A while back I started a series of articles with the intent of bringing the basics of graphic design to the masses.  I started with the premise that good design concepts should be accessible to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you are an artist, an accountant or a homemaker the basics of color and layout are accessible concepts.

In the spirit of those articles i decided to collect the thoughts and examples into an easy to read E-book, or PDF for the rest of us. I hope you enjoy. This book distills parts of my lecture from podcamp on graphic design tricks as well as touching on simple accessibility design hacks to make sure that your blog reaches the widest number of people.

How you present your ideas can matter more than what you have to say.

If you have great content why make it painful to read.

CaffiNation Blog Design Guide FREE  E-Book Download right here

This is a short and simple post, consider it a best practices for blogging and website management in general. Back up all of your article and your uploads very frequently. The best looking design in the world doesn’t mean anything if your carefully tweaked theme is erased by a errant keystroke. This article will focus on WordPress installs because its what I am most familiar with. For Drupal, Joomla, or hosted blogs your mileage will vary but the sentiment remains the same.

The entirety of the Caffination Podcast as you see it right now has disappeared twice so far, both my fault. Just a tip when your blog asks you “are you sure?” Make sure that you are. But because i had backups running it was only down for a total of 30 minutes between the two mistakes. I have never had a catastrophic hardware failure on the server level, I have never lost all of the files on the server, failed to pay a bill and had my account closed or anything like that but you get the drift. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone wants their content to be accessible to as many people as possible, why not change the way you do things slightly to open your blog up to a whole different audience?  It isn’t that hard, a few minor tweaks.

Blogs are an inherently visual media, from layout to color choice each decision that you make sets the website up as a canvas to be viewed. The problem with thinking that way is that there is a very voracious group of users who crave knowledge and want to consume content but are visually impaired, so you canvas means nothing to them, or does it?

As it turns out some small design changes can make your blog, or website much more accessibility to blind and visually impaired users. A quick run down of the changes and choices which you need to take into consideration when designing your site, or making changes to the layout. Build from the left to the right, Putting your blog-roll on the right hand side allows for the first content picked up by screen readers to be the content of your site, and not the sites you link to. Read the rest of this entry »

So you think you’re all set now that your blog is up, laid out and designed. Well you still do need to put some stuff up there for people to read. This isn’t about writing for SEO, writing for awards or writing for fun. This is about writing to inform. You have content, you feel a need to get it out there. How can you possibly gain a wider audience for your content? Well there are some small tips for writing copy that i can share with you that will send you well on your way. Read the rest of this entry »

In the continuing series on small ways to make your content pop and turn the design of your site into an asset rather than an issue. Today’s little post is going to pose a couple of small things for you to consider, and general rules that you should try to consider when you move things around.

Location, Location, Location:

If you are part of the English speaking world chances are that your eyes naturally flow from left to right and top to bottom when you look at a website, unless you have been reading a ton of Hebrew, or Japanese most people’s eyes travel across a page like this. So where you have the content on the site dictates whether people will act on it first or not at all. Read the rest of this entry »

So now you have  a blog with a great new theme, you even managed to change the header color to something you really like you are at a bit of a loss from there. Some graphic designers out there might try to kill me for writing this article but it has to be done. Not everyone has the budget for a professional graphic designer, not everyone even knows someone who is good with web design. But that doesn’t mean your content should suffer being ignored because of it.

Part 1 the Basics:

Color Choices:

When you start your blog or a redesign you might want to spend a couple of minutes considering what colors you would like to have included in the overall design of your site. Do you have a favorite color? how do you want your site perceived? Better men and women than I have spent years studying color and its affects on the human brain, but that doesn’t mean you need to. Bright active hues can make the site friendly, cool calm hues can make your site invoke a relaxed feel. With the CaffiNation I tried to pick colors that both relaxed, and gave a gentle reminder of coffee / tea with milk in it. Even though I prefer my beverages black the color of cup of coffee with cream in it is a subtle way of connecting to people via the design of the site. A cup of dark, rich black coffee is very hard to differentiate from black and is a bit too bold for how I wanted the site to appear. Read the rest of this entry »