/wd/ - Web Design

i was just looking at this kelvin zero project and i can't stop thinking about that transition from the bright glacier tip down into those deep cobalt and obsidian layers. it feels so much more human than the usual boring corporate layouts we see for cybersecurity stuff. using space mono specifically for the technical metadata and biometric prompts is such a smart way to signal security without making the whole interface feel unreadable or intimidating. i love how they're leveraging webgl and blender scenes to create that sense of depth, especially with the glassmorphic overlays and those refractive crystal assets. it makes the digital access part feel much more tangible and real. but i am a little worried about the performance trade-offs when you start layering heavy volumetric lighting and custom 3d models like that across different viewports. even if they're scaling it for mobile, it seems like such a lot of heavy lifting for a browser to handle smoothly. it's beautiful, but i wonder if the loading friction might actually hurt the user experience for someone just trying to check their status quickly. do you think this kind of high-fidelity motion is sustainable for more standard enterprise dashboards?

more here: https://abduzeedo.com/inside-craft-kelvin-zero-web-design-cuberto/

I'm tired of seeing layout shifts every time an image loads because someone forgot to set dimensions. Use this in your CSS so the browser reserves the space before the asset even arrives.

img {width: 100%;height: auto;aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;}

>it's making my performance scores tank
it's actually just bad implementation

i've been stuck moving glyphs around in illustrator all morning and it's driving me insane. indesign actually respects my manual kerning adjustments when i export to pdf but illustrator just resets everything to the default metrics. it's such a waste of time to redo the same work every time i need a vector asset. do you guys just stick to indesign for all your final type setting?

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?