Minimalist/Flat Design

Flat design is a very popular trend in web design now. It focuses on the use of simplistic icons and buttons, colour variety and typography. It uses 2D symbols and shapes to communicate ideas and colours and layouts to enhance them.

Incorporated into the minimalist idea is the use of simple, smooth animations that help to make the space clutter free. 

It is important, however, as with all trends, to know when to use them on a website. Hence, one has to know what the purpose of the website and what style would best suit the needs of said website. For more on this trend, see the video below. 

-- T Y P O G R A P H Y --

Typography is more important to us on a daily basis than we realize. Whenever we read a text on a phone or see a newspaper article, it is the designer's knowledge of typography that helps to clearly communicate the purpose of the text. A typical example of this is below. 

As seen above, The use of fonts and its variants create a hierarchy of importance for the information. Please note:

• The title is in bold with a larger font size to emphasize its importance and to catch the reader's attention. 
• The subheading is bold and italic with a smaller font size to explain in brief the title.
• The body of the text is narrow and spaced so that the text and individual characters can be clearly seen, however, note that the author's name is coloured to show some separation in the purpose of that specific text. 

As web designers, it is important that we understand the principles behind typography that they may be incorporated in our work. One way to do so is by knowing what the purpose of what we design is. If we know its purpose then we can apply the principles with the use of appropriate fonts and colours and arrangement. 

Click here to read more on typographic principles! 

-Depicting Your Journey With Canvas!-

HTML Canvas is a good tool to be used when you'd like to put graphics or animation in a web page. The <canvas> element allocates space in which graphic work may be drawn using JavaScript or even animations made. An example of how it works is shown here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml5_canvas_first

Journey to Validation

What is Validation?

Web validation is when a software program is used to verify the proper syntax of a HTML, XTHML or CSS document against the web standards. 

Why Validate?

We validate our web pages because if man made it, they are most likely errors in  the code used to create and validation identifies these errors and displays them. Validation is also a method of quality assurance, ensuring that your customer(s) receive web markups that are up to standard with what it should be. 

Where Can One Validate Their Document?

There are online sites that can help to validate your web page as a means of promoting good web development practice. 

If you wish to validate your HTML or XTHML documents you may click here.

However, if you wish to validate your CSS stylesheets, there is an online way to do it here. 

Errors in your code can become like a disease, so get tested and stay on the journey.