The January edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, color tools, and a number of great new fonts.
Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.
As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments.
What makes a successful icon designer? Is it their skills in digital rendering, the clever ideas they have or is it something else? The truth is, it’s managing to be many things at once and keeping a balance between communicating a concept and crafting great designs. Do you have what it takes to be a productive, happy and successful icon designer? Find out at the jump.
Marketing your product is very important these days but marketing it the right way is more important. We all know that there are lots of marketing tools available in order to reach out to the audience, but one must select the tool which will prove to be really beneficial for the product. Among all the marketing tools, brochures are also a great marketing tool if used in the right way.
Brochures are a great way to reach out to a large number of audiences but at times, people do make a lot of silly mistakes due to which their brochure marketing strategy suffers. Following are a few mistakes that designers make unintentionally while designing brochures and these mistakes need to be avoided in order to make your marketing strategy work. Your brochure printing projects will go off without a hitch if you avoid these common mistakes.
Color is very important especially to designers. A design would certainly look dull without the element of colors. No doubt, colors are indeed very important. It has a great impact on a business, on marketing and even in one’s emotions. With the variety and infinite number of colors you could choose from, you might have a hard time creating a color palette for your designs especially that you have a lot of things to consider.
To help you with that, we will give you ten tips that can be your guide in creating your own color palettes. For designers, it is important to have your own color palette especially for creating a design for a company or for marketing purposes. It has to be unique and attractive so that people could remember it and be attracted to it. Here are the different approaches and techniques in creating a color palette:
Time and time again, we mistake good decoration for good design. When we are looking for inspiration, we go to the same websites and the same showcases trying to get that added push necessary to create something we love. Now this isn’t a huge deal (especially if we are looking for a creative kick), but if we aren’t careful, we can end up focusing mainly on the decoration and beautification of a web site.
In the world of design we all tend to have our processes and approaches that rule how we craft our work. This is essential for most of us in the field to have in place. Our own systems that we have spent years honing and developing down to less of an art, and more of a routine. We do this so that we have an order by which we can methodically craft our designs without letting any little things slip through those proverbial cracks. Our processes tend to be a series of steps that help us cover all of our bases. But this can also prove to have a negative impact on our work.
Every product has a target audience to cater to and when a designer is given a responsibility to create a website for a certain product; he should definitely keep in mind the target audience and their age group. If your product caters to a certain kind of audience, your website should have the features which would be of the target audience’s interest. Keeping in mind the age of the people who would be visiting your website is way too important. Age factor can completely change the way you design so while designing a website, make sure you are aware of the target audience of the product and design accordingly.
Today I’m going to recap some concrete considerations you should make in order to make sure your web design is optimized for use on a touch-based tablet. In March, I wrote an article entitled How the iPad (and Tablets) Are Driving a New Age of Web Design. In that article, I looked at the iPad – a platform I’d been using on a daily basis for about ten months – and how it had changed the considerations of the modern web designer. With the rise in tablets (or, rather, the rise of the iPad), touch inputs are being used much more often when browsing the web. It’s a different story to smartphones, who often have a specialist touch site. In that article, I looked at the concepts of designing for tablets, such as designing for new resolutions. While very similar, this article will cover considerations you should be making for touch driven devices.
In late 2008 we introduced you to the work of Jeff Huang. Huang is a designer and Depthcore artist living in New York City who specializes in digital illustration and photo manipulation. I recently had the opportunity to meet Huang in person at the Depthcore Exhibition in Soho. Since it has been a while since we have featured him on this site, we decided to show you some of his most recent works. Please take a moment to review what Huang has been working on over the last 3 years.
Inspiration and creativity always follow recognizable patterns which come from culture and social trends to be effective. To works well design has to consider not just the single element but how the totality is perceived. That’s how we can define the Gestalt Theory, a matter of perception.
Visual elements are characterized form deep relationship which any good designer has to know and understand. Principles of Gestalt can be helpful to find out how visual perceiving works and why some shapes or groupof elements are look more balanced than others.
We are going to see what is the Gestalt School is, which are its rules, what those said and why they are so important for designers. By talking about them we will also see how they are applied to real examples. This will help to demonstrate how close the relationship between them, the design and its perception is.
