A balanced composition feels right. It feels stable and aesthetically pleasing. While some of its elements might be focal points and attract your eye, no one area of the composition draws your eye so much that you can’t see the other areas.
Source: Design Principles: Compositional Balance, Symmetry And Asymmetry
Perhaps more than any other single designer, Paul Rand was responsible for defining visual culture in America in the decades following World War II. He radically transformed advertising, blowing away the dust of the Depression era and pioneering a new, modern approach to selling products. He helped convince some of nation’s biggest corporations that good design was good business, crafting indelible logos for the likes of IBM, UPS, and ABC.
Paul Rand, the Visionary Who Showed Us That Design Matters | WIRED
We’re living amidst a new renaissance in design: Call it Silicon Modern—a moment made possible by cheap processors, new software, digital manufacturing, and novel approaches to problem solving. To ring in this era, WIRED collected 13 exemplars that encompass everything from big ideas to novel forms of expression.
Working in a content-focused industry, we need to keep this issue pretty close to heart; creating great copy is pointless if it is visually uninspiring or unreadable. Likewise, if the content doesn’t deliver, then even the most attractive page won’t hold the reader’s attention.
Designing The Words: Why Copy Is A Design Issue | Smashing Magazine
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design isn’t just what it looks like. It’s how it works. These sources break down the way design works–what’s coming up, what’s going down, and what you need to pay attention to.
101 Signals: The 18 People Who Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Design | Wired.com
The jquery plugin lets designers/developers use a YouTube video as a Webpage background.
How cool is that?
Tubular: Use YouTube Videos as Website Backgrounds – Website Magazine