The way to choose the right color especially in webdesign depends on many things. Personal favourites and the focus on the appliance of the site are important. Color theory and the meanings and psycological aspects of colors are often discussed. Here is a nice article about all these aspects:

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/a-look-into-color-theory-in-web-design/

But what about how to find the right color? Who is faster and sure what to choose? In my daily work I often stumble upon different types of customers. Some give examples and know what they want. Others ask for propositions what to choose. Others compare printed colors with the monitors color, printed on whatever a printer.

I often wonder why the most difficult decisions are caused by people who ask many others what to do! With different monitors and different ideas and points of view. And see one thing – often it is more difficult with women.

I just found a nice page with a list of female webdesingers: http://www.leemunroe.com/25-hot-female-web-designers. So I was curious and looked at some of the listed pages and further the suggested pages in the comments.

My personal selection is here – and I hope there will be more suggestions, too. Maybe we will reach the 100s? Sure. Give them to me! Use this as your showcase.

http://yaili.com/ – London

http://www.dream-design.net/

http://www.evalotta.net/

http://girlatplay.com

http://www.kaiusdesign.com/index.html

http://www.pixelhorse.de/

http://peejeej.com/

http://www.pixelgraphix.de/

http://www.lealea.net/

http://www.sarahenid.net/

http://juliakhusainova.com/

Often I wonder if women work better together with other women or with men? Here in webdesign my collegues are both but depending on the number of individuals I work often together with men. So it is kind of lack of expierience. My focus is more on the work not on “private” interests. Looking at female networks my imprssion was, that talking about private female interests such as family, clothing etc. is very important – but not for me. I work and think problem based (if that exsist in english?).
But further in cooperations I often think that women are not so sure and proud of their work. The often ask others (what men seldom do) and are quite difficult making decisions. On the other hand men can often not accept another point of view and try to make their own thing looking the best ever. For this reason I prefer askers who can make decisions, too!

Right now I found a nice magazine about women in typography and graphic design: Slanted issue 12. It follows my intention to show that we are someone and somewhere working! Often only male artists, designers e.g. are in focus but we are nearly the same number of individuals on this planet.

Let’s have a look at the mag’s original description:
“Beat That If You Can! – “Slanted #12 – Women, Typography, Graphic Design” is a stage for extraordinary and intelligent projects by women. This is not a very special thing. For our focus on visual culture it’s all the same whether a (typo-)graphic work has been realized by a female or a male being. But it’s undeniable and strange that still only very few women are visible in graphic design (more) and typography (less). We want to contribute to more visibility for at least some female type and graphic designers – design by women is at least just as well. Beat That If You Can!

With great pleasure we present the work of Ariane Spanier (Berlin), Julia Born (Amsterdam) and Verena Gerlach (Berlin), the photographic essays “Brides of Krishna” by Kalpesh Lathigra (dmbmedia / London) and “Female Marines” from the archives of the U.S. Marine Corps as well as contemporary typefaces, illustrations and graphic projects by female designers. Type essays by Laure Boer (Berlin) and Gerda Breuer/Julia Meer (Wuppertal) are dealing with the role of women in graphic design and typography and outline a corresponding history. Numerous interviews with Verena Gerlach (Berlin), Ariane Spanier (Berlin, Nadine Chahine (Bad Homburg), Veronika Burian (Prag), Laura Worthington (Washington), Kapitza (London), Geneviève Gauckler (Paris), Esen Karol (Istanbul), Akiko Kanna (Tokyo) and Susanne Baer (Tokyo) as well as the second part of the Tokyo report by Ian Lynam (Tokyo), a musical travelogue and a paper report round up stuff to read.

Slanted Magazine #12
Women, Typography, Graphic Design
Autumn/Winter
148 pages”*

*order and see here: http://www.slanted.de/eintrag/slanted-12-women-typography-graphic-design

Newsletters are a fast and cheap way for marketing. In our first issue we collected articles about contents and concepts. Now we look at the design, coding and testing.

There are many clients you can use free for receiving eMails. Freemail clients as yahoo, hotmail or solutions as lotus notes, outlook … We decided to send designed newsletters in html and hope the user agreed to receive html. To have a good result in all clients here are the best links:

General tipps for your code

• 20 best practices by nettuts
• 6 ways to improve html mails by nettuts
• CSS compatibility
• Design guidelines
• Design mistakes
• Crossclient work by adobe
• How to code by sitepoint
• 10 Basics HTML for newsletters
• Design and build newletters seen by SMASHINGMAGAZINE

Testing the newsletter

Testing can be solved if you have many addresses at all common freemailers and clients installed. Not very efficient and not in all cases a good practice because it depends on the mailer, too, how the code is presented in the client. If you send a html mail using copy and paste with outlook, outlook will modify the code itself. A service for testing your code is previewmyemail.com, it offers some clients views’ free and nearly all for a fee.

• http://www.previewmyemail.com/

In our first issue, we look at the general ideas of design a newsletter and the most efficient way to present contents.

Keep it small, short and interesting

1. The newsletter should be not wider than 600px, and give a first impression in the preview panel.
2. Use the main theme in the header and the subject.
3. Don’t write the whole article about … use headlines and short blocks and give links to read more. The more contents can be on your homepage. If you use a professional solution you can use tracking tools – to check the response.
4. If you can send attachments use common formats as pdf. Often clients have a limit for receiving attachments. Keep it under 1 MB.

What others say

• e-how email-marketing-guidelines
• 20 best practices by nettuts
• Design guidlines by campaignmonitor

Thank you foru your suggestions and links!

In the past we had to be in the kitchen and look after the kids. Later we started working, but as we didn’t learn anything else than cleaning and cooking, the jobs where payed very low. The times has changed in many ways but there is still a difference about the money we earn. It depends not only in our education or expierience. What are the reasons in your opinion and how much do you earn? Post a comment and take part in our poll. Men are welcome. Links to other related articles are welcome, too.

Maybe we can collect some differences here:

W O M E N vote here about what is your hourly rate in webdesign?

• < 10 $
• 10 - 50 $
• 51 - 100 $
• more than 100 $

View Results

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M E N vote here about what is your hourly rate in webdesign?

• < 10 $
• 10 - 50 $
• 51 - 100 $
• more than 100 $

View Results

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Sometimes you need a quick layout or nobody wants to pay for the design.  This is when your looking for free templates – we did it and found some amazing ones.

In all cases you have to take care if free is really free. Sometimes adapting is possible, sometimes there are a free and a licensed version as well.

I think, individual is the best way even for developers, because adapting an exsisting code is often more complicated than coding in your style.

Another point is inspiration. Creative people have ideas but looking at examples will give us new ideas, too. This doesn’t mean copy but modify and take parts. In the best case it’s just an idea and it doesn’t look as a copy afterwards.

Here are some resources for free templates and inspiration

TEMPLATES

http://chocotemplates.com/

http://cssmayo.com/

http://www.freewebtemplates.com/

http://www.styleshout.com/

http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/ – more a coding resource, but endless

http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html

PSD

http://freepsdfiles.net/

http://photoshopcandy.com/category/free-psds/

EMAIL

http://freemailtemplates.com/

Maybe it started in 1999 with the http://www.womendesignersgroup.net/ that women arrived in webdesign. The next milestone – I don’t know but later in 2007 when this article about women in webdesign was written: http://www.zeldman.com/2007/04/19/women-in-web-design/ by a man .

Ok let’s go on, here http://whdb.com/2008/100-awesome-webmaster-blogs-by-and-for-women/ a really large list is published – about active female webdesigners.

What happend elsewhere? In germany the http://www.webgrrls.de/ network started in 1997 – unfortunately it is not free to participate.

I think it’s time to talk a bit about our work. We do it and we can show it.

Write a comment if you are a webdesign-related woman! Say hi and leave a url – that’s enough, don’t loose time.

Tooltips are a good thing for a better usability in webdesign – you find a good description about them in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooltip. They are shown when you hover a link or menu element. With css you can modify the tip as you like.

Design of tooltips for links – with javascript

A javascript based library by Walter Zorn you find here. Another Version at dyn-web.com. Based on the javascript library jQuery a plugin helps to design tooltips – find more about it here.

and css only

A better way for all users would be to use css  http://lixlpixel.org/css_tooltip/ and as whole popups here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/popups/demo.html

Some love it some hate it

In case you design a menu an extra tooltip could disturb the user. Often tooltips are used to explain a link – but in a menu it’s clear and not good to use. What can you do – where does they come from? Each link with a title attribute will show a tooltip. So the easiest thing to do would be to delete the title attribut within the link.

Special Joomla: In the basic mainmenu there are no titles – fine – but some people think they need them, so you use the extended menu module to add them.

For SEO reasons, titles can be useful. They are good if they give extra information about the link – but in a menu you should avoid just to repeat the link name in the title.