Category Design

Online shopping

Deceptive Design and Dark Patterns

As we are in the midst of another holiday sales season, it’s a perfect time to examine the intersection of design, marketing, and sales techniques.  The best design clearly communicates a message or concept. Great design can compel someone to…

Grid overlay via CSS and a PNG

While working on a site’s CSS, I’ve been using transparent PNGs to overlay a grid image on the page in order to align design elements to the grid. Previously, I specified a repeating background grid image on the body tag, and commented it out when I didn’t want to see the grid. That works fine, but any child elements that use background images or colors will sit on top of the grid, obscuring it. And the repeating grid image will take the place of any background image which is supposed to be part of the design.

Photoshop 960 grid template

Here’s a Photoshop template for a page based on a grid 960 pixels wide. I have found this combination to be useful and start most projects with a variation of this file (the color palette I start with is different).