Blog Archives
Posted on October 7, 2013 at 4:42 pm
A clean website design is one who is uncluttered, has good whitespace, and naturally has solid typography. This doesn’t mean that an online site must be void of color and design elements to be considered clean, but you will see usually clean web designs use both sparingly. In your inspiration, we’ve gathered a set of sites which might be good examples of what clean design is all about.
About the Author
I love communication, technology, web, design, movies, gastronomy and creativity. Web writer, portuguese/english translator and co founding father of @refilmagem & @mentaway
Twitter: @gismullr
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on October 5, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Getting started on the earth of design may be both thrilling and intimidating. Sometimes, you are feeling such as you just don’t have the tools or skills you ought to complete even probably the most basic projects. At other times, your mind is simply buzzing with a mess of ideas, but it’s possible you’ll not have tips to get them organized. Yet, through the strategy of becoming a designer you’ll grow and expand both as somebody, artist and designer.
Design is the process of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is not any single definition. Design may be art. Design could be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it’s so complicated. – Paul Rand
The key to starting out a successful career in design, is creating your personal toolkit. This toolkit must be an array of design resources that will let you transform a blank canvas into something incredible. Today, we’ve compiled 20 of the handiest design resources in the market for anyone starting out on earth of design. Here you’ll find design tools, in addition to useful websites that can assist you complete design projects, gain inspiration, and become an amazing designer.
1. Lorem Ipsum Generators: For a lot of of your design projects you’re going to wish to grasp how text goes to peer. You’ll normally see lorem ipsum text on website designs available to be used and buy so that you can see how text would look at the site. Will the colour scheme work well? Are you able to see the text? Is the text large enough? A lorem ipsum generator provides you with a large number of text to include for your designs so that you don’t need to give you it yourself.
Here are some useful and funny lorem ipsum generators you need to use for testing out the feel and appear of your designs:
Hipster Ipsum
Cupcake Ipsum
One-Click Lorem Ipsum Generator
2. Icon Sets: As a designer, you’re going to want to be both versatile and quick in terms of designing for clients. Sometimes you can not have the time to craft something entirely yourself, or may find that you’re missing a undeniable element. Having icon sets might be useful create ads, banners, blog headers, campaign images, and website design in a snap. Use the icons to focus on important information, as component to background images, and for CTAs.
You should start by fooling around with icon sets from a single bundle and check out arising with all of the ways you should use them. From there, try using icon sets of alternative styles and understanding ways of incorporating them into different designs.
Cosmos Set (1471 Icons) by IcoJam
600 Stroke Vector Icons by Zlate
Flatties
The Ultimate Pack
UI Icons
Hand-Drawn Icons
3. Color Scheme and Color Palette Resources: When you’re just starting out with design you’re going to wish to grasp how colors interact, and which colours are right for certain projects.
Here are some sites that will help you better know the way to take advantage of color to your designs:
- COLOURlovers: Browse palettes and create your individual, discover new colors, and funky color combinations multi function site.
- HEX to RBG Converter: Know the way to transform your colors for various purposes and color schemas.
- 0 to 255: This tool allows you to select a colour, or discover a random color after which find variations of that color.
- Colorrrs: Discover random colors with the press of a button.
Interested in learning more about color? Look into these articles:
Recommended books that can assist you better understand color and design:
4. Smashing Magazine: If you’re interested by coding, mobile design, website design, and UX/UI Smashing Magazine is a superb place for beginners and veteran designers. You’ll find new articles each day with regards to design and development, which include books, workshops and a task board.
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Here, are some articles you’re able to enjoy from Smashing Magazine:
5. Bounce: This tool means that you can study different elements of any webpage and make comments, highlight a selected area, and share with others. It’s an easy way to watch what other folks are doing on the internet and state what you prefer, what you don’t like, and what you could change. Bounce let’s you better understand other people’s websites so that you could make your sites optimized for whatever you’d like.
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6. Useful Design Checklists: It’s hard to position this stuff into one section, but i believe one extremely important tool for beginning designers is having a checklist. A checklist allow you to be certain that you’ve done everything you’ve needed for a project, that your design is user friends, that your design looks good, and more. Listed below are a number of my favorites:
7. Moqups: Need assistance with wireframing? Moqups is an HTML 5 app that may be used for wireframing, mockups, and laying out user interface elements. Moqups also features collaboration tools that permit others to observe what you’ve created, offer advice and crticism and help your project become even better.
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8. Take Courses: If you’re just starting out on the earth of design and development, sometimes taking a course assist you to fill in any gaps to your knowledge and help get you began to having the ability to create and design the things you’ve only ever dreamed of.
There are numerous places to take courses, and you may take a look at your nearest college or university, otherwise you can look into these resources to be told online:
- CodeAcademy: Discover ways to code, interactively online.
- Treehouse: Take courses in website design and development, discover ways to build websites and smartphone apps, or even start your individual freelance business with Treehouse.
- Teach Yourself Graphic Design: A web self-study course that will help you learn the fundamentals of graphic design.
- HOW Design University: Online courses and workshops for budding designers and freelancers.
- Udemy Design Courses: Select graphic design courses in line with what you need to learn and manage to create.
9. Objects and Illustrations: Every designer, especially those just starting out needs resources to assist create designs faster that look incredible. You may incorporate ready-made design resources like arrows, flourishes, banners, and borders to diminish the quantity of labor you need do.
Here are a few of our favourite resources:
3 225+ Vector Arrows
4 120 Decorative Shapes for PS and AI
5 Chalkboard Signs & Ribbons
6 Ornamental Flourishes
7 44 Decorative Vectors
8 67 Classic Frames
10. Pattern Tap: Ever just wish to take a look at what people are doing on the subject of different areas in their website. Pattern Tap showcases everything from buttons to UI to headers and footers. It’s a good way to browse what folks are doing across the web to get inspiration in your own designs.
11. Firebug: Sooner or later during your strategy of growing and developing as a designer you’re going to need to take a look at what people are doing on the subject of website design and development. Firebug is a free tool that integrates with Firefox, and allows you to inspect and edit the HTML of web sites. For instance, you are able to wonder what’s creating a website look a undeniable way. Firebug helps you to inspect the code that creates the feel and look of an internet page. It’s a handy gizmo every beginning designer should familiarize yourself with.
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12. Superhero.js: Both the creation and upkeep of expansive Javascript code may be difficult. Superhero.js has curated plenty of resources that can assist you get in your way on the subject of Javascript. It’s a good resource for beginners and helpful to get you started.
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13. Harvest: It’s very important to cope some time, keep track of hours, and be accurate with expense reporting when you’re just starting out. In case you begin because of a software or program to watch the work you’ve done, you’re prone to stay organized and manage your work for clients well sooner or later. Harvest helps you manage your projects, track the time spent doing certain parts of your project, and helps you with invoicing clients.
14. Primer: It is a useful gizmo for beginning designers seeking to get into development. Primer lets you copy and paste HTML right into a doc, after which click the button and also you get a basic CSS sheet in keeping with the styles and classes you utilized in your HTML. It’s an ideal way to benefit CSS and understand HTML vs CSS.
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15. Tools for Responsive Design: You’re going to want to appreciate and have the capacity to create responsive friendly designs if you’re going to world on earth of the net. Having tools that can assist you create responsive design is significant. Look at 12 Helpful Tools for Responsive Website design and Top 10 Responsive Website design Tools to get your designs responsive-ready.
16. Google Fonts: If you’re seeking to use fonts for your website, or simply know the way fonts work on the web, Google Fonts is a handy gizmo to determine trending fonts, know the way fonts look on the net try out what text looks as if with different typefaces.
17. Background, Texture, and Pattern Sets: In the case of design you’re going to wish a good selection of backgrounds and textures to include into your designs. It’s good to have hundreds of things that you may use and alter for various design projects. You are able to combine backgrounds and textures to create new looks, and incorporate patterns into different areas of print and website design. Listed here are a number of our favourite sets in your design use:
2 Textured Watercolor Backgrounds
3 Soft Colored Textures
4 200 Blurred & Noisy Backgrounds
5 Chalkboard Textures
18. Gridwax: This simple to apply bookmarklet permits you to add a grid overlay in your website that can assist you make certain everything is aligned and appears just the way you want it to.
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19. Launchlist: It’s important to ensure you have everything finished, complete, and able to go when you’re about to publish a brand new design or submit something to a consumer. Launchlist is a device that helps people inside the area of website design and development to envision their work before publishing. When you’re just starting out, it’s important to ensure you have all of your bases covered and which you know your designs are complete. This tool can help you you are making sure you complete your projects comfortably, and which you didn’t forget anything.
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20. Font Resources for Designers: Every designer, it doesn’t matter what skill level, have to have a couple of fonts of their design toolkit. When you’re just starting out, you’ll like to spend numerous time twiddling with fonts, seeing fonts look combined together, and what fonts look best for print and web.
You’re going to wish your toolkit to contain fonts of other styles including: display fonts, script fonts, serif fonts, san-serif fonts, and unique fonts to play with and get used to using together on your designs.
Here are some fonts to get your toolkit started:
Stay Gold Script & Web Font by Decade Type Foundry
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Lunchbox by Kimmy Design
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Nueva York by Ed J Brown
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Mocha Mattari
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Church within the Wildwood
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Black Velvet
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Dirty Flamingo
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Recommended books for learning more about fonts and typography:
Interested in learning more about fonts and design? Take a look at these articles and resources:
If you’re a beginning designer interested by gaining more advice, inspect these useful articles:
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on October 3, 2013 at 3:18 pm
When it involves website design trends, minimalism has risen to the highest and shows no signs of losing its current popularity. There are various the reason why the fashion have been so embraced of late: not just does it mesh well with the tenets of website design, it may also be effortlessly combined with other popular design trends. Visual styles like color blocking or large photography, and functional trends like innovative navigational structures all could be combined with the methods and goals behind minimal design.
But all of those benefits don’t mean that minimalism is especially easy to work with. Actually, despite the deceptive simplicity in their construction, very good minimalist designs actually require just as complex of an artistic process as every other style. with a purpose to approach a minimalist project will be to accumulate a posh site and refine it all the way down to the essentials. But what are the essentials? Read directly to discover.
Concept
The first mistake designers can fall into is deciding to take advantage of minimalism for the inaccurate reasons; either since it’s popular, or because it seems like it’s easy to do. But don’t be misled by the hype; minimalism is only one stylistic choice among many; it doesn’t and shouldn’t work with all kinds of website.
- Minimalism works best when combined with a fashionable aesthetic and of course sparse content.
- It’s at its worst when used with complex content, conventional audiences, and a conventional aesthetic.
Minimalism wouldn’t work on a content-rich site just like the Verge, despite the obviously modern aesthetic and audience. The hassle is that it has too many elements; the ads, social media, buttons, articles, and so forth all add as much as an unwieldy total. This isn’t a failure to of simplification; all those elements are essential and can’t be further reduced without negative consequences. And while the web site is relatively busy and entire, it’s also quite effective. Just be sure you have an excellent reason behind using minimalism, otherwise choose another style.
Execution
Another common mistake that designers make is taking reductions too far. This leads to a domain design this is either lifeless and unappealing, or obscure and have interaction with.
- Minimal sites more often than not want to feature either beautiful imagery, interesting type choices, or great balance and contrast. Otherwise they appear too plain.
- The entire purpose of minimalism is to bring clarity through simplification. But when navigational elements are reduced to a degree where users can’t immediately understand them, then this purpose has not been upheld.
For example, while other portions of Pixelsapien’s site have interesting elements, the “Our Work” section exemplifies how throwing flat, refined icons on page really isn’t a successful implementation of minimalism. It’s really easy to realise, but it’s also boring and lifeless. The imagery, type, and colours are all very plain, and the layout is centered and straightforward. If only 1 of those features were tweaked and enhanced, then the look of the page will be immeasurably improved.
In contrast, Grain and Gram is beautifully designed. But minimalism’s primary emphasis on good communication isn’t being upheld as strictly correctly; most of the icons and navigational elements are ambiguous and want further clarification.
Design Elements
A Modern Style for a fashionable Audience
As an artistic production studio, minimalism fits perfectly with the objective audience of Gigantic Squid. A low profile user interface lets their imagery do all of the talking.
Simple Content Fits an easy Presentation
A website just like the Minimalist Music Quiz has only one purpose; to make a fun game out of guessing song titles and artists through minimalist art. As previously discussed, minimalism is a superb choice for one of these simple site; it’s made more functional in addition to more attractive by paring it all the way down to the bare minimum.
Contrast
By overlapping aqua triangles with black and white photography, Case 3D shows only one example of ways their web design succeeds at creating interest through contrasting shapes, textures, and hues.
Balance
This essential could be achieved in lots of ways, only one of them being seen in Hennessy’s homepage design. A classical gridbased arrangement like this can be a good selection for an organization with a historical feel, but something edgier and more complex may be attempted with another form of site.
Detail
It’s the little things, just like the exquisitely intriguing rollovers to be found on Stronghold’s website, that make minimalist designs feel special. Thoughtful touches like this (that don’t interfere with functionality) are the hallmark of a top quality minimalist website.
Typography
The textural, handwritten typography on MailChimp 2012’s homepage is all that was had to make this huge-scale photo come alive; it makes an announcement by contrasting the rough, flat texture of the text with the graceful, dimensional look of the picture.
Consistency
A necessity that ties into both the visual and the interactive experience could be seen in Adam Rudzki’s portfolio, where shapes, movements, and contours are carried during the site to make it feel like a continuing experience.
Although all of those components must be considered and incorporated right into a good minimalist design, the fundamental purpose of the manner may be boiled all the way down to only one statement: minimalism is supposed to raise communication by simplification. By as few tools and options and possible, good minimal designs should provide an interactively streamlined and visually appealing user experience. Many websites stand to vastly take advantage of this treatment, so it’s an amazing bet that minimalism might be here to remain.
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on October 1, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Last week we showcased 13 Beautiful Examples of Bold Colors in Website design and we received several emails asking us to position together a listing with specific colors. So today, in response to our requests, we prepare a set of sites using greens and blues as their main color.
Green is the colour of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. While blue is the colour of the sky and sea. It is usually related to depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. All colors have meaning. So when choosing the colour palette on your next project, that’s something to think about.
UIkit
Lush Type
Alyssa B. Noel
Knock Knock Factory
Moving Things Design Company
play-dot-to.com
Daru Sim
Zero Zero
adaptable
Desktime
Aldeia Coworking
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Niche
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Activate Media
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In case the need arises know more about colors and their meanings, some time back we published a pleasant infographic – The Pscicology of colours – inside the article Color: Links, Books & Tools to Make your Life Easier, test it out!
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on October 1, 2013 at 12:07 pm
It’s important for a website to stand out from the crowd, and depending on a business’s brand awareness and corporate identity, a vintage design can offer a completely different take.
Many people and businesses opt for glossy websites, but after a while they can begin to look the same. However, if you do opt for a vintage look, there are different areas that need to be taken into account.
One of which is typography. It can be too easy to focus on images and forget about the fonts used in a website. And this must be selected carefully and it should only compliment the retro design your website possesses.
Choose an era. Retro can often be applied to many eras, occasionally even the naughties, which really don’t seem too long ago! So try and do some research pick a certain era, draw up ideas, and plan the website well. Different era reflect different times, different colours, different well, everything.
Retro can make your website stand out, but make sure it stands out for the right reasons. It must be said that a website can be made too retro, so while it’s okay to play with the design, just make sure the functionality is always modern and up to date.
Posted in Web Design
Posted on September 29, 2013 at 7:52 am
From web to print and television, we believe that you could find inspirations in a wide variety of mediums! With that during mind, and in addition on the grounds that advertisement is a smart place to locate cool artworks, we decided to collect some creative and provoking print ads to expose you the way designers approach colors, textures, type and composition in one other medium. Be sure to click the pictures to benefit more about each campaign. One of many reasons i really like ads is because they must communicate an entire idea in just a couple of words and a striking image, capturing the viewer’s attention while being memorable – and positively inspiring.
The Miracle of Helsinki. Champions League qualification game HJK HELSINKI-Nõmme Kalju Wednesday July 17th at Sonera Stadium.
End the traffic.
Do one good deed that’s worth for a lot of.
Is your english still skinny?
How does the Happy Meal stack up?
Longer lasting products! Let’s bring total quality to our food and beverages. Method to go, high-barrier containers.
In case you thought it’s Big apple, it’s time to read Viaje Mais. Statue of Liberty, France
Unlimited plans for endless conversations.
0 Dirt is right.
1 Food is Life. Come live it.
2 New cream cheese in slices.
About the Author
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I love communication, technology, web, design, movies, gastronomy and creativity. Web writer, portuguese/english translator and co founding father of @refilmagem & @mentaway
Twitter: @gismullr
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on September 27, 2013 at 8:14 am
In Freebies
Posted by Henry Jones on Sep 18, 2013 | No Comments
Our job at WDL is to collect inspiration, resources, tools, tips and naturally freebies for our readers. We do each of the searching so that you can do something about what’s important. For today, we’ve got some cool PSDs that make it super easy to provide your app mockups in an eye-catching perspective layout. These PSDs utilize smart layers, so all it’s essential to do is drop on your mockups.
iGravertical Screen Layers + iOS 7 Screen Converter
Perspective App Screen Mock-Up 5
Perspective App Screen Mock-Up 4
Perspective App Screens Mock-Up
Isometric Perspective MockUp
3D View iPhone 5C Psd Vector Mockup
3D iPhone 5 Psd Vector Mockup v2
iPhone X Concept Template
Free 3D Perspective Mockup
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Dribble Mobile Mockup IN PERSPECTIVE!
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on September 25, 2013 at 10:35 am
Incorporating bold colors in an online design is unquestionably with a purpose to get attention and to offer your site personality. Bobbing up with the correct color combination may be a challenge, but if done correctly the end result may have a big effect. To provide you some inspiration during this department, we’ve gather a group of websites where the designers weren’t shy about using some bold and bright colors.
About the Author
I love communication, technology, web, design, movies, gastronomy and creativity. Web writer, portuguese/english translator and co founding father of @refilmagem & @mentaway
Twitter: @gismullr
Here’s another articles that you’re going to definitely find useful.
Posted in Web Design
Posted on September 23, 2013 at 2:08 pm
jQuery plugins certainly exist to make our life easier, and it’s always great to find new ones that make it easy to feature cool functionality to our projects. So for today, now we have some fresh jQuery plugins to share with you. From progress bar animations to flat shadows, and HTML restructure in a responsive way, there are several interesting plugins as a way to try. Enjoy.
Flat-Shadow
A small jQuery plugin so they can automatically cast a shadow creating depth on your flat UI elements.
NProgress
A nanoscopic progress bar. Featuring realistic trickle animations to convince your users that something is occurring!
FlowType
Web typography at its finest: font-size and line-height in response to element width.
Device.js
Device.js makes it easy to jot down conditional CSS and/or JavaScript in keeping with device operating system (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows), orientation (Portrait vs. Landscape), and sort (Tablet vs. Mobile).
Intention.js
Intention.js offers a gentle-weight and clear thanks to dynamically restructure HTML in a responsive manner.
Perimeter.js
Perimeter.js creates an invisible perimeter around a target element and monitors mouse breaches.
favico.js
Make a use of your favicon with badges, images or videos.
Animo.js
A powerful little tool for managing CSS animations.
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Posted in Web Design
Posted on September 21, 2013 at 10:10 am
In Inspiration
Posted by Henry Jones on Sep 10, 2013 | No Comments
It doesn’t matter in the event you earn a living from home or in the event you use your individual space only at night or at the weekends, home offices are great! They provide us a raffle to create an area just the way in which we would like it, with the things we have to do our job effectively. For some, this suggests filling the gap with things that inspire, like plenty of art and nick-nacks. But others take the “less is more” approach, picking out a minimalistic office where clean lines, less clutter, and only the bare essentials create the best work environment.
Remember to click the photographs to profit more about each space.
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Posted in Web Design
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