Stuff & Nonsense product and website design

Posts about Design

A book for your inspiration collection: Alex Steinweiss

There’s so much we can learn from books about editorial, graphic, and print design to help us get web design out of its rut. So, I’m sharing my collection and recommend this book about the work of Alex Steinweiss, the inventor of the modern album cover.

A book for your inspiration collection: Richard Hollis

To help get web design out of its rut, I think people should look outside the web to all areas of design for inspiration. There’s so much we can learn from books about editorial, graphic, and print design. So, I’m sharing my collection and recommend this book about the work of British designer Richard Hollis.

Quick typography tips №1

Here’s a quick design tip for improving the readability and style of long passages of running text.

A book for your inspiration collection: David King

I’m sharing my design books collection to help encourage designers to drag web design out from its rut. I recommend this book about the work of British designer and design historian David King.

A book for your inspiration collection: Paula Scher

To help get web design out of its rut, I think people should look outside the web to all areas of design for inspiration. So, I’m sharing my collection and recommend this book about the work of American graphic designer Paula Scher.

A book for your inspiration collection: Wim Crouwel

To help get web design out of its rut, I think people should broaden their knowledge of all areas of design. So, I’m sharing my collection and recommend this book about the work of Dutch designer Wim Crouwel.

A book for your inspiration collection: Robert Massin

My bookcase holds my growing collection of books about editorial and graphic design and studying them has completely changed how I approach design. To help get web design out of its rut, I think people should broaden their knowledge of these areas of design. So, I’m sharing my collection as it grows.

Layout Love: Take the guesswork out of layout by using ratios

One of my biggest problems with grids included with frameworks is that they offer little or no help in deciding proportional relationships between elements. Ratios can be an enormous help in determining these relationships, but they’re rarely written about in relation to web design. I want to change that.

Layout Love. How and why I built it

I’m not a framework user. I’ve never once used Bootstrap and I didn’t use 960gs or Blueprint before that. I can understand the benefits of using a framework or off-the-shelf templates, but they weren’t ever for me. Still, I wanted a simple set of layout modules I could call on for design projects, so I developed my own. I call them Layout Love.

Layout Love: Modular grids for visually appealing layouts

As I’ve said plenty of times before, a well-chosen grid can do much, much more than align content. Our choice of grid can influence how we approach a design and it can change how we think about layout. That’s especially true of modular grids.

Layout Love: How a 3+4 compound grid can improve on 12-columns

Compound grids offer exciting and often unconventional layout possibilities. Most importantly, they also encourage us to think differently about the choices we make when we’re designing layouts. If you’re familiar with the grid made ubiquitous by Bootstrap, a 3+4 compound grid is a great place to start learning about compound grids.

Stuffed with layout options: Using a 4+5 compound grid

A generation of product and website designers has grown up with 12 or 16 column grids from Bootstrap-style frameworks. In those frameworks, columns are used mostly for aligning content. In my new design for Stuff & Nonsense, I wanted to go beyond that and use a compound grid to influence the entire design.

52 weeks of Inspired Design Decisions #38 — Saul Bass

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 38 and my design this week was again inspired by Saul Bass.

In a career which spanned over 40 years, Saul Bass not only designed some of America’s most iconic logos, but also designed title sequences and film posters for some of Hollywood’s best filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. For Hitchcock, Bass created innovative title sequences for films including North by Northwest, Psycho, and Vertigo. The opening sequence of Mad Men—one of my favourite TV shows—pays homage to Bass who died in 1996 aged 75.


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About Andy

Hello. I’m Andy Clarke, an internationally recognised product and website designer and writer on art direction for products the web. I help product and website owners captivate customers by delivering distinctive digital designs.


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