Typography is more than just selecting a font. Design geeks know there are issues of kerning and ligatures, and that these effect how hard or easy your text is to read.

You can typically find the most frustrated web designers slaving over Internet Explorer or Windows in some form. Browser bugs, text-rendering… it’s no wonder most designers and developers hack it in an Apple-rendered Mac environment.

Enter a little CSS trick that doesn’t work on Mac OS X (largely because it doesn’t need it).

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

BOOyah. Know it, and love it.

Cha-ching! You can hear it now. Your customer’s final payment is almost coming and you can actually pay for that iPad you bought on credit before you started this project. You know, the one you said would change your entire design process. (It did. You now spend way too much time playing tower defense games).

Whether we’re refugees from the paper-pushing world, digital purists, or tree-hugging environmentalists, we web designers seem to have an unreasonably strong dislike for “hard copies”. But maybe printing your final revisions is just what you need.

Are you REALLY done? Something about putting pages to ink gives you a mental signal that you better have dotted all your t’s and crossed all your i’s. (eh?) Printing out that final version helps you to pause with a subliminal gut check that you’re DONE done.

Whether you’re a designer or not, in this day and age chances are good you spend the better part of your day staring at a computer screen. Sometimes it helps to look at a design off-screen to catch inconsistencies and to re-do odd designs you dreamed up at 3am.

Lay all your pages out on the floor or pin them up on a wall. The spread helps you take a look at your entire site at once. Wow! You really did all that. Take a step back and look to see if your site wraps itself in to one coherent design. Is there a page that now just looks terribly out of place? Better open that text editor back up.

You’re done! Don’t forget to recycle.

Dieter Rams is one of the most well known and successful industrial designers, known for his brilliant work at Braun for over 30 years. Rams followed the approach “weniger, aber besser” which translates to “less, but better”. To give you a deeper understanding of that philosophy, Rams is quoted as saying that Jonathan Ive and the team at Apple are the only company today that still follow what he believes are the core values of design.

At the age of 78, Rams says he doesn’t own a computer, but his Ten Principles for Good Design certainly apply a great framework for web design:

Gone are the days of geocities websites. Thank God. Innovative web design evolves with and is developed with the latest in web technologies, such as semantic HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript libraries, with an eye kept on future technologies.

A good website design serves as a purposeful portal. Whether it is a social portal or an information portal, good web design focuses on the usefulness of a site to an end user, while excluding any elements that may detract from the user experience.

A site can be tremendously useful, but to keep traffic coming back, it needs “the look”. Even the extreme simplicity of a site like craigslist holds in itself an aesthetic beauty.

Good web design explains itself. Easy to use navigation and straight forward user interfaces are at the core of any good design.

Good web design is, for lack of a better word, moderate. Hot pink, 144pt article font certainly won’t keep your visitors coming back.

Hidden pay-per-click links and multi-page articles to increase pageview counts do nothing for the user, and certainly have no place in a good web design. A good web design does not manipulate users for the gain of the site’s owners.

Good web design is timeless. A trendy design may bring a repeat customer back sooner for a web designer, but a long lasting design focuses not on fashion, but builds and helps carry on the legacy of a brand.

Web designers and design recruiters love to talk up “pixel-perfect design”, but there is some enduring truth to these industry buzzwords. Sharing a common canvas with comparable work from other artists, the little things matter big in web design. The right color for a checkout button or the proper use of white-space can turn a great site in to a horrible site.

The web is its own eco-system. From cutting down on bandwidth use, to preventing visual pollution, a good web design is web environment friendly. Clean code, cross-browser compatibility, and minimal resource requirements. That’s green web design.

That 3 minute animated-Flash splash page to your website might be pretty cool the first time, but does it add to the experience of your site’s users? “Weniger, aber besser”. Less, but better. Words to live by.

You just said it wrong. WHAT?!

Sorry, fellow silly Americans. It’s not “Helvetica New,” it’s “Helvetica Noy-uh.”

DOH!

A European Union directive passed in 2003 prohibits tobacco companies from sponsoring cross-border sporting events.  In September of 2005, Marlboro/Philip Morris announced a sponsorship deal with Scuderia Ferrari through the 2011 F1 Season.  You probably can’t pick up a Formula 1 car at your local supermarket, but the F10 Ferrari has a barcode anyway.

Just a Ferrari Red F1 car and no sign of Marlboro anywhere, right?  Here’s a mockup from Graphicology.com.

Sneaky, sneaky!!!  Check out the Graphicology post for more photos.