Tag Archive for: Web Design

Breaking Down The Facts About Responsive Design

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Source: WikiCommons

Source: WikiCommons

Responsive web design isn’t quite the standard yet, but it certainly shows no sign of going away. It is currently the best solution for the majority of website owners attempting to make their site work well for people accessing it, no matter where they are coming from.

A growing minority of internet users are using smartphones and tablets to browse, and especially with Google’s push to punish sites with poorly configured or non-existing mobile sites, there isn’t much time left before site owners will have to choose between going responsive or creating a separate mobile site. To help you choose, Designrfix shared the latest facts about responsive web design.

  • Display Doesn’t Affect Load Times – Responsive design largely changes the appearance of sites depending on the device being used to access them. They don’t really affect what is actually loaded when a page is brought up, and so it doesn’t really do much to load times. In other words, you can’t rely on responsive design to “dumb down” and speed up your site on slower machines or lesser resolutions.
  • Search Engines Like It – Google has actively supported responsive design as the best solution to going mobile, mostly because it makes the job easier for its crawlers. The webmaster guidelines for Google even address the issue saying, “Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.”
  • It Directly Affects Your SEO Campaign – Running a separate mobile site rather than simply adapting responsive design basically requires running two SEO campaigns for the same site. With the ability to design for all devices with one site, comes the ability to only have one SEO strategy for the site as a whole.
  • Most Sites Can Be Turned Responsive – This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but for the most part site owners don’t have to create an entirely new site design when they decide to create a responsive design. Instead, most sites can be converted, saving over half the total cost of a full redesign.
  • There Is a Lot of Testing – The main thing people forget to mention when they support responsive design is that designing for all devices means testing for all devices. Going responsive does save you time in the actual design process, but the best rule of thumb for responsive design is if you haven’t tested on a device, your site probably doesn’t work perfectly on it.

I fully predict responsive design to become the standard for all website design in the future because it simply makes more sense for the large number of site owners out there, especially those with limited resources who want to only manage one version of their site.

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Long Shadow Design Previews The New Flat Design Style

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long shadow design

Source: Web Designer Depot

Flat design is established to the point where many are starting to iterate and experiment with the basic principles in ways that break some of the basic rules of flat design while still clearly relying on the style for the overall effect. Apple’s new iOS7, for example, is heavily influenced by flat design, but as many have noted, is not even close to being completely flat.

One flat design inspired trend that is quickly gaining some popularity is “long shadow” design. It’s hard to call it a full design trend, but it is certainly a unique effect that is starting to pop up across the web.

Long shadow design “produces an effect like looking at an object late on a Winter’s day,” as Ben Moss from Web Designer Depot so poetically described it. It replicates when shadows draw out to dramatic proportions adding significant depth while not completely detracting from an overall flat aesthetic.

The trend is typified by a 45 degree shadow that extends far out, gradually evaporating. The look is very similar to the early Soviet style used on posters and collages by designers such as Kazimir Malevich, which makes it great for icons and branding.

Long shadow design isn’t going to grow legs outside of flat design, but it is a sign that flat design isn’t going to stay completely flat for long.

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Best Places To Find Free PSD Files

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Photoshop IconRaw, high-quality PSD files are one of the most treasured finds online for web designers. They aren’t particularly easy to find, especially compared to all of the readily available resources out there like tutorials, scripts, and templates. A combination of contractual restrictions for much of our professional work, and fear of outright plagiarism of our hard work keep many from sharing their finished PSD files for others to use.

We should be sharing more of them however. PSDs speed the design process up dramatically, as designers can cut and borrow elements of existing files rather than building nearly identical looking versions from scratch, as often happens.

PSDs are also great for learning. Rather than reading tutorials, designers can dig into PSD files and see how every layer acts, individual settings for simple elements, and truly get hands on while studying other designers’ techniques.

While these files aren’t as popularly shared online, there are some sites devoted strictly to sharing PSDs for our own use. Jacob Gube listed the ten best sites posting new files on a regular basis that are high enough quality to be used professionally.

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Why Prototyping Tools Shouldn’t Keep You From Sketching

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Blank gridded notepadConceptualizing a mobile or desktop site has never been as easy as it is today with the huge range of wireframing and prototyping tools at our fingertips. Long gone are the days of sitting down with pen and paper and tossing away pages every time you wanted to change a small detail. To many designers out there, that is a relief, but Lennart Hennigs, writer for Smashing Magazine, suggests it may be better for the final product to revert back to the old ways and undertaking hours of sketching.

Hennigs suggests that these tools which have made getting started on a website faster than ever before are also making us skip over key step that leads to the best results possible: taking to time to actually understand the problem.

Many designers are afraid of white or empty space. The pressure to start from nothing can sometimes be intense, especially on important projects, but when we start to map out the project and work out the problems we also start to create solutions. We aren’t just fixing problems on the paper when we sketch, though. We also generate new ideas out of the lack of established details. Your brain automatically fills in the blanks, and you can often be surprised by what you imagine. The best part of all of this is exploring these options without being forced to commit.

With sketches, you can have three our four different options for a single screen on a single page, all in progress at the same time. You can explore every option you want, and if something goes wrong, mark that design out or throw it away. With prototyping, it isn’t so easy. Prototyping is slower and when it takes more time to create something, we get more attached to it even when it isn’t the best possible design. It is hard to outright throw away a prototype you’ve spent an hour or more on.

The big reason some designers were so happy to see prototyping tools become widely available is they were sketching wrong. Your sketches don’t have to look good, and you definitely don’t need to spend hours cleaning up lines or making them look good. You are conveying ideas, not the final product. You don’t need to be Rembrandt, you just need to get the ideas on the paper. Think of it like writing, you have to be legible enough to communicate the information, but sloppy penmanship doesn’t matter if it is still legible. Similarly, you’re sketches don’t need to look pretty so long as they formulate ideas and could communicate them to collaborators.

If you’re sold on stepping back one step in your design process and opening yourself to new ideas you normally wouldn’t get during the prototyping step, don’t worry about your artistic skills or anything like that. Hennigs suggests more than a few tips in his article for getting started and how to approach the new old part of design.

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The Thirteen Rules of Good UX

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User experience is more important now than ever. A few years ago, visitors would put up with a glitchy or poorly functioning site because the internet as a whole was less developed. Now, if one site doesn’t work well, visitors will simply look for another that was designed properly and responds how they want it to.

Visitors aren’t the only ones who care about user experience, either. Search engines are putting a bigger and bigger emphasis on how much users will enjoy a site instead of focusing on technical things like linkbuilding that visitors won’t ever notice.

Robert Hoekman has been working in the web industry for thirteen years and has first hand seen the changes happening as user experience became one of the most important aspects of running a website. While there are a few dissenters, Hoekman is part of the majority who are happy to see websites being designed for users, not for designers or search engines. However, he knows some designers have had some growing pains during the transition.

To help designers understand the importance of user experience and why it is the key to creating a well ranked and well liked site, Hoekman created a list of 13 tenets of user experience (one for every year he has spent in the business). If you don’t get what the big deal is or why user experience was bound from the beginning to become the most prized aspect of design, his rules should make it all clear.

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The “New” Design Trends of the Past Six Months

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We’ve reached the half-way point in the year, and more than a couple web design websites have started sharing their lists of trends for the year. But, most of these lists seem oddly familiar. Anyone keeping up with the blogs and news has already seen more articles on the popularity of minimalism, flat design, responsive design, and typography.

None of those articles are wrong, but surprisingly not much has changed in web design trends over the past six months. The trends gaining traction at the beginning of the year have just ingrained themselves even further into web design, but there are a couple things that have managed to start gaining traction that are worth noting.

Creative Overflow recently shared one of these lists of “new” trends in web design, but surprisingly not a single entry on the list is the least bit new. Minimalism goes hand in hand with responsive design which is quickly becoming a standard. Minimalistic sites also rely strongly on typography because they forsake all the other common embellishments. Elsewhere, the rise of high definition screens on everything from our phones to our computers has led many designers to begin using lush background photography rather than simple colors, because there is now a high enough resolution to differentiate the text from more complex images.

At this point, there is little doubt you’ve heard about all of these issues, but there are a couple more trends slowly spreading that have been less discussed, though they’re far from new.
Detailed illustrations have been a popular part of the internet for quite a while now, but on sites that want to appear light-hearted or nostalgic these illustrations have almost become prerequisite. The illustrations tend to give a sort of hand-crafted charm to sites as well as shying away from the edgy or dramatic moods prevalent on more “serious” minded sites.

An even more popular trend that has been steadily growing for the past couple years is the use of circles. We tend not to think about it, but the internet has been largely rectangular for much of its history, but with the advent of smartphones and touch screens, the use of circles has become shorthand for interactive features. If you want someone to touch something on the screen, make it a circle. Of course, it has outgrown the touch-focused usage, and circles are now just a hugely popular motif in design. Once touch interfaces turned to circles instead of squares, it opened up the floodgates for designers of all kinds to step outside the box based designs.

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Free Resources: Icon Grids For iOS7

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Apple’s keynote event earlier this month made news across the world, and few were impacted by the announcement of the new mobile operating system iOS7 more than designers and developers. While consumers will be receiving an updated user experience and new aesthetics on their phones and iPads in the next few months, designers are rushing to update apps and icons to keep their content up to date and optimized for the new operating system.

These designers won’t be forced to redesign from the ground up, however. There are already numerous resources available to help update to the new iOS. Designmodo is gradually collecting the best of these resources, and they recently highlighted two different icon grids for iOS, which are templates which you build icons on top of.

Beyond offering a few simple grids to assist the icon redesign process, there are also tons of examples of updated icons to help get designers steered in the right direction before the public has even gotten a hands-on turn at the operating system.

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The 50 Best Design Tools of the Past Year

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Tools, templates, plug-ins, and script libraries are all a huge part of web design. If we create absolutely everything from scratch, we often end up spending way more time than necessary to get the same results. We keep complete creative control, while streamlining our process to keep our work fast enough to keep clients happy and stay competitive.

So many tools come out every month, that some websites run weekly round-ups of all the new fancy toys we can use to make beautiful websites without draining all of our time and energy on individual products, but this also means many great tools get lost in the mix, or downloaded to be used once and forgotten.

To keep you from wading through duds, out-dated tools, and countless versions of tools that achieve essentially the same thing, Speckyboy collected 50 of the best resources and tools that have been released over the past year. Time is priceless to designers and all of these tools strive to make sure every minute you spend designing counts.

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What You Absolutely Need To Know About Responsive Design

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While you won’t meet a web designer who doesn’t know about responsive design, its still relatively new. According to Webdesigner Depot, the term was only coined three years ago by web designer Ethan Marcotte who writes for A List Apart.

While some still treat responsive design as a passing trend, it appears that responsive design isn’t going anywhere until new technology requires a new design methodology or we find a better solution. Responsive design aims to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible, and while that pleases users Google has also made it clear that UX is going to be a major consideration in site rankings going forward.

The internet used to be confined to desktops, but we all know that time is long gone. We access the web from countless devices with constantly changing screen sizes and browsers, often from our phone or tablet while at work, on a bus, or watching tv at home. Responsive design strives to make the experience as gratifying and problem-free as possible no matter what platform you are using.

Mashable called this the year of responsive design, and in many ways they are right. It is clear that numerous hugely popular websites have implemented responsive design, and there are many signs it may be considered standard within just a few more years. If you’re still not caught up with this fairly new design method, Marc Schenker recently broke down the facts everyone needs to know about it.

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For Now, Stock Photography Won’t Hurt Your Rankings

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Depending on your skill set, a recent Webmaster video may be good or bad news to bloggers and site owners out there. Most people have never considered whether stock photography or original photography has any effect on search engine rankings. As it happens, not even Matt Cutts has thought about it much.

There are tons of writers out there who don’t have the resources or talent with a camera to take pictures for every page or article they put out. Rather than deliver countless walls of text that people don’t like looking at, most of us without the artistic talent instead use stock photos to make the pages less boring and help our readers understand us more. For now, we have nothing to worry about.

Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, used his latest Webmaster Chat to address this issue, and he says that to the best of his knowledge, original vs. stock photography has no impact on how your pages rank. However, he won’t rule it out for the future.

“But you know what that is a great suggestion for a future signal that we could look at in terms of search quality. Who knows, maybe original image sites might be higher quality, whereas a site that just repeat the same stock photos over and over again might not be nearly as high quality. But to the best of my knowledge, we don’t use that directly in our algorithmic ranking right now.”

Logically, I would say that if Google does decide to start consideration photo originality on web pages, Cutts appears to be more worried about sites that use the same images “over and over” rather than those who search for relevant and unique stock images for articles. Penalizing every website owner without a hired photographer to continuously produce images for every new page would seem a bit overkill.

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