The recently popularized “flat” interface style is not merely a trend. It is the manifestation of a desire for greater authenticity in design, a desire to curb visual excess and eliminate the fake and the superfluous. In creating new opportunities, technological progress sometimes leads to areas of excess. In the 19th century, mechanized mass production allowed for ornaments to be stamped out quickly and cheaply, leading to goods overdecorated with ornament.
A website has a personality — it is a reflection of the person or organization behind it. When people visit your website, you want it to stand out from the crowd, to be memorable. You want people to come back and use your website or get in touch with you. So, to distinguish itself from the unwashed masses, your website not only needs remarkable content, but also has to be innovative yet functional.
If you code websites, it’s a good bet that at least one of your clients has asked about or requested a mobile-friendly website. If you go the responsive design route (whereby your website is flexible enough to adjust visually from mobile to desktop widths), then you’ll need a strategy to make images flexible, too — a responsive image solution.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the staggering array of resources and options available to designers. In this article, we’ll explore the idea of consciously restricting yourself to a set of core tools that you know, love and trust. Take a traditional craftsman — let’s say a carpenter. While they may have access to a wide range of tools in their workshop, they will take a bag with just a few carefully chosen tools when working away. Similarly, an artist may have a wide range of paints, brushes and accessories in their studio, but will carefully select a limited palette and a few choice brushes when painting in the field.
Here comes another great free pack, designed by the team behind Freepik. It features a list of amazing location pin icons with color combinations and well-designed source. The free source files of these Location Pin Icons contain icons with different sizes and shape such as Round icons ( 32px, 64px and 265px ) and Square icons ( 32px, 64px and 265px ).
Read MoreYou know how it goes: you are facing a difficult situation with a client, and you aren’t quite sure how to respond to it to navigate the conversation into a meaningful direction. This is where email templates can come in handy. This article features email templates for communicating with clients, superiors, teammates and the like. You can easily customize them. They balance firmness and tact, professionalism and friendliness.
Today we are pleased to feature a set of 200 useful and beautiful foodie icons. This freebie was created by the team behind Freepik, and at the time of writing it’s the largest set of food icons available on the web in one pack. The 200 Foodie Pack includes 200 customized icons available in PNGs (32×32px, 64×64px, 128×128px), as well as in AI, EPS and vector format. Perfect for any projects around gourmet, food, restaurant, gastronomy and the like. Enjoy!
Read MoreIn this article, Matt Gibson will explain, from his own experience of refreshing his agency website, why they abandoned a separate mobile website and will review the process of creating a new responsive design. At Cyber-Duck, they have been designing both responsive websites and adaptive mobile websites for several years now. Both options, of course, have their pros and cons. With a separate mobile website, you have the opportunity to tailor content and even interactions to the context of your users, whereas a responsive website means better content parity for users and a single website to maintain.
We are talking and reading a lot about responsive Web design (RWD) these days, but very little attention is given to Web applications. Admittedly, RWD still has to be ironed out. But many of us believe it to be a strong concept, and it is here to stay. So, why don’t we extend this topic to HTML5-powered applications? Because responsive Web applications (RWAs) are both a huge opportunity and a big challenge, I wanted to dive in.
Adaptive images are the current hot topic in conversations about adaptive and responsive Web design. Why? Because no one likes any of the solutions thus far. New elements and attributes are being discussed as a solution for what is, for most of us, a big headache: to provide every user with one image optimized for their display size and resolution, without wasting time, memory or bandwidth with a client-side solution.