With Halloween right around the corner, one of the year’s spookiest and most playful seasonal celebrations, we thought it would be somewhat appropriate if we put together a collection of desktop wallpapers for our readers to use to decorate their backgrounds. While some may think that this time of year is all about the horror and the macabre, we thought we would more focus on the lighter, more whimsical side of this holiday. No tricks, just treats.
Designers must keep in mind that true graphic design is less of an art
and more of a theory. Graphic design is simply a means to solve
problems, but once you have solved your problem, you are free to dress
it any way you like. The best way to design your web sites (as well as
any other thing), is to first figure out what the goal of your site is
to be.
In the world of design we all tend to have our processes and approaches that rule how we craft our work. This is essential for most of us in the field to have in place. Our own systems that we have spent years honing and developing down to less of an art, and more of a routine. We do this so that we have an order by which we can methodically craft our designs without letting any little things slip through those proverbial cracks. Our processes tend to be a series of steps that help us cover all of our bases. But this can also prove to have a negative impact on our work.
Read MoreDuring this series Aaron Lumsden will be looking behind the UI of Facebook and, in the process, showing you how to create your own integrated Facebook blog app through an RSS feed.
Love it or hate it Facebook has become an integral part of people’s lives. For many it’s a tool that allows us to catch up with old friends, share photos or plan our nights out with our mates. However, behind the social interaction lies a complex structure of careful UI planning that has been tweaked and re-tweaked.
In the early days of Facebook he was never a fan of its “boring look and feel” and always felt that it had potential for so much more in terms of design. However, it’s only as his knowledge and experience of being a UI designer has progressed that he now realizes it’s Facebook’s simplicity and ease of use that has allowed it to become so successful. Its design is certainly something that should be admired.
As almost any web designer worth their salt, and a large percentage of web developers will tell you, to be fully considered a web designer you have to have some background in code. Not to the depth that full on developers must, but it really is unfair to the rest of those working on a website with us if we do not have some knowledge in a handful of key areas. Which is where these web design tutorials come in.
Read MoreWe’re going to briefly discuss why lorem ipsum and its brethren still have legitimate uses and then we’ll have some fun as we check out thirty great dummy content generators that you’ll definitely want to bookmark.
Photography is one of your most powerful resources as a designer. Here we’ll take a look at some clever and unique ways to create photo-centric designs using multiple images. It’s always nice to keep your content to a minimum in order to maintain a clean, easy to scan page. Using one primary image with some accompanying text is a simple model that works for a lot of purposes, but when you’re designing for real world clients you often have an entire folder full of resources that you’re expected to use.
On many sites, the one page that people see over and over again is the login page. That makes it important to not only make it something worth looking at repeatedly, but also easy to use, as the designers below have done. Effective and pleasant registration form design is also important – as this will help convert website browsers into registered users.
Ecommerce websites can be one of the more challenging types of websites for designers. In this post we’ll showcase 25 ecommerce websites that feature an attractive visual design. They should serve as an excellent source of inspiration when working on ecommerce projects of your own.
This month’s edition of what’s new out there for web designers and developers includes a number of new smartphone apps (for both iOS and Android), as well as a few great web apps and some desktop apps.
There are also new tools and resources for web design and development, and twenty great new free and paid fonts.