Inspiration strikes at funny times. Chris Behr was just watching TV and playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. His mind wasn’t focused on either task. He casually divided a square into a grid, then randomly colored it. Something about the colors inspired him to combine the grid with a couple of icons that he had been doodling the night before. Thus, Nice Things was born, a set of 128 original, beautiful icons that we are honored to present to you.
In this article, we’ll take you on a thought-provoking journey through a couple of carefully selected Web designs. Certainly, these websites have some captivating interactivity; however, the selection of type and the typographic styling and spacing are the reasons why we chose them for this piece. In the context of typography, considering composition and grid structure is also important.
Axure is a powerful tool for creating software prototypes quickly. Getting started with it is really easy; however, therein lies a danger. The tool is so intuitive that many users can be productive without undergoing any formal training. What they might not be aware of is that they probably aren’t using Axure optimally.
As more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction. After more than five years helping content and design teams capture,
measure and understand website performance data (client-side at
Bazaarvoice and now at Volusion), Ashley Moreno has learned a lot about connecting
the dots between data and design improvements.
Central to a solid user experience is a well-structured, simple navigation system. Over the past few months, Jon Rundle has been involved in launching two large institutional websites with complex navigation systems. Maintaining simplicity on such large websites becomes increasingly difficult as content requirements grow and tiers of navigation are added, not to mention the extra complexity added by small screens.
If you’ve developed mobile applications or have just started building one, then you probably realize that marketing should be as much of an ongoing concern as the product’s design and development. After all, what’s the point in creating a beautiful, valuable app if no one knows about it? Assuming that promotion on Google Play or Apple’s App Store will take your app from beta to bestseller is… well, magical thinking. In reality, most successful developers kick off their marketing efforts months before release.
Few applications feel as complete as Adobe’s InDesign. First released in 1999 as a direct attack against the then-industry standard, Quark, the page-layout application has been made faster and more feature-rich with each iteration. But even the best applications lack some features. Luckily, Adobe realized this some years ago and opened the doors to allow designers to expand this beloved set of tools through plugins.
First impressions are lasting impressions. Whether you realize it or not, your typography helps to create an experience for users before they’ve even read a word or clicked a button. Typography has the potential to go beyond merely telling a story — it shows the user who is behind the website and what you’re about. The treatment of type creates an atmosphere and elicits a response much the same way as tone of voice does.
As front-end developers and designers, we’re constantly refining two interfaces simultaneously: one for visitors who load the website, the other for developers who have to tackle the code in the future, when adjustments or full-scale redesigns must be made. Yet we tend to assign the role of “user” to the first group, often forgetting that the code we write must work for developers in a similar way. We shouldn’t forget that developers are users, too.
This article features just one of the many, suboptimal solutions for responsive images.With all the talk of new HTML5 standards such as the srcset attribute and <picture> element, as well as server-side techniques such as Responsive Web Design + Server Side Components (RESS), you'd be forgiven for concluding that simple, static websites can’t support responsive images today. That conclusion might be premature, however. In fact, there’s an easy, straightforward way to deliver responsive images that’s supported by all of today’s Web browsers: CSS background images.