designm.ag - Archives (juillet 2013)
Back just a few years ago it was required for web developers use JavaScript/jQuery to perform animated effects in-browser. CSS3 has dramatic
I heard a friend say the other day that web designers measure time in deadlines. Maybe that is an overstatement, but time is of the essence. They need to get a high quality job done as fast as possible. For the most part, a designer’s working process involves the use of acceptable images, and I believe I’ve found a great resource for this purpose: Stockfresh, coming from the original founders of stock.xchng and Stockxpert.
You can take your pick from a vast array of high-quality graphic images. Last time I checked, there was a handsome amount of 2.5 million images in their vaults, and it’s growing at a fast rate, so by the time this article is finished, their expert team of reviewers may have approved yet another few thousands, based on qualitative, legal, artistic and commercial criteria.
Only the best submissions are admitted, so you need not fret over what kind of quality you’ll find. Now, this is the main concern with microstock agencies, and it simply does not stand here. In other words, you can get your supply of photos, graphics or vector illustrations in excellent resolution, and at a most convenient price.
WordPress is one of the easiest CMS to get started, with a lot of available plugins, themes and tutorials. But it’s also easy to get lost, write some bad code, and doing things that will certainly cost you a good time to fix in the future. WordPress has a simple guide on code formatting and our intention is not to just replicate that, therefore we’ll take it to the next level and learn a little bit of everything when it comes to code organizing, performance and optimization. One important thing also is to always use “future proof” solutions. WordPress code, themes and plugins are being updated all the time so you should make your code as easy as possible to debug and modify. So, here we are with a few tips that will make your “future you” much happier. Some may seem too simple, such as code indentation and spaces, but in fact all of them are simple to implement and you’ll notice how better your code will be after this makeover.
Whether you are a freelance designer or working as part of a team, there are going to be times where you need to lead the way. Not everybody enjoys being the leader and sometimes it is easier to follow directions working towards a greater goal. But I want to share a few ideas to help teams and individuals for managing their creative projects.
Confidence is a big piece of the process because you want the customer to understand what you are doing. Even if you may not have as much confidence in the work, keep this buried down and push through the workload. You may surprise yourself with what can be accomplished. A successful creative project requires open communication and a lot of pushing in the right direction. I do hope these tips may help other designers when building future ideas.
The decision for a developer to use an adaptive or responsive web design is dependent on the intended use of the web page. In a short comparison, an adaptive web design is made to deliver content accommodating to the type of browser enabled. While a responsive web design is designated to fit the original web page's contents into the specified container. Although adaptive web designs are less popular than responsive, neither style is necessarily better than the other in terms of overall viewing quality.
Discussing Responsive Web Design
When viewing a web page written with a responsive web design, the site aesthetics may vary depending on the type of device or browser the user is viewing on. For example, viewing a standard web page on a mobile phone versus on a standard computer monitor. These websites, when being viewed on a monitor, display the web page with full imagery and content normally.
Have you ever had trouble getting a client to pay you? Some freelance designers struggle to collect the money that is due to them.
From a freelancer's perspective, getting paid is the most important part of the project. The money we get from freelancing pays our bills and helps us to stay in business.
And to be honest, no one wants to spend weeks (or even months) trying to collect from a former client. But sometimes, payment problems happen anyway.
Happily, there are some steps you can take to reduce or even eliminate payment problems. In this post, I share some tips to help you get paid including the seven steps of effective invoicing and five invoicing tools. If you enjoyed this post, you may also like The Nitty Gritty Details Freelancers Need to Know About Getting Paid.
Brand design is never easy; in fact, it's such a delicate task that you never know when you got the right thing and your career depends on it. Business cards are a means of presentation taken for granted these days. If having no social media makes you non-existent, how can you exist in the real world without real branding?
A number of design resources are available online where you can build very simplistic logos from scratch. The incredible market of PSD freebies along with free font files creates an atmosphere of fluid creativity. It is much easier now to launch a project online and put together a quick yet efficient logo within an hour using Photoshop, or another graphics editor.
In this gallery I want to present a collection of logo designs for inspiration. Marketers and identity designers will know the amount of work it takes putting together ideas into a logo. But with enough practice you should be able to get the hang of things. It is my hope this gallery will provide a set of helpful minimalist logo designs for deriving other ideas on your own.
Pier 5 Fish Market
When Wordpress came out I thought "somebody ought to make that for websites as well" - and I'm sure I wasn't alone. Everybody wanted to be able to create a site without learning code. Fast forward by ten years and here we are, surrounded by that very wish come true and multiplied by as many wishers out there. The good news is that the coding days are over, and I'm not talking about hybrid software like Dreamweaver, for which you didn't need a Ph D in web design, but still had to go to college. All these softwares below allow you to create a site by clicking and dragging, just like a walk in a Photoshop park. The "bad" news is that they're so many, you wouldn't know which one to choose. But that is what we're here for. IMCreator
Designers and developers are growing in numbers and plenty of these folks have outstanding portfolios. The common advantage of the Internet is that anybody from anywhere in the world can check out your projects during any time of the day! If you wish to land more freelance work then I would recommend taking a peek at your current portfolio to see if anything could be updated.
And to help with building ideas for your own website, I have collected 200 various portfolios of graphics designers, developers, writers, and other digital creatives. This is a massive showcase gallery full of design inspiration for unique portfolio layouts. I strived to include only designs which really change things up from the typical portfolio website templates. Plus in addition to these design examples, I would love to read other people's thoughts on how to build a great portfolio site in the comments section.
Custom fonts are useful not just for graphics design, but also to use in your own websites via CSS @font-face. All of the free open source font families are easy to find and quick to include on your websites. But graphic/web designers also know the importance of choosing the right fonts in your mockups.
I want to present a small collection of interesting web fonts you can download for free use in any project. These are a great choice for web designers because you can easily setup your logo and heading text without needing to sacrifice much in the HTML/CSS conversion. Additionally you can produce the other web-safe font filetypes by using a service like Font2Web.
Idealist Sans
Typography has become a hot topic, often used referring illustrative typography or custom lettering. At its core, however, typography is simply the skill of setting type. Several centuries ago, this meant composing every paragraph by hand, character by character, before locking it into a form and printing it on a letterpress machine. For much of the 1900s, this meant typing it out on a Linotype or a similar composing machine. Since the advent of the digital age, nearly all composing has been done digitally. This certainly makes things simpler, but we’ve also lost many typographic sensibilities. Here are a number of items for your consideration that will help you set type better, applicable in both print and web scenarios.
The Principle Of Typography
As I'm sure many of you are aware you can use Shopify is a online store platform. The reason this audience is going to be interested in their platform is because of the details of their stores. They give users the ability to design beautiful online stores. Designers are visual creatures. We rely on the gut feeling over the substance. Our intuition drives nearly every visual decision we make. Shopify has carefully crafted stores to give their user base some of the most eye catching and functional shops found anywhere on the web. The stores come out of the box with lots of great features. Just to name a few: You can choose from over 100 professional themes Complete control over the store. They allow you to take their store and make any custom CSS or HTML edits. Shopping cart integration provided Unlimited hosting bandwidth They've got pricing plans ranging from $14 per month to $179. See pricing plans here
Registration for LearnWebDevelopment.com’s WordPress Bootcamp is ending soon. The doors close at midnight on July 11, 2013 so they can give each student live instruction and dedicated 1-on-1 support. To join this group and learn exactly how to use WordPress to make feature-rich websites faster than ever before, sign up here now. Why join today? Here’s why...
Common JavaScript techniques include Ajax content, dynamic forms, and modal windows. The content slider/slideshow interface has always been around but has gained a tremendous audience over the past few years. And with the continuing growth of jQuery it is safe to assume that more developers will be creating projects with an open source license. In this collection I want to present 30 of the most interesting jQuery slider plugins. Each one should work properly with the most current version of jQuery and they also provide their own documentation. It is a great way to introduce yourself into the system and start building websites with some more dynamic effects.
iView
Despite of the awesome mobile browsers we have available nowadays, sometimes the best thing to do is to serve content at least mobile-optimized. But in order to do this you need to first detect which visitors are coming from mobile devices and which aren’t. Today we’ll see a few ways to detect mobile browsers so you can chose the best suitable to your needs, and give your user the best experience possible.
#1 PHP User Agent
When the browser requests your server the page, it also sends some data about itself, like post data, referrer and the user agent. We could test the user agent comparing with a list of known mobile user agents so you can redirect the user to a different version, add a new cookie, set a global variable to be used in your CMS, set a HTML class or anything else you may want to do.