Building the Greyrobot Website

Long hours into the night are spent tweaking every last detail of the design and layout of Grey Robot's new website. Needless to say, I'm addicted to detail. We're making a web design website, we have to make it perfect.

I ruminate on that thought as I click through endless torrent results, looking for the ideal fonts package. Fonts and typography are an important feature of any respectable website, and it's something that a lot of time is spent on perfecting.

There's a lot to be considered when building a website whose prime purpose is to showcase the talent and skills of the individuals who are behind it all. And, like most things on the net, there's plenty of places that you can go to find just the right app to assist you in your endeavor.

Here's some important aspects I consider when designing any site:

• Color scheme - Choose the right set of colors
• Layout - Columns, CSS, Grids
• Typography - Font's and other text related styles
• Graphics - Including photos, and custom creations

There are lots of online tools to help out with many of these tenets of good web design. Such as...

This is an excellent flash based color scheme picker by Petr Stanicek. You can pick between triad, tetrad, complement, mono color combos and more. It even shows you a preview of a hypothetical website using your custom color scheme.

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements. Read more
http://960.gs/