A question Ive had to deal with a lot recently, do I deliver what I believe to be sub-par work, even though the client wouldn’t notice, or perfect a project at cost to myself? Most of the time it comes down to my professional pride, I hate to work on a project that isn’t as good as I think it could be.

I could go into details about why I feel that this “desire for excellence” is a large part of why I’ve seen a huge increase in clients recently, but I’ll let this article on webdesignerdepot do that for me.

Lets face it, if you havent seen Lightbox used in a website, then you’ve been living under a (big) rock.

It took a big jump in popularity about a year ago, and since then has has been used in thousands of websites. Alternatives which essentially do the same thing, just a little differently, like Fancybox and ThickBox have been released as well, which have also been used all over the place.

It is, of course, immensely popular for a reason. I wont get into all the specifics, but basically its an extremely easy easy way to display content (Lightbox can only handle images, to display HTML or video you’re going to have to go with Fancybox or another of the relatives) without taking the user to a new page, and it looks good while it does it.

Fancybox:

I tend to think its a bit overused these days, as lightbox and its derivatives are so easily recognizable its hard to implement it in a way where it doesn’t scream at you “IM LIGHTBOX”. Ive never really been one to not use something just because other people do though, so you might notice it (Fancybox) used to display images in my portfolio.

Now I’m going to get back to writing more stuff about off-camera flash for you to read tomorrow.

As a good godly website designer, part of my job is to keep up with current webdesign standards and trends. Websites like The CSS Awards, CSS Drive and CSS Mania, help me to do this by showcasing some of the best website designs around. Naturally as you plod through hundreds of well-designed websites daily, you will start to notice trends right away. Some come and go pretty quickly, and some stick around. Thus, every Sunday, for however long I feel the inspiration. I will make a post about one of these design trends, examples of it, and possibly how you can do it yourself. Since today is Sunday (wow! such luck!) I’ll start it off with…

Huge Typography

Pretty self explanatory. Very large text seems to be in vogue, and has been for a while actually. That is, considering that in the world of the internets a month is like decade. Designers seem to be paying more attention to typography as a major design element, using things like leading (line-height) and tracking (letter-spacing) for more control. Something tells me that sIFR and other ways of using non-standard fonts (CSS 3 FTW!) are playing a huge part in this.

examples:

bdsgraphic.com

www.andrewcanham.com

www.yourneighbours.de

www.andrewgarcianow.com

I pulled these four examples just off the first page of cssmania, which goes to prove that you don’t need to go far to find examples of huge typography on websites.