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Design

Designing For The Multifaceted User

Designing with users in mind is a tricky thing. Not only does it require of us a sound understanding of who our users are, but the actual act of translating what we know about them into a well-designed product is not always an obvious or easy path.

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Design

Responsible Considerations For Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web design has been evolving rapidly ever since Ethan Marcotte coined the term two years ago. Since then, techniques have emerged, become best practices and formed part of our ever-changing methodology. A few obvious examples are the multitude of responsive image techniques, conditional loading, and responsive design and server-side components (RESS), among many other existing and emerging strands stemming from the core concept of responsive Web design.

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Design

Creating Wireframes And Prototypes With InDesign

Hundreds of tools may be available for interaction designers, but there is still no industry standard for interaction design the way Photoshop and Illustrator are to graphic design. Popular programs are out there, but many of them have considerable drawbacks, which has led me to explore alternative apps.

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Design

Building A Better Responsive Website

Earlier this year, Jeremy Girard was in the beginning stages of a redesign for the company’s website. They had already been planning to use a straightforward responsive approach to Web design, which is their preferred solution for multi-device support. After hearing some frank discussions at An Event Apart conference in Boston about the limitations and challenges of responsive Web design, he realized that their solution needed a bit of adjustment.

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Design

Maintain Consistency With a Website Style Guide

Creating style guides is fast becoming common practice for web designers, especially when dealing with content heavy sites. With a website style guide, designers are able to set and maintain a look and feel by creating a set of rules which the design follows. The process becomes flexible, easily updateable and consistent. During this tutorial Aaron Lumsden is going to demonstrate how you can implement a style guide in your own site or project.

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Design

Build Responsive Emails

In this tutorial Elliot Ross will look at bringing some of the web’s mobile techniques to HTML email. User take-up of mobile email is massive: some email campaigns get more mobile opens than desktop, yet many marketing emails render poorly on mobile devices. Mobile support on the web has never been better – so if you’re sending emails that drive customers to the web, it makes sense to design mobile friendly emails too.

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Design

Logical Breakpoints For Your Responsive Design

There are several tactics for deciding where to put breakpoints in a responsive design. There is the rusty idea that they should be based on common screen sizes, but this doesn’t scale well. There are no common screen sizes. Another popular tactic is to create a breakpoint wherever the layout breaks. This sounds much better. But it still leaves you with the question, How do you determine whether the layout is broken? One logical answer is to look at classic readability theory and to define our breakpoints based on that.

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Design

Create a Simple Step by Step Progress Bar in Illustrator

In the following quick tip you will learn how to create a simple step by step progress bar using Adobe Illustrator. For the main shapes Andrei Marius will use some basic tools along with the Transform effect and some simple Pathfinder options. For the small details he’ll use some basic vector shape building techniques, several Drop Shadow effects and some simple blending techniques. In the final steps he’ll add the simple pieces of text and the little check symbol.

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Design

Fresh and Creative Web Design Techniques

As a designer, this is one of the most exciting parts of a new year. Here Kendra Gaines is, trying to figure out what’s going to be big for design trends in 2013. It absolutely makes sense. Web designers have to really be up on all the new trends to be relevant and abreast of what’s next after that trend. Of course responsive design is going to be big this year — it was big last year! And of course she is going to continue designing with grids. That’s basic design! This time around, she wanted to look into some trends that seem to be growing.

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Design

How to Create a Wicker Seamless Pattern in Illustrator

In the following tutorial Tatiana Sharanutsa is going to show you how to create a wicker seamless pattern in Adobe Illustrator using the Gradient Tool, Blending Modes and the Transform Effect.

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