Imagine drawing 100 different flowers in about a minute, one at a time. Not something that happens every day… until now.

The Japanese web designers at procreo.jp offer visitors a free web tool that does it. You are initially presented with a black screen. If you click anywhere on it, a flower appears on the spot.

It’s not the same flower, either. There appear to be myriad types, further permutated by size variations.

Use the tool to create pleasing dark backgrounds, beautiful floral buttons or square icons with a single flower on a black background.

Even if you do not have a specific application in mind, this tool seems to appeal to basic human artistic creativity… you just have to keep creating flowers for at least a minute (which is equivalent to a calendar year in Internet time).

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: web design, draw flowers, drawing tool, flash tool, lucky balaraman, the magnum group, cad drafting service

We are uploading a new web site design…. it is the fruit of thousands of hours’ study and practice in the latest usability design principles. We hope you will find it easier to find what you want… and hope that we have what you want!

Because of our considerable expertise in web design, we also have a separate web site offering web design to you as a service.

We are additionally drilling deep into Iphone-compatible web design, so that we can help you get ready for the tidal wave of Iphone visitors coming in June 2007!

The format of this blog is going to change as well… just keep watching!

Technorati Tags: web+design, css, usability, blog

The new web design service we mentioned in our earlier post is now a reality!

Our web design section, designed as a separate site, is growing into a web design universe. If you are in a hurry, you can select from more than 10,000 ready-made templates and have us customize them for you. Or we can design a website for you from scratch.

In the latter case, we also research relevant keywords for you and write content using them and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing, Google’s algorithm for determining how relevant your page is to its keyword).

All the pages we design take into account the latest experimental data on usability as well as principles for well-organized html code, like CSS (“Cascading Style Sheet”) use.

We invite you to take a look at our web design tips page and web design best resources page too, for an idea of where we get our best practices from.

In the works are a forum or blog where our community will offer suggestions and comments on your website if you ask for them.

We are very excited about our expansion into this area and invite you to take our capabilities for a spin!

Technorati Tags: web+design, web+designers

There were eye-popping findings in the source code and external CSS  (Cascading Style Sheet) file of Google Groups Beta.

• The source HTML was 95% tables: the only div was the footer
• There were many nested tables in the  body  section
  
• Many of the CSS definitions had been commented out (we guess this is since it’s a beta page)
• The width of the page was not stretchable

What we will now do is check recent final versions (i.e., non-beta) of Google web sites to see if they too have a unprofessional design features like those above… if they do, it will be a while before we emerge from our state of shock!!!

Technorati Tags: web+design, google+web+pages, css

One respected research heavyweight has acquired another: Marketing Experiments Lab has  bought Marketing Sherpa!

We at The Magnum Group rely heavily on the research of these firms for cutting-edge web design and web marketing guidelines. We’d go so far as to say that these firms continually make important contributions to the evolution of the Internet.

Now that they are close-coupled, we are sure these contributions will have enhanced content and we keenly look forward to them.

Technorati Tags: marketing+experiments

The results are out: if you want a web page to be effective, don’t confuse the visitor with columns to the left and right; also, even if you have only a single column on your page, don’t pepper it with links, put only the ones that are essential for that page.

If you think a web page should be “pretty looking” with plenty of graphics and “comprehensive” with a gazillion links, then you’re making a fatal error.

If you want to listen to some absolutely fantastic experimental results on this from a renowned authority on the subject, catch this audio file from MarketingExperiments.com. The host is famous web author Nick Usborne, who works closely with the founder of MarketingExperiments.com, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

Needless to say, when we design a web site, we will push hard for uncluttered design. And we are not the only ones thinking this way. Most of Google’s new sites follow these guidelines. Look at Google Groups Beta for an example!