Designs of the Week

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Hyperkit

On the homepage there’s nary a title of description in the full-width, full-height slider, letting the projects speak for themselves. The inner pages are on the other hand image-less and color-coded—a single bright color for all the text and background—and framed.

Game Paused

These look like prototype staged shots as the final product is not built yet, but things are kept interesting with the different angles and combinations. You’ll see the yellow/black hues run throughout the site along with the Swiss style grid.

French Garment Cleaners

I like how the clothes and accessories differ enough in size that it looks like a very neat person just unpacked, and it’s still not chaotic. Scrolling further down you’ll see close-ups that are still neatly arranged. At the top there are mega dropdowns with a translucent background, which lead you to product category pages with large wordless photos whose info appear only on hover. You’ll get the same feel of minimalism and stylishness in the product page itself, where the photos are not boxed in but blend seamlessly into the whole width of the page. Lastly: instead of the term “cart” they use “bag”.

More Air

Again, familiar techniques at play: text moved out of the way until you want to know about it, large gorgeous photos, and a two-column layout—in this case to put both English and Japanese text side by side.

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Business – Deleted my portfolio, made $30k in my first six months
“I came to the conclusion that I would try to make freelancing my full-time business.”

CSS – Apple Is Using Sass, And They’re Doing It Wrong
“Please, if you are going to use a preprocessor, use it responsibly. Thank you.”

Typography – Upping Your Type Game
“I want to introduce you to your brother from another mother—another group of humans that, like you, is quite under-appreciated: the type designer. Type designers and web designers have an amazing amount in common, that’s why it’s super wonderful that they’ve been collaborating more lately.”

This current deal is offering a complete WordPress shortcodes plugin along with 3 extra premium themes for WP. The Lizatom Shortcodes plugin has garnered quite a bit of attention for such a small product. It contains over 5,000 different shortcodes which you may use inside your WordPress posts or pages. The various content list includes:

• tooltips
• image shadows
• filtered portfolios
• tabbed content boxes
• info/alert boxes
• blockquotes
• text highlighting
• and a lot more!

All of these features are amazing and the plugin itself is mind-blowing. But adding another three free premium themes into the mix and this deal is practically unbelievable. The original price was $137 but you can pick up a copy from Mighty Deals for only $19 USD! That is over 85% of a discount from the original selling price.

How can you beat that? I would imagine that any WordPress developer both freelance or company-based can understand the magnitude of this offer. Consider pitching to your boss or client at your next meeting and see if they think it would be worth the extra money. Or even consider picking up a license for yourself and your own personal projects.

The practicality of this plugin goes well beyond good measure. Having direct access to a long list of short codes means you can build fairly dynamic content into a more static text editor. Since the WordPress functions backend will connect into PHP you may also pull entries from the database or list other important variables from the $post array. Check out the MightyDeals demo page and see if you can find a good use for this outstanding WP theme/plugin package.

Designs of the Week

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Isis & Norma Ltd.

The buildings at the top are layered and move with the parallax effect as your mouse cursor does. They also appear in a bottom up transition when you load the page, somewhat alluding to a structures being built from the ground up. I like the illustration style on this site—it’s a mix between chic and homey.

WalletMap

Nice isometric graphic going on here. It’s great how they represented each idea in the context of that space but I would’ve liked to see more interactivity with the illustrations (feels like that’s a minimum these days). It could even be an evolving landscape in one page.

Fifteen Robin

Cool interaction from the top of the building to the bottom triggered by scrolling down: text slide in from left and right, images are uncovered with parallelogram masks, the same boxes for the content areas. Overall a very sleek look.

Visit Bruges

Here’s a time-sensitive landscape which you can also control. The featured landmarks change by hour, showing the visitor appropriate things they might want to check out at that time, or one can scrub through the possibilities in the horizontal slider. If you want a more organized way of navigating, use the dropdown at the top or scroll further down, and see the spots color-coded by category (including “Romance”).

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Typography – Narrowing the Field: How To Bring Great Type Into Focus
“Choosing type is an exercise in understanding your subject and interpreting its meaning in a visual form. To paraphrase Robert Bringhurst: typography exists to honor the subject. Arriving at an appropriate choice depends on balancing how a typeface feels with how it functions.”

Design, Typography – Reconciling SVG and Icon Fonts
“I’ll explain how to set up a powerful design workflow, going from Sketch (my new favorite SVG editing app), all the way to the browser as Icon Fonts, all automated.”

Web Design – Common Patterns in Styleguides, Boilerplates and Pattern Libraries
“I thought there’d be more overlap between frameworks than there is. I recorded over 160 distinct patterns, none of them ubiquitous.”

But we need to think about which CMS solutions will be most useful to people accessing your website around the world. Which systems are the most stable and easy to install, customize, then keep running for years. It is a heavy burden to manage websites. The job is not physically strenuous but there are many various aspects and problems to deal with.

WordPress

Anybody who has gotten familiar with PHP knows about WordPress as a blogging platform. Over the recent years it has transformed into a major content management system great for managing pages and other custom post types.

The reason WordPress is such a great choice for new launches is because of the vast library of plugins for managing your site. There are free solutions for caching, comments management, user management, contact forms, and practically anything you could need. This is the main reason so many people rely on WordPress and how the system can stay online for years without much trouble.

LocomotiveCMS

I have not personally used Locomotive CMS but have heard great things about the product. It is an open source CMS built using Ruby on Rails for a production environment. Any developer who has toyed around in RoR knows this is a quick and efficient language. The ability to implement new custom features will come at an easier burden than PHP/MySQL developers.

There are other similar libraries running over Rails but I have yet to read into them much. Refinery is another solution but I have never used this nor read much into the system. So it is difficult to compare these two CMS options. However Locomotive is definitely a secure choice in my book. Take a look at some of their features and see how it would stack up to a WordPress installation.

Some people really prefer the idea of Rails because it has a newer code base. This means bugs and annoyances which plague PHP5 are not so common. The developers who started this project were aiming for a goal and pushed towards the end game of stability and reliable service. Even if you are not familiar with RoR Locomotive is a great way to get started practicing the language, installing Rails software, and managing a CMS on the backend.

Fork CMS

Fork is another PHP/MySQL alternative for webmasters building their own content from scratch. The reason I would suggest Fork CMS along with WordPress is how the two systems are majorly different. If you visit the Fork homepage you will notice that the project is geared more towards an actual content management system. You can publish blog posts but these are not the main focus, and it is even easier to create your own post types and publications.

If any developer has used WordPress on the backend then it is worth a case study into Fork CMS. The script may only be installed on a root domain and you can’t use a sub-folder, which is a bit off-putting. However the internal admin panel and subsequent templates/modules system is incredible and worth some time for planning. Personally I would trust my websites to run on any of these 3 solutions. It all comes down to personal preference and what functionality you need for a website.

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Designs of the Week

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Art, Copy & Code

If you’re wondering why the color scheme looks familiar to you, that’s because it’s actually from the ubiquitous Google. Aside from being section markers on the side, even the icons carry the trademark four colors as accents. The interactions combine both vertical and horizontal uncovering effects—the former for scrolling and the latter for page-hopping.

Ampersand Commerce

This design speaks in black, white, and red, on top of bold slab fonts and icons in circular frames.

Ampersand Conference 2013

I see design elements that look familiar and made new again: gradients, repeating backgrounds, ribbons, translucent layers. All with a responsive touch.

Ampersand LLC

This one’s more of the homey, personal, crafty style—highlighted by lighter text colors and elegant patterns and swashes. The ampersand on each post heading falls right into place.

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User Interface Design, User Experience – How to radically simplify your user interface
“Cutting too many UI elements may complicate the problem and not be the right solution, but designing the most minimal solution will show you new methods you wouldn’t have thought possible before.”

Design – Web Colour Data
“With a crowd-sourced data-set, the ultimate goal is to answer questions like: What is the most common colour/s or hue/s on the web? Do certain industries prefer certain colours over others? What colours are generally found together?”

The Internet has taken the world by storm and we are not letting up. There are more young web designers joining the ranks every day. I think it is a noble cause and provides a means for quickly distributing information. When people first get into studying web design there are a number of common questions which arise. I hope to address a couple of these and provide some relief with newer web developers getting into frontend coding, too.

Cloud Development

One very common trend you will find among designers is to build mockups right within the browser window. A couple popular webapps named jsFiddle along with Codepen are both free for all regular users. Both are an amazing service and I definitely recommend them to any young web designers. It can be great practice for HTML5/CSS3/JS and you do not even need to have software installed on your machine. It doesn’t even need to be done on the same computer!

Cloud-based web development is growing very quickly. There are lots of articles already online getting into the benefits of CDNs, image hosting, open source scripts, and other popular webapps. Overall it will take time and a lot of patience. But now is the best time to be getting into the field of website design & development.

Sources for Inspiration

You also need to consider how you are building your own design skills. People do not just read books and then somehow become outstanding web designers. You will spend months and years practicing different ideas, layouts, headers, navigation bars, and other common UI features. This is the best long-term solution for actually mastering a common skillset.

I think it is worth noting that many techniques first become popular on a series of different websites. Other designers will clone these ideas to fit into their own layout and it continues until thousands of different websites are using various degrees of similarity. You can learn a lot off the professionals by studying what they do. A personal favorite is the Awwwards Gallery which hosts a number of very fancy website designs. Everything is organized and catalogued by tag names which you can search(sidebar, purple, blog, icons, etc).

One other resource which is growing very quickly named Dribbble is a community dedicated to all types of design inspiration, not just websites. You will find some of the most talented designers on this invite-only social network where designers can post shots of their work – sort of like an online portfolio. Try searching for a couple keywords on there and you will be amazed at the high level of detail and image quality.

You can also find dozens of similar examples just by performing a quick Google search with related keywords. Designers all around the world regardless of language barrier can learn from these techniques. Make sure you are always studying and working to advance your own knowledge. After enough practice building websites you can only get better as time goes on.

Designs of the Week

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Playful 2013

Combined with rotated text, this geometric background pattern animation induced by scrolling is quite hypnotizing. You can see that same shape theme carry over to the logo, the dividers, and the footer.

Andrew McCarthy

The use of fixed backgrounds and frame animation produces this awesome running halftone cat. The content was repeated several times so the visitor can enjoy scrolling a fair amount, though it would have been fun to have an automatic button that does the work for you like the “go backwards” one does.

UW Design 2012

Love how the title is deconstructed and then comes together as you move down. There’s even this moving patterned shadow in the subtitle as well. It breaks up again as move further and onto the portfolio. Another cool feature to check out: the group photos under the Cast section are actually dynamic, every single person in the shot is clickable, leading you to his/her individual work. The rest of the people fade out when you hover; the same thing happens if you do it on their names.

Nate Navasca

Not only is each section represented visually by the background, the animation produced by scrolling explains it further. All done in geometric, abstract illustrations.

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Design, Optimization – One Less JPG

“Before you go worrying about how to minify every last library or shave tests out of Modernizr, try and see if you can remove just one photo from your design. It will make a bigger difference.”

Design – The design process of my infographic about women cycling for Grinta!
“There is a certain order in place of the mayor steps you take during this process, but there is a big part that isn’t very logical, even chaotic.”

Responsive Web Design – Pixel-free CSS
“I think the Web should fully move in this direction. True proportionate sizing seems to me a more authentic way to responsively fit websites to browsers (rather than media queries that simply toggle between set pixel widths).”

I think a good place to start is by asking what is a webinar? The explanation is a web-based seminar – something that can teach and educate listeners directly from the web. Lectures, workshops, keynote speeches, and similar events will all work perfectly as webinars. One important aspect is that webinars allow viewers to share data back and forth with each other. This is not simply a static video stream, but it offers dynamic interactions from team members.

Basic Web Conferencing

There are a large number of providers and web services focused directly on webinars. This may leave you in a state of confusion when attempting to purchase an account at one of these places. But after reading a number of handy articles the purpose of web conferencing should be more ubiquitous.

I really like the website Best Webinar which is more of a comparison tool for interested users. The site provides a number of helpful reviews for all the top-names in web conferencing software. The prices are varied dramatically from under $10/month up to $50/month. Obviously the more expensive packages come with more features and better user support. However it may not hurt your company to spend less money on the conferencing software if you do not need more advanced functionality.

If you would rather look over service providers in a table chart this may be an easier representation of data. You can easily compare different prices and review scores for many different companies. This is a crucial decision which can impact the productivity of many staff members. It is worth taking a bit of time to do research and find out which providers can work best for your needs.

Go for the Presentation

Flashy software and user interfaces can draw your attention, but do not always work as they intend. Thus it is up to you as a consumer treading the waters to determine which services are going to be the most helpful. If you are struggling to pinpoint your exact features I recommend going through this SlideShare presentation on webinars.

There are so many different topics and reasons to get into web conferencing. Big businesses will have the money to afford more complex solutions, and thus have less of a concern for scaling to a new product in the future. But for smaller teams and startups you need to work with every penny you have available. One popular online magazine has put together a 3-part series named a beginner’s guide to webinars. Definitely worth a quick read if you are new on the topic and want to understand more of the inner-workings to web conferencing.

Designs of the Week

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Spendee

This trend of animating the app as you scroll further down is great, because while a video demo is great, your scroll sets the pace. As you reach the bottom, a slightly translucent black footer covers the content and asks you to sign up for updates via email or like and tweet.

Hipstamatic

I really appreciate that unlike the boatload of sites that how just one photo of a hand holding a phone, this site shows two, and the angle works great for the product they’re selling: photography software. Also a nice touch: adding images taken with the app from the community, located not at the bottom of the page but right below the header, which makes, a nice colorful border.

MailChimp Gather

Here’s another subtly implemented split layout, with the icon sliding down the middle as indicator. I like the layering and translucency also done here. Apart from the photos, there’s a very minimal, subdued, and not just flat look to the elements on this page.

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Responsive Web Design – Adventures in Responsive Navigation
“So this is a little list of some popular methods of dealing with navigation on a responsive website. I’ve included code samples as well. Feel free to check out the source code and craft your own navigation pattern.”

HTML – List of Pseudo-Elements to Style Form Controls
“While all of these pseudo-elements are rendering engine specific (and therefore behind vendor prefixes), they can still be handy for customizing the display for that engine.”

Web Design – The process behind designing a website
“Most clients have little idea of what exactly goes into designing a website. In this new series, I unpack the process we use at Headscape.”

I think a really solid option is to move into cloud-based online data backups. This works out so great because you can access files from any Operating System including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The biggest factor is recognizing how much space you will need, and this greatly depends on your own needs. As an example, videos will require more external storage space than documents or website files.

Planning a Backup

There are lots of good resources online to get into studying data backups. Just last year there was an excellent piece in The Guardian asking is it worth backing up to the cloud? The benefits of accessing files from any computer only come to certain people who have this need in mind. Similarly if your local hard drives fail or get damaged/lost, then cloud storage is another alternative.

As for providers, I would suggest that readers check out Best Backups for their cloud storage solutions. There are a number of providers including their top 10 picks supported by users and resellers alike. The pricing tables are easy to skim and determine exactly which services you will need. I think this is an important step towards recognizing what features are important for remote data storage.

Obviously you would like to gain access from any computer regardless of the upload capabilities. Not all smartphones are currently supported, but there is a growing trend following the large numbers of users. It would help to get together a small list of ideas for which files you need to upload and keep stored in the cloud. This is also a good time to put together an estimated number of MB/GB required for your total storage space.

Security Measures

If you are worried about people getting into your account then follow a few easy steps to keep yourself insured. This great article on safe cloud backups provides a number of good ideas. You may try going through an encryption service or updating your password every month or two. Similarly watch out for automatic sync data so that you do not delete anything important without another copy.

It is always a good idea to keep some local copies of your files, too. There is just no telling what possible accidents may occur when server outages could be a big issue. The cloud is more of a resource for gaining quick access to your files off any computer with Internet connection. But do not consider this as a safer means than keeping local files on your own hard drives. After looking through many of the services I would argue that cloud backups do have a purpose in helping people gain access to their files quicker, easier, and without the hassle of USB flash drives.

Designs of the Week

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ECC Lighting & Furniture

The classic Swiss look at work. The furniture images appear only on hover, and are also in black and white. A tad fluid but not responsive. I like that the arrangement on the grid is not tight and there’s lots of negative space as you browse.

The Clocksmiths

Interesting asymmetrically laid out blocks in the background. More abstraction from the repeating dot and line symbols acting as logo and divider—which are so minimal they could pass for glyphs.

Lined & Unlined

If it isn’t red, the popular accent color of choice for typographic designs is yellow. Clicking on the search icon produces an even larger block of yellow serving as the background for the input box. The library on the footer mimics a book shelf, but done in a minimalist way.

Cartogram Inc.

There’s a set of websites that choose small type over the huge type trend and this is one of them. I’m not used to seeing slab text in all caps that small. Clicking on an item on the list loads the content inline, while a striped pattern animates as you wait. Keyboard navigation is enabled.

Tam Cai

In contrast to the homepage, the portfolio pages are all about the images. There’s a cool zooming in effect when you hover, which fades to the same hot pink accent color as the text appears.

Making Space For Others

A familiar shade of orange for intro text, with a huge footer comprising only two lines of text.

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User Experience – The usability error you don’t know you’re making
“It’s this lack of empathy that makes a failure to speak the user’s language such an insidious problem to spot in your own interface.”

Business – Tell a four-word story.
“If you want to start a business or launch a new project, you need to be able to describe your effort in four words.”

CSS – Helium
“Helium is a tool for discovering unused CSS across many pages on a web site.”

I think there are a huge set of great providers for VPN services which you can use for accessing privately masked Internet connections. The Virtual private network is a method of accessing a network of computers from your own, thus masking your IP and allowing you to surf the web on the VPN’s IP address. It can be a hassle at first, and very stressful if you are new to VPN software. However I greatly recommend this technique if you need some more privacy when accessing the Internet.

Benefits of VPN Usage

One of the most helpful social news communities on Reddit /r/vpn is full of knowledgeable members and topical comment threads. The sub has a wonderfully helpful FAQ page discussing the major purposes of VPN networks. And although there are some free services, you can tell these lack a major standard of quality in comparison to paying for a real VPN.

Managing your own VPN servers will take time and money. People who give this away for free are probably not offering the greatest quality. It could get to the point where it’s not even worth your time and it would be better to work on a real VPN service. But there are so many options out there – how do you know which to choose?

The people over at Best VPN run a great website of reviews and studies on the best VPN providers. Looking through some of their reviews and blog posts you can find great information on all the top brands. I really like the BestVPN Top 10 List as it provides a monthly price chart and scores for each of the companies. This is definitely not an easy decision and it shouldn’t be made with haste unless you have already done some research.

Spend a bit of time on each company’s website and look through their services. It would help to also Google articles which compare similar VPN hosts to determine what other people have chosen. Users will generally have some foresight into what you need and it can be educational to soak up information from bulletin board threads or blog posts on similar topics.

Masking your History

The network services provide you with a quick access URL or another piece of software for tunneling into the VPN. This is the best technology when you need to mask your home or office IP address. It does not require hours to learn, and you could get something working in just 20-30 minutes of practice. This excellent article on WikiHow explains how to use a VPN which should be a good starting resource.

If the VPN company has a website URL this can be accessed from any computer with your username/password combo. However if the VPN requires software then you will need to install this on each of the computers where you plan to access private Internet. If you can find the right price it is an exciting process to get into VPN usage. Many users will never go back to standard connections once they start on VPN access!