Articles by Ben Gremillion

People build websites for many reasons: to reach a wider audience; to sell, promote, or express; to appease peer pressure. Novelty stopped being a reason circa 2001. In its place, we have of course: of course I have a website; of course you have to have a Facebook wall, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, or Pinterest...

I earned my BFA in ’98. Learned to layout feature pages and create infographics for the local daily paper. I earned a Photoshop ACE in ’03. My most recent full-time contract was pure mock-up design work. Yet for the last year and a half I have debugged code 40–50 hours a week. I read about code, I wrote about code, I talked...

InDesign boxes are as simple as click-and-drag. Photoshop’s layers let painters color pixels anywhere they please. But layout with HTML and CSS is a game of nudging and cascading. It happens every day: Photoshop-savvy art directors mock up designs, honing their spacing, carefully choosing appropriate typefaces and...

By nature, the web is a chaotic place where people hop from page to page at will. Unfortunately, this freedom can work against those websites whose content is best followed in a certain order. Design techniques make it possible to direct users along a path with varying degrees of persuasion. But when is it best to direct users,...