Webdesigner Depot - Archives (septembre 2013)
eb Design Resources for Web Designers. We include Photoshop Tutorials, WordPress Plugins, and Web Development tools. Download free icons, Photoshop brushes and tools for web and graphic designers.
Building complex, flexible layouts has never been easy, but CSS3 has certainly taken away a lot of the headaches. CSS3 features like Flexbox and Columns have made some complex layouts a real possibility and now they’re being joined by one of the newest additions to the web designer’s toolbox: CSS Regions. CSS Regions allow you [...]
     |
When it comes down to it, user experience should be the number-one priority for mobile developers. Really successful mobile experiences are not compromised, stripped-down versions of their desktop counterparts — they’re better than the experience on a desktop computer. Successful mobile developers “go mobile” first to create an engaging, satisfying user experience, and a large [...]
| |
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of [...]
| |
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world [...]
| |
WordPress is one of the best ways of deploying content. But we’re not all about using templates. Most designers want to design. And the problem is with WordPress that to get exactly what you want visually, means an awful lot of work coding. The conundrum is, do you spend months learning code, or dip into your [...]
| |
Google, the omnipresent search engine, is celebrating its 15th birthday today. Which means it can now drive a car and thinks it knows everything. To celebrate this significant milestone, a new easter egg has been launched. If you search for “Google in 1998″ from Google’s homepage, the site will switch to a static version of [...]
| |
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works…and sounds. The web is home to thousands of sites dedicated to showcasing great design, but the majority of these are focused purely on the visual, meaning that the audible aspect of design is often overlooked. It’s an issue that [...]
| |
Still looking for that perfect UI kit to base your flat design on? Then look no further… This Awesome UI Kit from Freepik.com is massive and a fantastic way to ease into flat design. Perfect for a host of projects, the UI kit is unashamedly neutral, providing a framework for your own design, not dictating [...]
| |
As designers, we can be extremely critical to different designs and details. If a designer told me they could never suggest a change to a design, I probably wouldn’t believe them. Whether it be on a poster or on a t-shirt, I can always find something I might change if I were the one in [...]
| |
Web design resources are often cheap, but they add up: stock photography, fonts, a sound file or two; before you know it your assets for a project have taken a fairly hefty bite out of your profit margin. The answer used to be to increase your prices and pass the expense on to your client. [...]
| |
There are no bad dogs, just bad owners; likewise there are no bad fonts, just bad designers. Well, that’s not entirely true, fonts are regularly distributed with all kinds of flaws — inadequate hinting, poor consistency, a lack of optical adjustment, are all common mistakes — but those fonts fall by the wayside pretty quickly. [...]
| |
I’ve traveled to many art schools, being asked to review senior student portfolios, and speak on professional practices in the design business, and the one thing I always notice is the lack of direction in student portfolios. Even with professionals, there is often no idea what, or even how to present work to a client. [...]
| |
If you’re looking for a quick fix of typographic inspiration then boy, do I have a treat for you. It comes in the form of Typewolf. Typewolf is a showcase of typographic inspiration that identifies the fonts used in each of the featured designs. The site is curated by designer Jeremiah Shoaf, whose aim is to [...]
| |
You may have noticed a common look in many images, not only in graphics and animations online, but also in magazines, and in television motion graphics, featuring low-detailed, faceted models, highly rendered, often with soft lighting effects. It’s at once a reference to the early days of computer modeling and animation, but given a modern [...]
| |
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of [...]
| |
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world [...]
| |
Logos are a different kind of design. They’re tricky. They have to encompass an entire company, brand and attitude in one image. Sometimes that image is iconic – the NBC peacock, the Verizon red checkmark, the Mercedes-Benz pointed star. Other times it’s, well. . .not. Even iconic brands can get it wrong – especially when [...]
| |
One of the very best things about the Web is the great tools that the community keeps on delivering. We love discovering new stuff almost as much as we love bringing it to you. This great selection has over 50 free resources including coding tools for developers, icons sets, fonts, PSD and vector design sets, [...]
| |
The blogosphere exploded today at the news that .net magazine, the publication that many of us began our careers reading, has pulled the plug on its online offering. The print magazine will continue to publish, but netmagazine.com is no more. From now on, much of .net’s news will be published via Creativebloq.com, a site just [...]
| |
We all know that the best photos are the ones we take ourselves — or at least the ones we pay a photographer to take for us. But sometimes, a client simply doesn’t have the budget for that kind of service. Sometimes you’ll need a shot of a woman relaxing at a spa, or a [...]
| |
Most my clients are focussed on print, so I was super stoked to get my first web design client in a long while. I had some techniques in mind that I wanted to try out. During the initial client meeting, my mind was racing with ideas on how I wanted the site to look and how [...]
| |
You can never have too many icons, especially when they’re free to download like this great set from Ivo Ivanov. The set comes as a PSD file with properly separated layers. Each icon has 4 effects — inner and outer shadows, gradient overlay and drop shadow —that can be toggled on and off as per [...]
| |
Recently, a friend suggested that I write an analysis of news websites: what they’re doing right, and what they’re doing wrong. He suggested that the online news experience was too backward, and maybe a bit boring, and figured that they could make better use of AJAX and similar technologies to streamline content delivery and site [...]
| |
Conventional wisdom states that body text benefits most from being set in a serif font because the serifs create a path for the eye to follow along a line and down to the next. Despite that, many web designers have for a number of years, argued for the use of sans-serifs; and with good reason: [...]
| |
When I speak to senior students at art schools, there is one major thing I try to impress upon them: to freelance is to run a small business, and a freelance design business has all the needs and headaches of running a bakery, pizza parlor, or crack house — although a crack house basically only [...]
| |
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of [...]
| |
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world [...]
| |
Browsing the Web is usually an endless round of clicks, taps and scrolling. That’s changed with Annyang, an incredibly simple JavaScript library that enables voice commands for web sites. Maybe not the most user-friendly for brochure sites, it’s great for complex applications where giving the user a series of verbal shortcuts to different sections, such [...]
| |
It’s very typical that I experience an increase in clients during the summer months. I mean, business is really booming, so much so that I typically need some help with the projects I have. Clients are excited and enthusiastic about giving out tons of work and trying to keep up with what their customers want. [...]
| |
These incredibly beautiful images by artist Christy Lee Rogers are created without the aid of Photoshop, with carefully lit models, in water, at night. Not the first to use the medium of water — the seminal video artist Bill Viola springs to mind — Rogers has refined the process to achieve an astounding painterly quality. [...]
| |
In recent years, user experience design has become a popular topic in the web design community, with discussions focussing on successful examples of good UX design. With regard to websites, the term covers all aspects of a user’s experience within a particular site. In other words, the visual layout, information architecture, usability, graphics, user interaction: [...]
| |
You can’t have too many good script typefaces; each one brings personality and a distinct character to a brand. Case in point: Melany Lane by Yellow Design studio. A delicious hand-drawn font that’s perfect for wedding invitations, restaurant menus and anything that you want to feel hand-crafted. Which is why we’re delighted that our sister-site, [...]
| |
It seems like there’s been a flurry of logo redesigns lately and Google is the latest to throw its hat into the ring. The new logo, currently only in Chrome on Android, has had its bevels and drop shadow removed to embrace the flat look. It’s no secret that I personally don’t consider flat design [...]
| |
Are you underestimating this deceptively “neutral” color? Either it’s considered cheap (because it reminds us of putty colored school cabinets and our landlord’s choice of budget “Navajo White” paint) or boring (for the same reasons, I suppose)… or it makes us think of something that started out snowy white, but yellowed in the weather. There are [...]
| |
When Google acquired YouTube back in 2006, most people expected to see a rebrand to pull the video sharing site closer to its parent company’s corporate style. That anticipated rebrand may finally be on the cards 7 years later as YouTube rolled out updates to its apps at the end of August, featuring a swanky [...]
| |
Any and every designer wants (and should) strive to be as creative as possible. We design to be functional and useful, but we should also design to be aesthetically pleasing. Who wants to make a web site that’s an eyesore? Many wonderfully designed items have the perfect blend of functionality and beauty from phones to [...]
| |
The September edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery resources, sites to find inspiration, responsive design tools, mobile design tools, coding resources, and some really great new fonts. Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot [...]
| |
This morning 500,000 premium Creative Cloud subscribers will be waking up to an update alert for Adobe Photoshop. Adobe’s flagship product has been revised for the first time since the switch to the subscription model back in June. The big news is that for the first time the heart of Photoshop, its workflow, has been revised [...]
| |
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of [...]
| |
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world [...]
| |
Freelancing is a minefield, and if you don’t traverse it properly you can find yourself in real trouble, fast. Just browse through any freelance advice board and you’ll see hundreds of horror stories: clients who won’t pay, clients who steal work, clients who demand unreasonable scope-creep, even clients who’ll sue you. But that doesn’t mean [...]
| |
UI kits are a great way to kick-start a user interface design. The best ones feature the most common elements required by developers. Most importantly, UI kits avoid the dreaded ‘blank screen’, giving you a jumping off point for your own innovations. It’s rare however that you find a UI kit that is neutral enough [...]
| |
In one form or another, public service announcements (or advertisements) have been with us for well over a hundred years. They have as their chief objective the goal of educating the general public in order to raise awareness on a multitude of social issues; from cancer and global warming to domestic violence and drug abuse. [...]
| |
Marissa Mayer is many things. A brand designer she is not. After 30 days of change and countless dollars thrown at R&D, Yahoo! have unveiled their new logo. The past month showcased some options — most of which were bad — and unfortunately the end result is distinctly amateurish. So what’s wrong? Well to start [...]
| |
One of the more ambitious conferences on the circuit, Reasons to be Creative was held this year September 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Whilst most conferences focus on a single discipline, or audience type, ReasonsTo seeks to inspire creative change in all of our lives. With such an intangible aim, the danger would seem to be [...]
| |
Friends of Type is the side project of designers Aaron Carambula, Erik Marinovich, Dennis Payongayong and Jason Wong. The project is an ever growing archive of original typographic design and lettering primarily created by the aforementioned. It came to be in the September of 2009 after Erik sent Aaron a sketch but neither of them had any idea [...]
| |
The excitement of scrolling has really evolved since we could use colored scrollbars in Internet Explorer years ago. Today, we are finding new ways to reinvent the process of scrolling with gestures, parallax scrolling features and more. We’re creating excitement and telling stories. We’re creating great user experiences and making content functional. Problem is, most [...]
| |
Print’s a tricky business. Just because the dimensions are set in stone, we tend to think that everything will come out just the way we designed it. Oh, and it turns out the dimensions aren’t set in stone… The reality is that print is as device dependent as screen-based design; in fact, possibly even more [...]
| |
Congratulations! You won a job, worked hard to produce a great site, and the client is thrilled with the results. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to get paid? While invoicing may not seem to most enthralling subject, it is without doubt one of the most crucial areas for every business. Your invoice reflects your branding, [...]
| |
Namebox is a simple service created by designer Drew Wilson to help you sell your unwanted and/or unused web domains. It’s free to use and is built to make listing your domains quick and easy. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Drew and his work, he’s well renowned for building his own products [...]
| |
It is easy to say that 2013 has so far been the year of flat design. Even Apple, the driver of the skeuomorphic design trend for many years, is trying some level of flat design when it releases iOS 7 later this year. So are you ready to try it out as well? Not sure [...]
| |
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of [...]
| |