/wd/ - Web Design

saw this layout for that japan book earlier. it's pretty clean if you're into that minimal aesthetic. using 'Cabinet Grotesk Medium' for the body at twelve points keeps things readable enough even with those huge margins. i like how the red pull quotes pop against the white space, but i'm not sure about that 420 by 595 page size. it's a massive spread to manage if you're actually printing something this heavy.
>The grid uses two wide text columns split by slim white gaps.
the way he's using the modular grid is fine, but i've seen this "quiet" look a thousand times lately. it's basically just playing with whitespace and hoping for the best. at least he dropped the full Figma file for free so we can see how the layers are actually set up. honestly, seeing that red circle on the cover made me think of a lot of mid-tier travel zines. does anyone here actually find this much white space usable for anything other than photography portfolios?

https://abduzeedo.com/editorial-design-minimal-book-layout-design-ashutosh-rana/

that floating grid with all the icons drifting around looks fun but i can't imagine trying to manage that much manual positioning for a huge catalog without it becoming a nightmare.
>fine-tuning the positioning and scaling of every single element
it's basically manual labor disguised as art. do you think anyone actually uses those personality tags like "bookworm" or is it just fluff?

full read: https://abduzeedo.com/web-design-vitra-gift-finder-build-amsterdam/

i'm getting tired of seeing menus and tabs just vanish for some empty prompt field.
>we're gaining incredible speed-but we may be losing something unexpected
it's fine if it works for simple tasks, but i don't want to have to type out every single navigation step like i'm talking to a chatbot. good luck finding anything without a sidebar do you guys actually prefer navigating via search/prompt over a standard menu?

more here: https://webdesignerdepot.com/how-the-prompt-box-is-swallowing-website-interfaces-whole/

i've been seeing so much of this lately where designers just slap a noise overlay on top of every single vector graphic to make it look more organic. it feels like a lazy shortcut to hide the lack of actual depth or interesting lighting in the work. it's getting hard to tell if someone actually put effort into the shading or if they just used a grainy filter to mask the simplicity. has anyone else noticed this becoming a bit of a crutch for mid-tier illustration styles?

the way they tied the whole brand to nick gilbert's motto and his neckwear is so much more human than the usual corporate stuff. it's wild how they're using custom delta hints just to keep things sharp for mortgage charts in 'WNTL', but i wonder if that level of technical calibration is even possible when you're working with standard web fonts.
>the naming honors Nick Gilbert, the late son of the company's founder
i love the idea of a typeface having this much personal history behind it, though i'm always skeptical about how much that sentimentality actually carries through once you're staring at dense data cards all day.

article: https://abduzeedo.com/typography-design-rocket-type-system-typetype-foundry/

saw this thing for stringtune today and the whole katana/sensei theme is a bit much. they're saying it uses mostly css and attributes to keep things lightweight but i'm skeptical if it actually beats the standard stuff when things get heavy. anyone tried running this through a stress test yet?

link: https://www.awwwards.com/stringtune-for-core-web-animations.html

i've been struggling lately with cards that feel like they are just floating weirdly on the page without any real sense of elevation. instead of using a heavy dark shadow, i started layering two different shadows with very low opacity and different blur radii to mimic how light actually hits objects. it makes the interface feel way more organic and less like a bunch of stickers slapped onto a background. it's a small change but it really helps users understand the hierarchy when things are overlapping. does anyone else find that single large shadows always look a bit muddy on high-res screens?

it's such a bad idea to use photoshop for text-heavy layouts when you've got inidesign right there. even if they have some free figma or illustrator templates, i don't see how anyone survives the easy nightmare of editing all that copy later.

full read: https://speckyboy.com/free-resume-templates-designers/

I'm losing my mind on this client project because the text looks so broken in certain paragraph blocks. We're using an old-school Garamond specimen and the italics are just. bad. Every time I hit a specific sequence of characters, the spacing falls apart and creates these huge gaps that look like someone used a hammer on the kerning. It's driving me insane. I tried manually adjusting the letter-spacing in CSS but it just makes the rest of the line look like a mess. I even attempted to use

font-feature-settings

to force some OpenType alternates, but it didn't fix the specific overlaps in the lowercase 'f' and 'i' combos. It looks totally professional amateurish right now. I can't just ignore it because the whole point of this brand is "elegant heritage." If I have to manually wrap every single word with a span tag, I'm going to quit. I'll probably end up just swapping to a different font and lying about the client's request

trying to fix this tiny 14px uppercase label for a client. i tried setting letter spacing to 0.1em but it looks way too gappy now. looks like the font is just too thin for that much air. swapped it to a slightly heavier weight but still feels off. maybe i should try negative tracking instead? tried -0.02em but it's basically unreadable on retina displays. honestly if people can't read a single line of text at this size they shouldn't be on the site anyway. i dont think changing the font family is an option because client is obsessed with this specific brand typeface. looks super amateurish when the kerning is this broken. anyone else dealt with this specific weight/size combo before? tbh it feels like a losing battle without custom glyphs