Ideas, insights and inspirations.

My last blog post I wrote about the future of web grids by using CSS Grid Layouts. Recently I have been finding a lot of inspiration off of the grid. Finding a way to incorporate some more organic or random elements on the page. Over the weekend I visited the home page for one of my favorite photography social media and mobile app called VSCO  and was surprised to see a very unorthodox homepage (figure 1, 2, and 3) The site looks normal at first glance, a simple nav and a list of recent blog posts, but on hover (at large desktop sizes) the post items will load images from the post behind the text in a somewhat random order and position.   The interiors are more structured (figure 4) but still give the appearance of a random placement for images and text. It is easy to keep the web in a grid structure using frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, or … Continue reading

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This past June several Elliance team members had the pleasure of attending Web Design Day 2016. While many of the speakers presented interesting new ideas and techniques one seemed to stand out of the crowd for me, Jen Simmons’ ‘Revolutionize Your Page: Real Art Direction on the Web’. Her talk focused on upcoming web standards that will have great impact on how we design and develop web page layouts. You can watch a similar talk here. One of the most exciting features she covered was CSS Grid Layouts. What is a CSS Grid Layout? It is a browser native feature for making 2 dimensional grids on the web. In the past, after the introduction of CSS, we used tables to create layouts, this was followed by the use of floated elements and most recently we’ve been dabbling in flexbox. Of course CSS Grid Layouts are not ready for production, but Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are testing this new standard that you can use today (after … Continue reading

My family recently took a trip to Portugal and Spain. Be it my first time in Europe, I could compose a never-ending list of all the things that astounded me — from the decadent pastries to the new and exciting symphony of language that filled the air. The thing I found most astonishing, however, was the intricate architecture that sculpted each building we passed, on every street we ventured down. In these cities and towns, some over 500 years old, everything is a piece of art. From the cobblestone streets to the burnt Spanish-tiled roofs, every building brightly etched in a different color sidewalk chalk. I spent every day of our trip 10 steps behind the rest of the group, handicapped by my awestruck wonder and need to photograph every inch of the masterpiece before me. Even every door was a beautiful creation. Each original and treated with an attention to structure and detail that could not be ignored by … Continue reading

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Design for mobile first? No way. I was in denial. People couldn’t possibly enjoy trolling the Internet more on their smartphones than through their computers. Or could they? I thought about my own habits. Wake up. Check Facebook. Go about my morning routine. Get ready to leave the house. Facebook. Drive to work. Facebook. Go into work. Work for a little while. Eat a doughnut. Facebook… It’s a vicious cycle. But what does my millennial, forever-faithful relationship with Facebook have to do with the mobile-first web experience? The answer is everything. It’s a truth I wasn’t ready to accept, but then the usership numbers started rolling in on a landing page I designed recently. Ninety eight percent of users were visiting this particular landing page on their… you guessed it… mobile devices. And there it was: concrete, matter-of-fact, absolute data that proved my thinking was completely flawed. What now, huh? What does this mean? Thanks to Facebook, (Or, no thanks to Facebook, … Continue reading

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The Problem: During development on a recent project I was tasked with creating some Front End animations for a web app. This application would present a user with a list within two tabs (the tabs will display the list by either A-Z or by Category). Within these tabs you can also filter the list, and this is where the animation exists. Items would disappear and reappear. Wanting greater control over the animation, compared to simple JQuery, I started finessing CSS animation. I quickly ran into a problem. I found that the CSS animation would re-fire/re-paint when the tabbed content came back into view. Example: Toggle between the tabs and note that the animation fires each time you return to “Tab #1” Why was this happening? I double checked my keyframe statement. Made sure I was setting animation-fill-mode to “forwards” to prevent repeating the animation. After much research and testing, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the CSS animation, … Continue reading

In relaunching the online Carnegie Mellon responsive university magazine, we have created a technologically sophisticated online university magazine which is commensurate with the Carnegie Mellon brand. It has a singular mission: to build brand awareness for Carnegie Mellon name with people who are not aware of the brand name (“brand unawares”). Two forces are powering this new relaunch: big data and branding. Let me begin with two high-level views: Let me now illustrate the smarts behind this: 1. Data powers the entire user experience: The online magazine sections (aka departments in print parlance) are based on a combination of popular SEO keywords and CMU strategic priorities and. The story tags too are intentionally hand-picked by use of popular SEO keywords. Instead of displaying popular tags alphabetically, they are prioritized in descending popularity order, with ability for site administrators to designate a couple of tags as sticky tags based on university’s strategic priorities. 2. New interactive design deepens the brand: CMU … Continue reading

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The statistics are rather unsettling. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 1,658,370 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2015 and 589,430 people will die from the disease. I wrote about my own cancer scare years ago for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and I always thought I could only fight cancer on a personal level. I eat veggies, stay active, slather on sunscreen, get a mammogram and donate money. What else can one person do? That all changed when I was asked to work on the website redesign for the Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation (ONCC). Now I had a chance to use my writing talents to help nurses who care for cancer patients, which in turn, helps those battling this disease. At Elliance, a website redesign doesn’t just mean put a few pretty pictures into a new layout. We ask questions. We think. We ask more questions. Then, we combine what we’ve discovered about the client … Continue reading

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Over the past few years, the web industry has been very focused on devices. So much so that responsive design is defined as “building web content that shows up well on any device.”But focusing on devices isn’t enough anymore. By focusing only on devices, we are missing other experiences. Our web content is no longer stuck to a browser. It is traveling beyond it’s traditional medium. Take something like a news article — a simple piece of web content — and look at all of the different places this story can, and will, show up: Perhaps its original print medium; As a webpage on any device with a web browser — a computer, phone, TV screen, tablet, game console, watch, etc; On the homepage of your website; On a search results page; – or you can say on google but i would recommend keeping it open ended to all search engines. On a 3rd party website; In an ad on … Continue reading

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We recently launched the William Woods University website with the thought that it might be touted as one of the best responsive design college websites. Our guidelines were simple: 1. Authenticity 2. Simplicity 3. Integrity 4. Findability 5. Usability 6. Beauty How did we do? What do you think? and in responsive mode Visit the responsive website at www.williamwoods.edu If you are seeking college website design agency, please see our work and consider partnering with us.

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Elliance is proud to launch the first responsive website for naturopathic medicine in North America for Southwest College for Naturopathic Medicine (SCNM). By outsmarting the competition and with its history of firsts, SCNM has once again proven that it is indeed the most innovative college for naturopathic medicine. The entire process of launching the website took almost one year, the four months being spent on articulating their new brand position: “Simply Inspiring”. Our interviews with SCNM faculty, students and patients made us realize that SCNM is a storehouse of inspiring stories of patients being healed by craft-minded Nauturoapthic Doctors. We also met a wide array of alumni who were respectable leaders living lives as ND’s, as researchers for Neutrceuticals, as authors of ground breaking work in Naturopathic healing, and as members of integrative medicine practices. The new website is the first expression of the new brand position and comprises of two parts. The first part is the website for the … Continue reading

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