Book Image

Creating Flat Design Websites

By : António Pratas
Book Image

Creating Flat Design Websites

By: António Pratas

Overview of this book

<p>Flat design is a simple yet visually appealing and increasingly popular style, particularly good for people just starting to develop their own websites. This book helps you to create a simple and good looking product in the flat design style.</p> <p>Creating Flat Design Websites will cover the origins of flat design, its principles as a visual style, and how to start designing right away, always making sure that the interface designed doesn't suffer from usability problems. Learn to design and develop your flat website with external frameworks to save time and money in your project. The book also provides you with tips to avoid the usability mistakes that commonly accompany this style due to its simple look and elements, as well as how to start developing the look of your website in HTML and CSS. Finally, you will learn how you can create your own Flat UI kit to suit your needs.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Understanding web usability


Jakob Nielsen, a web usability consultant and usability expert, defines usability in the website, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/, as follows:

"Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word usability also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process."

In this case, web usability relates to the good functioning of a website and how easy and predictable it is for the user. We, as designers and developers, assume that for most people using a website is easy and a skill that is already considered natural, but this is not an assumption that you should make. On the contrary, when designing a website or an interface, you must assume that the user doesn't have prior experience in using them. An interface must be designed in such a way that it is intuitive and easy to use, even for a first-time user.

All elements must be visually identifiable. Elements such as...