Every time Apple redesigns their software, specifically iOS, the total design industry landscape changes. Basically, everyone follows them.

This phenomenon actually makes quite a lot of sense. What’s confusing, though, is that Apple typically isn’t the primary to create new design patterns or usability trends, and Apple isn’t necessarily the main capable leader with regards to software design.

They are, however, leaders in lots of others ways, and their software design is healthier than most. That’s exactly why they set trends.

Image via Songquan Deng / Shutterstock

It Started With Me

I see this happen to me each time a major shift happens in iOS. It started at the day the iPhone was released in 2007. i used to be blown away by the device, the design, the usability, the touch screen, the gestures… it was all so new, so cool, and very unexpected.

I remember immediately applying the foundations in their gestures and design patterns to my very own trade, which was and is designing websites and web applications. i used to be literally so inspired, and that i still believe that that day changed history and shaped every single day that came after it. The style that everybody thought of design and user interactions was totally turned the other way up.

Subsequent releases of recent iOS versions and contours evoked an analogous reaction. plenty of this has to do with Apple basing its design decisions on deep human principles, smart thinking and research. That implies that after you get it (you notice it after Apple’s done it), you already know that there are a wide variety of how to use Apple’s thinking and usefulness on your own projects and ways of fascinated about projects and users.

I Wasn’t Alone

Soon i realized that others were taking the cue to boot. When iOS first started innovating, it was long before responsive website design. If truth be told, it was largely the primary time that full, beautiful websites were viewable on cell phones. It is sensible, then, that once everyone started creating mobile versions in their websites, the plain inspiration was Apple’s native apps.

It could be hard to keep in mind, however the original native apps, before the App Store existed, were nowhere near what they’re today. Still, they were like nothing anyone had seen previously.

So mobile websites, at the beginning of the “true” mobile web, looked so much like Apple’s iOS apps. Frameworks started emerging, like jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch, that featured simple “views” with back buttons within the upper left, nav bars around the bottom, bouncy scrolls and more. Forget loading new pages. We wanted sliding and flipping transitions between views without a load time.

Briefly, and after Android was out, there has been a push for “non Apple” mobile UIs, which translated basically to a platform agnostic, mobile-web-specific UI language. Even that looked and functioned plenty like Apple.

Then Came the App Store

Image by Christophe Tauziet

Soon Apple unfolded their App Store and created this complete new subset of the technology/development/design industry where anyone could create their very own mobile apps. Here it really made sense to duplicate Apple’s interfaces and design styles, and it is probably what set the tone for the future years.

Now, designers and UX people had good reason to base their decisions off of the functions that users were already used to. That’s usability 101. Especially because before the iPhone, there have been no pre-existing user patterns for touch-based mobile apps.

The issue, in order to call it that, is that we now have an entire slew of various use cases and value patterns from all different mobile operating systems, mobile and responsive websites, and mobile applications. It sort of feels, though, that everybody still desires to follow Apple.

I guess it’s safe…

The Flat Design Example

Recently, essentially the mostsome of the most relevant example of the way we’re all still being led by Apple is de facto flat design.

Apple failed to invent flat design, and in reality, that you need to argue that they don’t even practice true flat design. (i do know there’s no formal definition of flat design to tell us they don’t… but they don’t.)

Image by Leo Drapeau

Regardless of its popularity pre-iOS 7, all of the sudden, with the discharge of iOS 7, everything on the earth went flat.

I don’t mean that the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter apps updated their designs to compare the hot iOS 7 flat interface and best practices. That did happen, though.

I mean that websites became flatter to check their mobile app companions. In numerous cases, Android apps got the flat treatment besides. Taking things a step further, some very large companies even updated their logos! Yahoo, Google and Bing all released new, flatter logos right round the time Apple updated to iOS 7.

The proven fact that Apple wasn’t nearly the primary company to implement flat design helps to strengthen my point. Flat design was extremely popular amongst designers and stylish tech or design-focused companies. It was written about, debated and defined. Nonetheless it took Apple to let everyone know that “OK, it’s safe to do that now. We did it.”

Back to Me

The thing is, even in fact these years, i used to be insanely inspired by watching the Apple keynote where iOS 7 was revealed. Especially after they showed the recent photos app.

And it’s crazy, because I dislike the hot design of the “select” inputs, I dislike how the back arrow interacts with its label, and that i dislike another minor choices.

But i like how they push our whole industry forward. i admire how they thought “outside the box” and threw all previous assumptions out the window. i admire how Jonny Ive was capable of take his genius and spill it into the software side of the product.

For now, and doubtless for ages into the long run, I and everybody else will continue to repeat Apple, whether consciously or subconsciously, through Apple directly or through another individual who copied Apple originally. We’ll continue to have “aha” moments when Apple rethinks a standard user interface element. For better or worse, we’ll continue to base our aesthetic decisions on Apple’s cellphone interface.

And, really, that’s not this type of bad thing.

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The start of a brand new year is often an exhilarating time for businesses to peer ahead and beauty what the arriving year will bring. There are many of changes in store in 2014, especially for those that work in technology and website design.

2013 saw a slew of recent trends, a number of that have begun to vanish out and others that stuck around and are still going strong. While 2014 is barely getting started, let’s look at a number of the website design trends which have began to emerge or that we will expect to determine within the coming year.

Flat Design

Flat Design was one of the crucial biggest trends to emerge in 2013 and this is going strong into the hot year. Companies from Taco Bell to Apple are dropping skeumorphism in favor of flat design by stripping their graphics of very nearly any design element that isn’t 100% purposeful within the function of the product. Apple, for instance, launched their iOS7 with an extreme flat design, stripping the design elements until they were stark naked. This involves doing away with 3-D graphics and gradients and basically just using flat shapes and indicators to assist the user have a more accessible experience.

Experimental typography

More and more designers are enjoying fonts and injecting them with new personalities. These fonts have slightly more pizazz than standard serif or san-serif fonts like Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc. We’ve already seen designers starting to add uniqueness and personality to the fonts their using in logos and on websites. A few of these may be fun and playful while others are artistic but still professional. Possible expect to look many more websites going the best way of the fewer boring font in 2014.

Slide Out Menus

Want to view the content on an internet site crisply without distraction? Slide out menus let you just do that. A slide out menu may be toggled from the head or side of your screen to bare the remainder of the site’s content in a unbroken way that doesn’t interrupt your browsing experience. It’s a pleasing approach to get where you’re going without getting distracted. It’s minimalistic and ease 2.0.

Big Background Videos

Move over single page websites that feature big beautiful images, and hello background videos. This new trend is making waves, and it isn’t hard to work out why! Imagine a wonderful video playing in your site that fills up the whole screen, providing your audience with an inside look and peak into your organization or business. When done right big background videos could make your website stick out from others, and supply an in-depth user experience were customers and readers feel connected to you and your brand in a technique never before possible.

Endless Scrolling

Scrolling through a domain is quicker and easier than having to click through links to access various information. They don’t seem to be the content-cluttered long scrolling pages of the past, either. New design techniques allow the content to be impeccably organized and formatted in a fashion that’s super easy to read and digest. Long scrolling site can change layout and design as you’re scrolling, which makes it easy to forget that you’re actually scrolling through rather a lot of knowledge.

Simple Color Schemes

2014 will see much more websites using just one or two colors rather than the attention-popping graphics and animation of the past. a brand new trend is to take advantage of one bright and clean background color, like red, orange or teal, and to incorporate images or black or white text over it. The effect is super minimalist and user-friendly.

Focus on Mobile

Image by Yecid Sanmartin

Responsive Website design was another big trend in 2013 and now 2014 is seeing websites designed expressly for mobile use. Designers are working increasingly more on keeping sites performing on mobile devices and developers are helping the cause along too. Such things as logins, social media integration, email subscriptions, endless scrolling and lots of other features are making sites much, much easier to exploit on phones, that is where most users are turning nowadays.

Less Text, More Video

Instead of getting blurbs about what a corporate does, businesses are instead determining short videos. Because videos are easy to provide and share for your site and on social media and so they entice the fashionable attention span that desires to be wowed and entertained, videos are a good way to speak with an audience effectively.

Scroll Activated Animations

Interactivity in website design is beginning to visit a wholly new level. With scroll activated animations you could create incredible content that your audience can interact with and explore. It makes your websites truly come to life in a method never before possible. Sometime the online can feel distant and different than somebody connection, but with scroll activated animations your audience can begin to feel more involved with the digital world.

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There are a many aspects of fine website design, and whitespace is definitely considered one of them. Whitespace is the empty space around design elements which includes images, text, columns, etc. It’s that blank space that makes layouts clean and complicated. Understand that whitespace doesn’t must be white, provided that it can be blank, any color will do the job and may deliver a clean and stylish design.

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I am always doing that which i will not do, so that i’ll how one can do it. – Pablo Picasso.

Absolutely – building websites with no less than some knowledge of HTML is way more productive than just drawing them with Photoshop. While web-designers who understand how to code still often grow to be sending their PSDs to the “real” developers, if truth be told that almost all award-winning websites are designed by code-savvy web designers. You wonder why?

It’s because both HTML and CSS are very visual languages in themselves. Also, websites become increasingly interactive. User interactions though are very difficult to foresee using only Photoshop. Whereas having code in mind always helps creating designs which have interactions in mind.

Let alone cash. If you’re a contract designer reminiscent of I previously was, knowing code will certainly broaden your range of consumers as possible become a one-stop-shop (trust me, learning how one can design takes a developer for much longer than vice versa). And while you are a company designer which include I currently am (working at ImpressPages, a user-friendly content management system), knowing as a minimum the fundamentals of coding might be useful you deliver designs which are both interaction-oriented and easier to work with as they subconsciously take developers under consideration. Simply speaking, you earn karma points that regularly translate right into a better pay.

As New Year’s resolution time is looming, learning code can be just the proper one

Is it difficult?

Contrary to the well-liked belief, learning how you can code is so easy at first, even to an extent where it becomes addictive. However, if you’re not getting addicted originally or if you happen to don’t like self-learning, most possibly programming isn’t something you must pursue…
However, if you’re already into website design, odds are that programming is for you.

Should you choose a programming language?

At first, make sure you decide what it’s essential to do. In you’re into web solutions, HTML5 and PHP are the most well liked languages on this area. However, it becomes increasingly popular to rent developers whatever the programming languages they’re good at. Great developers always play with new technologies after they pop out. Most significantly, if someone’s good at one language, they could learn new ones very fast. So that you shouldn’t stick with a specific language, yet play with ones which might be with regards to web technologies.

Also, odds are that there are many web developers working (or perhaps living) around web designers. Take one for a lager! He’ll be very happy to inform you what languages are worth fiddling with on your environment and what’s important to bear in mind. Not to mention he’ll let you know why he would like seeing you knowing methods to code.

Where when you start?

There are a lot of useful online resources that teach the fundamentals of web development. Sadly though, there’s no single tutorial it truly is good for everybody promptly. I actually have selected a number of websites that i’ve been using during my pursuit of turning into accustomed to coding.

Dash

Dash teaches HTML, CSS, and Javascript through fun projects you are able to do on your browser. The advantage of Dash is it truly is teaches the fundamentals trough real-life scenarios, similar to “Anna’s friend Jeff needing a custom theme for his poetry blog”. The code is written within the browser and the teachings are leved-based. Is indeed is a fun strategy to learn the fundamentals for an internet designer, sadly however, only four projects (lessons) come in.

Codeacademy

Codeacademy is usually great on the subject of the fundamentals of website design. It also offers interactive lessons and it has more programming languages at the table than Dash. Codeacademy starts with HTML and CSS lessons (they call them Fundamentals), that’s truly the correct selection for the beginners. After the basics are completed, you are able to decide to learn jQuery, JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby.

I also like Codeacademy attributable to two separate parts it has while teaching coding: theory and practice that’s devided into web projects or APIs. This suggests it really works both for complete newbies and for ones that would like to go dig deeper.

Treehouse

While Treehouse is paid, this learning platform has an enormous choice of both programming languages and systems (corresponding to development tools or design) to choose between. Treehouse also features videos. It also has Tracks – different goals that you can set in your lessons resembling Becoming an internet Developer, Becoming an online Designer or Learning HTML and CSS. It’s very useful if you’ve got a spare buck.

W3schools

This set of tutorials is a really popular one. w3schools features both tutorials and references – the latter are frequently being explored even by experienced web developers. The web site features lessons for popular languages and technologies reminiscent of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, PHP and jQuery. It also teaches servers, databases and other vital stuff, it has greater than 1000 of code examples. It’s free. While Dash is somewhat better for newbies, W3S is extremely handy even for the pros.

LEARN JS

While JavaScript is somewhat advanced and that i does not recommend it for you because the first technology to benefit, it’s very good to be told which will work on making web plugins or mobile apps. That’s greatly favourite right away, so it’s a handy programming language to understand.

Learn-js.com is your first port of call if you commit to go JavaScript. It features an interactive board that permits to aim the code you simply wrote. The teachings are both basic and advanced.

What else?

Every developer knows stackoverflow that has millions of questions and the same amount of answers, plus a colourful community. It has saved billions of man-hours and it’ll definitely avoid wasting of a while.

Speaking of communities, Mozilla also has an excellent one with lessons and tutorials widely available.

And in fact, you want to check net tut+ with thousands of tutorials for many of issues and challenges beginners may come upon.

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Here at WDL, we never get bored of great logo design. That is why today we have got a brand new choice of inspiring logos to reveal you. These logos are minimalist and lovely. They use simple lines and great typography, proving that you simply don’t ought to over design to symbolize your brand in a bold way.

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For our first inspirational list of 2014 we decided to collect examples of white type in website design. I’m always browsing css galleries and other sites find nice things to teach here, and that i noticed that a large number of sites use the dark/colorful background white type combo. That is why i determined to dedicate a listing to it.

Whether you’re using a pretty background image, a texture, or perhaps a big video, overlaying white type can create an extremely dramatic effect. Look at the examples we now have here and provides white type a try for your next project.

Mostly Serious

The Garden Edit

Harbr

Latitude Supply Co

Built

Gran Turismo – First Love

Crop the Block

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Chattanooga Renaissance Fund

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Paper Tiger

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Clean and minimal website design has certainly grown in popularity, and typography plays a massive role during this variety of design. When you’ve got been struggling to locate the proper font to your clean designs, we’ve rounded up 8 fresh free fonts for you to find very useful.

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You is usually a newbie in website design otherwise you can be a veteran. Either way, it’s an exhilarating time to be within the website design business.

As the net reach spreads the world over, the wheels of entrepreneurship take traction on the net. The web, as a medium, has lots to give entrepreneurs who choose to embrace the net. Today, the demands on web designers aren’t just technical skills because the days of putting together HTML code with CSS tied in are long past. Designers are getting into the toes of developers. That super combination of skill has to align with marketing and business.

It’s almost foolish to think that a basic skillset of HTML5, CSS3, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and jQuery can fill in for the industry’s demands which can be more aligned towards business results with an equal emphasis on utility, aesthetics, and on design that basically works.

Image by Kyle Gallant

Here’s learn how to walk at the road that ends up in website design excellence:

Measure up

Are you a very good designer or an effective one? Rob Bowen asks that query on Myinkblog.com and that’s a very good place to begin for designers. Good designers know basics of website design and may do a role “well enough”. In the event that they were to be rated on a normal corporate-style rating on performance, you’d give them a “met expectations” rating. Great web designers might get the “exceptional, and went beyond the decision of duty”.

How does a designer go from good to great? For excellent web designers, the pursuit of information is rarely ending. The itch to use design principles that far exceed business objectives is habitual. Great designers always dig deeper into the complexities of website design. They are attempting new things. They aren’t scared of making mistakes. They installed the hours. They take in challenging work.

Image by Sean McCabe

“Learning” should be in your “to-do” list

As the internet evolves, so will the technology driving it. With an industry like website design or development, it’s a never-ending demand change. With change comes the necessity to learn, adapt, and apply. It’s easy to get stuck within the rut of finding projects, delivering before deadlines, chasing invoices, and participating with clients or with teams.

The deeper you get into the maze of industrial management, the farther you escape from “keeping up with the changes”. It’s not even hard to locate courses and lessons on skills – from mundane to technical aspects; from business side of website design to inspiration.

Excellence doesn’t include routine work. It comes from the edges. It seeps in from the additional hours you spend learning in an afternoon.

Set trends and lead

If you haven’t done anything new yet, you haven’t done anything in any respect.

As long as you persist with basic principles of website design and your designs are in sync with user experience, utility, and practicality, you will have the license to check out anything.

If you could, then why persist with the norm?

If success involves people who dare, when was the last time you deviated from the norm and did something new? Even though it were ridiculous, it’d still work on your publicity, wouldn’t it?

Avoid being a slave to what’s obtainable. Instead, try something new. If it really works, you’ve set a brand new trend.

Collaborate and grow

You can’t succeed alone. You’d only know much at any given point of time. Collaborating with others grants juicy insights. It also helps you leverage your work, share your learning, get more business, network better, and learn faster. With others on your immediate ecosystem, you need to constantly push yourself to do better. In the event you aren’t exhausted or dead yet, you’d emerge successful.

If you’ve gotten a team, that you can collaborate with them to grow faster and leverage your online business. If you’re networking with fellow designers, you’ll learn so much and gain inspiration. If you’re collaborating with designers more matured and established than you’re, you’ll find mentors.

Collaboration works. There’s history to prove its efficacy.

Image by Trent Walton

Challenge yourself, for the thrill of it

We won’t suggest pushing yourself until you break. We’d, however, implore you to challenge yourself nonetheless. Use technology, experiment with grids, explore different palettes, and check out to design to inform a narrative (great brands are great storytellers, right?). If you’ve never used the nice old pen and paper, start your workflow with that. You probably have an iPad, use touch apps to start your workflow. Take multiple approaches to a single idea. Work on different ideas and don’t accept one.

There’s power in having options – whether you’re showcasing them to a consumer for approval or working for yourself. Learn what you don’t know yet.

Move into more domains, only for the sake of it

Everything changes, so will website design. We have already got responsive design as a massive trend. Mobile is everywhere. New technologies emerge and older technologies will see the grave in the end.

As for many things in life, you want a diversification strategy inbuilt into your path for website design excellence. Strive to achieve out to other domains. In case you’ve only designed websites, embrace responsive design. If you just design for now, get into programming and code. Attempt graphic design, content development, copywriting, and marketing more often than not. Open that window to profit how you can make videos or podcasts.

If none of this seems exciting enough for you, get into data analytics, application development, mobile apps, or even building new operating systems.
If you’re business-inclined, develop new web-based apps. You spot where we’re going with this?

Diversify, after which diversify some more.

Image by Creativedash

Gain inspiration, from everywhere

We are boxed into thinking that we will gain inspiration from a running display at sites like Dribbble and Behance.

They are certainly great places to begin but inspiration from design can come from anywhere. Does the coke bottle look inspiring enough to design a car? Ferrari’s design seems to compare the description of the bottle, anyway. Were you aware that Aria “Swanwing” is galvanized by a woman’s body?

Your inspiration could come from everything around you. That comes with animals, cars, other objects that the majority people don’t even give much thought.

Well, most individuals aren’t designers, are they? Fill your mind up with loads inspiration that ideas come to you by the dozen.

How inspired are you? What do need to make of your career in website design? What are the stairs you’re taking to get ahead and make a mark for yourself?

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Designing Mobile Forms and Inputs

To close our “best of 2013″ series we gathered the net designs our readers most mentioned, and we did this large list to turn you what we and our readers considered the appropriate web designs of 2013. These are websites we featured throughout the year to teach you examples of excellent use of imagery, type, texture, navigation and far more. Take some time to browse our selection and explore all of the websites. Happy 2014!

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So far in our “Best of 2013″ series, we’ve checked out free fonts and free PSDs. And now it’s time to focus on what we feel like are the right jQuery plugins of this year. There are always plenty of jQuery plugins being released, but we predict that these standout from remainder in what they are able to offer from a functionality standpoint.

jQuery Scroll Path

jQuery Scroll Path it’s a plugin for outlining custom scroll paths. It uses canvas flavored syntax to attract lines and arcs.

freetile.js

Freetile is a plugin for jQuery that allows the organization of webpage content in an effective, dynamic and responsive layout.

gridster.js

This is it, the mythical drag-and-drop multi-column grid has arrived. Gridster is a jQuery plugin that permits building intuitive draggable layouts from elements spanning multiple columns.

Fancy Input

CSS3 text typing effects for input fields.

Superscrollorama

The jQuery plugin for supercool scroll animation.

jQuery File Upload

File Upload widget with multiple file selection, drag&drop support, progress bars and preview images for jQuery. Supports cross-domain, chunked and resumable file uploads and client-side image resizing.

jQuery Validation Engine

jQuery validation engine is a Javascript plugin aimed toward the validation of form fields within the browser (IE 6-8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera 10). The plugin provides visually appealing prompts that grab user attention at the material.

Validations range from email, phone, and URL, to more complex calls which includes ajax processing or custom javascript functions. Bundled with many locales, the mistake prompts can also be translated into the language of your choice.

kerning.js

Take control of your web typography.

equalize.js

The jQuery plugin for equalizing the peak or width of elements.

MeanMenu

A free jQuery Responsive Menu plugin if you want to Hide or show menu children, Target navigation element to swap out with MeanMenu, Control screen width at which MeanMenu activates and lots more.

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Toolbar.Js

Toolbar permits you to quickly create tooltip style toolbars to be used in web applications and internet sites. The toolbar is well customizable using the twitter bootstrap icons and offers flexibility across the toolbars display and collection of icons.

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Smart Menus

Website menus that work on all devices.

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NProgress

A nanoscopic progress bar. Featuring realistic trickle animations to convince your users that something is occurring!

3

FlowType

Web typography at its finest: font-size and line-height in response to element width.

4

Device.js

Device.js makes it easy to jot down conditional CSS and/or JavaScript in response to device operating system (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows), orientation (Portrait vs. Landscape), and kind (Tablet vs. Mobile).

5

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