporate items that are part of the browser GUI. These elements, like it or not, are part of the overall design. So its often many designer’s habit to fire up their browser, find a checkbox, radio button, text input, etc. and grab a screen shot. However, there is a better way. The Designer’s Toolbox has done all this for us and organized every browser’s unique elements into an easy to use layered PSD file. Just keep them nearby and whenever you need a browser GUI element you can…
Thank you to the good folks at Creattica who recently featured the Billups Design web site as an outstanding example of interface design and HTML/CSS practices. You can visit the page here: Creattica feature page. We are already meeting many new people because of this prestigious feature posting and we’re excited!
Read MoreThis is just a reminder to our readers and clients that one of the most critical pieces of building a great brand and great web site rests with copywriting. It is the single greatest persuader on any web site despite all the advances in multimedia, social networking, etc. As an example of how things can go terribly wrong, I’ve grabbed this site from an able competitor in UK and highlighted some of the problems they’ve created for themselves that impact their credibility.
My first point is that they should be especially careful when proofreading their display message on their home page.…
Read MoreRecently I came across a little cross browser bug concerning the “button” element that caused some headaches between Webkit browsers and Firefox. The button element can be a great tool that is generally under utilized. It offers many more flexible options than the “input” element and degrades more gracefully than the “a” element. A great writeup can be found on the Particle Tree blog (Creators of the amazing form creation tool, Wufoo).
The problem I was encountering was when I was adding a span inside the button for design resigns and realized that no matter what I did Firefox was adding a…
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This is indeed something to celebrate! Billups Design has been once again recognized by the Web Marketing Association Awards for 2009, earning the Consumer Goods Standard of Excellence Award. We are excited to receive this award on behalf of Nike and the Nike ID Custom Shoe Builder application launched earlier this year. More exciting yet, the project was hailed by Nike as a major success and they have now designated Billups Design a preferred agency. Thank you to all the usual suspects – you’ve done it again!
Read MoreWe’re very excited to have been spotlighted in this year’s AIGA Chicago Annual 2009 for our work on the Nike ‘Show Your Colors’ digital contest campaign / HighSchoolSports design and code integration. We want to congratulate everyone on the team who contributed to this project here; your seamless integration, technical and artistic contributions in collaboration with our partner agencies made this project a rollicking success! And thank you, AIGA Chicago. We’ll see you next year.
Read MoreIt has been a good year for Billups Design in the awards category. We are happy to announce that the 2009 American Design Awards have recognized Billups Design with a Silver Medal for its work on markshale.com. The site was rated for its eCommerce engine, usability and layout, overall brand and interface design and cross-browser compatibility. This is a high honor for us as we’ve always admired the other winners in this semi-annual / annual competition. Congratulations to everyone on the Mark Shale team (SB, SB, RM and RK) and the BD team (RN, TB, CS, SM, and OI)!
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Read MoreWe published this as a whitepaper a while back, but feel it still has the power to benefit any organization involved with planning and producing a web development initiative.
Perhaps the most costly and painful experience for any company initiating a new web project are the planning and launching phases. In the case of planning, different departments within the company (too many in some cases) are invited to early conceptual and business objective meetings. Each person has a different perspective. Each person has a different level of expertise. Personal and professional agendas get in the way, too. Draft after draft, plan…
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