Web design has come a long way in the twenty years since the first website was published. The ease of use that today’s users experience on sites like Google and Amazon.com necessarily resulted from the trials of the early days. While design techniques may come and go, one overarching goal of our efforts is increased usability. Here are a few ways to improve the readability of a web page. Split up the content. What Google did: Google isolated the most frequently-used part of the page … Continue reading →

DBS>Interactive’s designs for St. James Court Art Show, University of Louisville Physicians and Leadership Louisville were all award winners at the 11th Annual Horizon Interactive Awards. More than 1000 entries from 25 different countries were judged in this year’s competition.  The awards were announced April 15th. DBS>Interactive won a Gold Award in the Websites-Responsive/Mobile Design for the St. James Court Art Show website. The panel also awarded DBS with a Bronze for the same site in the Advocacy/Non-Profit category. The web design for Leadership Louisville … Continue reading →

The Interactive Media Council has awarded DBS>Interactive a second Best in Class award for 2012. The DBS team won Best in Class in the Nonprofit category for the design of the St. James Court Art Show mobile site. Organizers of the St. James Court Art Show asked DBS>Interactive to overhaul its website, so we created a responsive site viewable on a variety of devices, including tablets and phones. We also created a unique mobile site that integrated GPS mapping, which allowed visitors at the show … Continue reading →

In the world of fantasy, the term “sprites” can refer to a wide variety of small, super-natural beings — from  ”fairly-like” creatures, to “insect-like” creatures, to “flower-like” creatures. Because of their many forms, sprites have an inherent mystery to them, which often results in them being misunderstood. Although the web definition of a sprite differs greatly from it’s fantasy-world counterpart, the air of mystery and confusion that surrounds them is quite similar. Although the name suggests that the item may be small in size, in … Continue reading →

So, you’ve been convinced that designing websites with mobile commerce in mind is a great way to improve business. The next step is to ask ourselves the big question: how are we going to put the principles of mobile commerce into action? The principles of good mobile commerce design overlap with those of any website whose purpose is to call upon the visitor to act in some way (in the case of M-commerce, this action is a purchase). Many of the difficulties associated with M-commerce  stem from … Continue reading →

The International Association of Business Communicators-Kentucky and the Bluegrass chapter of the Public Relations Society of America awarded DBS>Interactive and the Leadership Louisville Center an Award of Excellence for Graphic Design: Web Design at the Landmarks of Excellence Awards Ceremony October 16th. DBS and Leadership Louisville Center teamed up in the spring of 2012 to design and launch a new website (www.leadershiplouisville.org). The revamped website showcases the Leadership Louisville Center’s activities using photography across a platform of cleanly-designed pages. DBS implemented intuitive navigation programming and … Continue reading →

Although Apple has made the Retina display a household name the term “retina quality” can roughly be applied to describe screens with resolutions exceeding 300 pixels per inch. These ultra high-resolution screens have transformed the way users experience the web, offering 3 million more pixels than your average HDTV. But are these huge resolutions an improvement for web designers? Sure, they have their benefits, but are the advantages great enough to outweigh the apparent challenges of designing for a post-retina Internet? More Pixels for Your … Continue reading →

At first glance, learning to program a circle in a browser is a task that to many would seem senseless. But believe it or not, creating a circle in a browser is a task that offers a lot of value to web designers of all skill levels. Why take the time to render a circle with code, when we could simply use an image editing program like Photoshop to create the circle? By rendering the circle in-browser, as opposed to embedding an image or coding it … Continue reading →

Every web designer has their own set of tools that they use with every site. This core set of tools maximizes efficiency and reduces the time spent performing mundane tasks.  With the vast amount of web apps / plugins popping up every day, there are a lot of options web designers have to choose from to help them in their workflow. But these tools, I’ve listed below, are the 5 tools we think every web designer should know about.

In the early days of the web, designers were very limited in the number of options that were available for styling type. Web designers were basically left with two options, neither of which were particularly attractive solutions. Font Stacks – The first option was to specify a group of fonts from a tiny selection of web-friendly font stacks. A common example of a font stack would have been “Futura”; “Century Gothic”; “Sans-Serif”. In instances where a visitor did not have the first specified font in … Continue reading →

Fueling Trends The end is nigh for 2011! It’s time to start preparing for snow, holiday parties, and the upcoming web design trends of 2012! We all know that technology is growing exponentially, and that change is generally fueled by necessity. The Internet changed a lot in the last year, and we can only expect that it will change by leaps and bounds again in 2012. Making your website stand out amongst the crowd will depend on your ability to identify the upcoming web design … Continue reading →

Individuals familiar with film editing programs such as After Effects, Final Cut Pro, or iMovie have long understood the power of incorporating transitions into their films. Without transitions between camera shots, movies have the tendency of feeling fragmented and unpolished. Applications such as Flash and JavaScript were revolutionary in that they brought rich media experiences such as animation to the web, but they came with a significant problem. Search engines spiders had difficulty (and in fact, still have great difficulty) indexing this content and many … Continue reading →

DBS>Interactive announces the newly redesigned Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage Center website, www.bourbonheritagecenter.com. The Bourbon Heritage Center is an award winning destination on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, located in Bardstown, Kentucky. Their site redesign includes a section that informs visitors of the rich history of Bourbon in Kentucky and an extensive timeline with profiles of key players who helped Bourbon become what it is today. Website visitors can learn about tour options, reserve their space on a tour, and purchase tickets online. Tour options include free … Continue reading →

What is the box model? Designing for the web requires two frames of mind. The rational side of the brain writes out the code, in the order it should appear in the final project. Next, the creative side determines how the elements of a web page appear. Without styling, a website appears to be nothing more than text in predefined sections. These sections can be a heading, paragraph, image, etc, but the browser considers each element a box. As a default, these boxes have a … Continue reading →

DBS Interactive has promoted Mark Shelton to the position of Art Director. Mark will be responsible for overseeing the continued success of the DBS Web Design department. In his previous position as Lead Designer Mark was influential in positioning DBS as a prominent Web Design company in Louisville. His interest in design extends beyond the workplace environment and is one of his passions in life, one he shares with his wife Joanna who is also graphic designer. Mark said “What I find so fascinating about … Continue reading →

DBS Interactive has promoted Mark Shelton to the position of Art Director. Mark will be responsible for overseeing the continued success of the DBS Web Design department. In his previous position as Lead Designer Mark was influential in positioning DBS as a prominent Web Design company in Louisville. His interest in design extends beyond the workplace environment and is one of his passions in life, one he shares with his wife Joanna who is also graphic designer. Mark said “What I find so fascinating about … Continue reading →

DBS>Interactive announces the launch of PopCosmo.com, the premier online fashion and style magazine for teen girls. PopCosmo was created by mother-daughter team Kim and Chloe Gordon. PopCosmo is the savvy teen’s go-to guide for the scoop in her city and on the web. PopCosmo is a nationwide site, with a city guide for Louisville’s teen girls to find the coolest hangouts, shops, and events. PopCosmo plans to expand to other cities in the future as they grow. Teens have the option of keeping up to … Continue reading →

Brian Maier joins DBS>Interactive as our newest web designer and front end developer. Before working at DBS, Brian resided in Cincinnati, Ohio and worked at Mindbox Studios, and was a freelance designer. He has worked on a variety of designs for companies small and large. Some prominent clients he has worked on include Wal-Mart and Proctor & Gamble, as well as many startup companies for Continuous Web, a community showcase for startups and tech professionals. Brian brings 4 years of design experience to the DBS … Continue reading →

The rapid growth of user-friendly social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook has attracted a plethora of new users to the web, as well as increased the frequency of which an “average” user browses the Internet.  Such growth has prompted websites to regularly deliver their audience with fresh content to capitalize on each visit, and that demand is where modern-day content management systems (CMS) have come into play. Content management systems are no recent development, but in recent years the development of their usability, … Continue reading →

Strongly endorsed by both Apple and Google, HTML5 is on its way to becoming the online development language of the future. Although the language is not scheduled to be finished until 2022, there are plans for it to be implemented by all major browsers as soon as 2012. So what does it mean for the web development community as this historic milestone grows nearer? Should you be using HTML5 in your designs right now? The answer to that question, as with many things, is it … Continue reading →