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Creative Website Imagery

2012-07-16T13:42:00.009-07:00

Using imagery on a website is a great way to capture the attention and imagination of your users. But use too much imagery or do so improperly, and those eyes are just as likely to flick back to Google. We’ve put together these tips – some innovative and new, some tried and true – for drawing those users right in.

Be economical

Never has the term “more is less” been more true than when using images on a website. We’ve all visited sites that don’t follow this advice – sites with links sprawled from one end of the page to the next and graphics squeezed into every available bit of white space. We’ve all abandoned those sites, too.

Avoid this fate by concentrating first on a few key images, including your logo, your primary navigation, and the most important, relevant or current content. Any added imagery should support these features rather than overpower them. This could mean using no photos or extra images at all, or it could mean placing one or two clear, unique and powerful images well above the fold. Just pick your theme, find the most important images to bring that theme to the forefront, and use the least that you can.

If you don’t have access to a photographer or designer, consider using stock photography or stock footage in your design creation.

Use powerful colors

It’s best to be economical when it comes to colors, too, staying true to one scheme. Better yet, stick with just one main color. That way you’ll be able to grab a reader’s attention when you switch briefly to another.

No matter how much you love that bright fuchsia, be gentle on the eye, using flat colors, subtle contrast, and smooth gradients and curves. While it’s fun to experiment, know that many colors show up very differently on different screens. Going too far out of the box can create an unintentionally unpleasant experience for some of your visitors.

Don’t fear the white space

Use white space to contrast with other colors. This will help visitors focus their attention, and it will give their eyes a break. Plus, white space just looks fresh and clean, giving your site an inviting contemporary look.

Play with typography

Typography can help convey tone, voice and message. You can go funky and fun, slick and professional, or purely utilitarian. Experiment with a number of choices before you settle on one. Stick with your choice throughout the site, using no more than two different fonts – one for the headers, one for the body. Just like all other images, make sure typography supports the theme rather than distracting from it. Pay attention to spacing, too, both between letters and between sections on the page.

And last but certainly not least, remember that it’s function before style. Don’t sacrifice readability just because you love how old timey a text looks.

Stay relevant and be direct

The core purpose of having a website or blog is to send a clear message. That’s why it’s so important to stay on theme, no matter how creative your site may be. Users will feel cheated, annoyed or misdirected if Google brings them to your restaurant review site and the feature image is of a Ferrari. With every image you add, stop and ask yourself, “How does this support my site’s voice, theme, or purpose?”

But don’t fear the abstract

That said, relevance doesn’t have to mean a literal translation of your ideals. There are, for instance, far too many business websites out there featuring stock photos of models in suits shaking hands. Showcasing businesspeople just because you’re in business doesn’t tell us much about who you are and how you’re different than the competition. Try experimenting with abstract shots or vectors instead. This will enable you to create images that are truly unique. They’ll still be compelling and relevant if they relate to some aspect of your business, like your voice or emotional tone.

Overall, the images you use on your website should send a clear message about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. With these techniques in your tool box, you’re sure to stand out from the crowd.

Written by Rob Toledo: Rob Toledo loves all things CSS3, staring at source code and no longer supports IE7, he can be reached on Twitter @stentontoledo

500+ Symbolicons Vector Icons from Mighty Deals

2012-07-16T13:42:00.008-07:00

Whether you’re creating an application or a website, anyone who appreciates design knows how the right set of icons can add that perfect, final touch to your project. After all, it’s the icons that users will usually interact with the most. And today Mighty Deals bring you the perfect set of icons that are nothing short of spectacular. They’re precise, elegant and quite simply…gorgeous!

You can get thisset of 505 Symbolicons icons for just $15, that’s more than 60% off the regular price of $40! You’ll also receive free updates as this set continues to grow.

Check out this awesome set on Mighty Deals right away, as the deal is available this week only.

The 3 Essential Fundamentals of Designing a Successful Website

2012-07-16T13:42:00.007-07:00

The internet is chock-a-block with different websites clamoring for the attention of their target audience. Forget about emerging as the leader, but even surviving in such cut throat competition is difficult. But, there are websites and online businesses that are actually thriving in such conditions and the credit for this should be given to their website design. Their designers have taken every care in the book to ensure that their designs attract a loyal stream of website visitors, which in turn ensures a successful online presence.

The key to successful website design is getting the fundamentals right. Let’s take a look at three such fundamentals:

Get Specific – Don’t Try to Please Everybody

Let’s face it, you can’t please all and sundry with the design of your website. This is why you need to create a design that will appeal to your specific target audience. For this to happen, identify a theme that your audience will appreciate and create a website that revolves around that specific theme. The business of website design is all about specifics and designing a website that has no clear and definite thought process behind it will never work.

Start from the ground-up

Begin at the very beginning. When you are conceptualizing the design of the website, first check with the developers regarding its feasibility and only then start off on its wireframe. At the same time, identify the various designing platforms that you are going to use to bring your concept to life. It’s important to understand that there are plenty of designing platforms out there, but use only those, which you are comfortable with. This will give you the added confidence to be innovative with your design and bring to it a sense of uniqueness.

Avoid Needless Complications

Some website designers fall into the trap of designing a website that is replete with complicated visuals, call-to-action buttons and complex use of design elements. This results in a UI that not many website visitors can make sense of. As can be imagined, such visitors will definitely prefer going to some other site and not wasting time on a site that is difficult to understand. Therefore, it’s important that you subscribe to the policy of simplicity. Simplify your designs as much as possible, so that the website is able to deliver its message clearly.

To Conclude

As can be imagined, these are not the only fundamentals that you need to keep in mind for creating a successful website. But they are enough to get you started. If you are serious about your job as a website designer, it’s of paramount importance that you keep improving your skill sets and keep identifying and implementing more fundamentals as a part of your website designing process.

Written by Hazel Raoult: Hazel Raoult is working with PLAVEB – a leading web design company based in Los Angeles, CA. She loves designing visually striking user experiences for clients and has brought to life a slew of client projects that have gone on to become very successful. She has a keen insight for design and loves sharing it through her write ups.

The Components of Clean Web Designing

2012-07-16T13:42:00.006-07:00

Simple and clean web designs are an evergreen trend. There are some traits that are shared by all clean web designs. Here we will discuss these traits and the techniques that you can use to clean up your web page.

The web page layout

The basic structure of the grid should be well thought out. In order to do this, imagine rows and columns that divide all the elements on the page into a perfectly well balanced composition. Following this grid will give your page a good sense of pattern and order. The grid should be the basis for the scale and placements of the components of the webpage. It yields consistency and rhythm to your page.

Getting the layout right can be quite challenging, if your site offers a large amount of content. But if you follow a good grid, this process gets simplified.

Typography

Good typography is all about getting more out of less. Restraint is essential when you want a clean looking web page. Avoid the use to too many typefaces as they tend to clash, giving a disjointed appearance. Choose one or maybe two typefaces, you can then add variety by changing their size and color, in order to establish hierarchy. The space given between lines can also make a web page look appealing. Make sure your letter spacing is also consistent.

Color palette

Although the colors you can choose from are vast, remember to limit yourself. Use neutral shades combined by one or two other colors to add uniformity. Colors that are more vibrant should be used for important elements, so that they catch the reader’s attention. If you plan on pushing past say two colors, use them sparingly. The colors used should not only look good, but also echo the site’s content.

Imagery

When it comes down to imagery, make sure that it is consistent all over the site. Ensuring harmony of visual elements can be quite tricky, but they do add a powerful finishing touch. The quality, composition and depth of field should be similar in all images on a page. This ensures that viewer’s look at images as a whole rather than as distinct, distracting elements. Sometimes, this may not be practical, but the use of graphics like borders and other such elements can give a more uniform appearance.

Simplify and tweak

While planning you page design, it is normal to come up with designs that are complex. Do not worry, initially don’t limit yourself and add all the layers you want. Once this is done, begin to break it down and simplify. Look at what you actually need and get rid of the rest. Getting an outside opinion may also be useful.

Spend a lot of time tweaking. Just changing small details and trying out variations of different elements like color shades, sizes and other thing that seem inconsequential could make a world of a difference. So keep tweaking till you find exactly what you are looking for.

Five Inspirational Books Designers Should Read

2012-07-16T13:42:00.005-07:00

Inspiration, that crucial spark that works as the catalyst for creativity, is a difficult thing to pin down. And if you could bottle it, you would be on track for making a fortune. Inspiration, or the lack of, is what every creative person fears the most. It’s the reason why writers can sit staring at a blank page, pen poised, for hours. It’s the bottleneck that can cause designers to bash their heads on keyboards in despair. But when it flows, there’s no stopping it. Inspiration is impossible to fake and can sometimes come from the strangest of sources – not always visual. Rather, it draws from all the senses and can be as diverse as the smell of freshly brewed coffee, a song that holds certain memories or even the feel of a certain fabric. Whatever floats your boat. If you’re struggling to hit upon a creative idea or your ideas are far from fresh, here’s a quick look at five must-but books for designers. We can’t guarantee you’ll find the answer to your problem, but hopefully you’ll find they reignite your creativity, imagination and passion for your craft.

1. A History of Graphic Design by Philip B. Meggs

Meggs spent over a decade carrying out the research for this seminal book, which is considered by many to be the definitive graphic design bible. The book has gone through many updates in the 15 years since its original publication, and the fourth edition is packed with hundreds of full-colour photos, over a thousand illustrations plus examples of design excellence from across the globe. It also includes chapters on the impact of the computer revolution on contemporary design and communications. It’s essential reading for any design professional, offering a thorough grounding on the history, key movements and breakthroughs of the craft from its original inception. Keep it close at hand; it’s a go-to reference that you’ll us again and again.

2. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

Creating beautiful typography is a real skill, and this book is hailed as the most influential work in the field in the past 30 years; a must-read for designers who work with type everywhere. It’s a handbook of best-practises that seeks to understand and explain the reasons behind typographical choices and includes numerous black and white illustrations, technical details, appendices and an easy to navigate glossary. It’s a dense book, but immensely readable. The latest edition also contains a chapter that’s dedicated to the challenges of digital typography.

3. Design Workshop by Robin Williams

This book is a brilliant back-to-basics for anyone who works in design and may not have had formal training. It’s a guide to style that begins with a quiz on technical details (answers not included) and moves on to the essential building blocks of imagery, logo, typography and layout. It’s written in Williams’s typically crystal clear style and is accessible to almost anyone, regardless of their level of experience. The ‘before and after’ sections, and the exploration of why some designs are attention grabbing and others are not are particularly illuminating.

4. A Designer’s Art by Paul Rand

Playboy, Walt Disney and the V&A all have Paul Rand in common. This hugely influential American designer is the man behind some of the most enduring and memorable logos ever created. To produce a list of essential design writing without mention him would be close to sacrilidge. This book contains a collection of his writings across subjects as diverse as the use of humour, the application of colour black and the power of repetition. It offers a fascinating insight into one of the 20^th century’s most important design minds.

5. The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is a renowned book cover designer, who has created some of the most iconic covers of the past 20 years, putting pictures to the words of the likes of Bret Easton Ellis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Michael Crichton. His debut novel is a humorous and thought provoking look at the art school experience of the 1950s. Designers will adore the lectures in design delivered by the terrifyingly bitter Winter Sorbeck, whose ‘Introduction to Graphic Design’ course changes the way his students view the world forever.

Written by Julie Pena: This is a guest post contributed by Julie Pena. She writes on behalf of Printerinks.com. Julie is a designer from the UK who enjoys blogging and sharing her knowledge of graphic design. To find out more follow her on Twitter.

Up and Coming Web Design Trends in 2012

2012-07-16T13:42:00.004-07:00

Nothing attracts visitors like a fresh website design. As the landscape of the Internet evolves, new trends in layout, style and accessibility are changing the way people consume information.

Quick Interface Response

Example: http://sundaybestdesigns.com/

Now that people are accessing the Internet from a variety of mobile devices as well as computers, ease of use has become of paramount importance. The fewer clicks a user needs to find information, the better. Instant dropdown menus, large buttons and links that are easy to manipulate on touchscreens allow users to interact with a site from any device without hassle.

Minimal, Intuitive Interfaces

Example: http://studionudge.com

Simple, minimalistic website designs take ease of use one step further by providing all their relevant information on one page. Rather than looking cluttered, these sites employ clean layouts with geometric shapes, highly visible links and variations in font to separate information into different sections. When businesses give visitors the information they want without making them search through page after page, those visitors are more likely to turn into customers.

Big, Visible Images

Example: http://www.gruny.net

Large background graphics are a bold way to make a website design pop. Whether it’s a static photo with text layered over the top or a prominent “mascot” image that appears throughout a website, visual content makes an impact. Consistent images provide a cohesive user experience and can work to build brands by keeping business logos in the forefront throughout a user’s entire visit.

Eye-Catching Typography

Example: http://futureofcarsharing.com/

Fonts can be just as stunning as images when it comes to website presentation. Services such as Typekit host unique fonts across a network of servers, allowing for integration on websites of all kinds. This reduces load time, ensures consistent uptime for all text and gives webmasters an enormous variety of fonts to choose from. Well-placed text draws the eye and gets users interested in a site from the moment they arrive.

More Infographics

Infographics pop up on social media all the time, and with good reason. These large images curate bits of important information and put them together in an easily understandable way. Through infographics, webmasters and users can share statistics, relevant industry data and a host of other information almost instantly across a variety of platforms.

Parallax Scrolling

Example: http://playtend.com/

Parallax scrolling allows objects on a website move in different ways or at different rates. The most common use of this is in the combination of a static image and scrollable text. This is another trick that webmasters can use to place a large amount of information one page while maintaining a clean, user-friendly layout.

HTML5 & CSS3

New standards in HTML and CSS are making it easier than ever to create highly interactive website designs. Integration with JavaScript and other types of coding gives users a whole new way to experience the Internet. The more the Internet changes, the more users are looking for an experience over and above the passive act of viewing site content. Websites that can engage visitors on a deeper level are will see more return visits and perhaps even an increase in search ranking.

These attention-grabbing design elements help to create websites that stand out from the crowd. The easier it is for users to interact with a site and find information, the more likely they are to come back. Adding stylistic touches enhances the experience, giving visitors something to tell their friends about, thereby spreading the word to a wider audience.

Written by Allison Hanfield: Allison Hanfield is a graphic designer and product manager, you can see her designs on Bubba brand mugs and kegs.

Reaching out to your Customers through Calendars

2012-07-16T13:42:00.003-07:00

That day I sat in my office’s pantry, while drinking coffee while I was idly looking at the calendar on the table, attracted by the photo of a Balinese dancer so fascinating, behind it printed featuring an Bali arts attractions. On side of the calendar is also printed a company logo complete with on the underneath printed a small of their customer service’s phone numbers including email and website address.

This is a small example of how effective its the calendar printing to reach your customers or potential customers. Calendar cards featuring holiday themes, culture, scenery, and other interesting photographs, with a unique design concept and of course very useful and interesting for them and they will greatly appreciate this gift throughout the year. That way you keep your contact information in front of your customers eyes and even reach out to new potential customers.

With a nice design of course they are very happy to put the calendar from you on their desks, reception desk, pantry, and even meeting room. That way it means you have to advertise for a year with only a capital of a beautiful calendar cards.

In this post I like to show you some examples of calendar printing with unique, beautiful, attractive and ofcourse must useful. So, enjoy!

Write the Future

Pop-up calendar

Just Flip The Junk

4 seasons

Toyota Corolla Fukuoka Callendar 2011

Calendar for Lanck Telecom

Chimteks Company Calendar 2012

Calendar made of matches

Calendar "Pasha Travel"

2012 Charity Calendar

Mouscacho 2012 Calendar

Javdekar Calender 2012

Calender Design- The Sea Saver

2012 Type & Color

DUNKIN calender

Eye Catching Luggage Tags Design

2012-07-16T13:42:00.002-07:00

Luggage tags. Probably one of the last things you are thinking about before you jet off for your well-earned holiday or weekend break. But with claims that 1 in 150 people have their baggage misdirected or lost, is that a risk you are willing to take with no visible identification on your baggage?

In this post, we will take a look through some of the most eye-catching designs of luggage tags to date, which will ensure (or at least give it the best chance) that you and your treasured possessions follow you wherever you are travelling!

PVC plastic tags inspired by colourful travel related cartoon images; these will really stand out on the luggage carousel.

Beautiful and classic calf-skin tags, handmade in Tuscany, Italy. Notice the buckle fastening on these unique and classy luggage tags.

Check out these cute critter tags. These soft leather tags are ideal for you or your children’s luggage.

Romero Britto’s artistic style shows a mixture of cubism and pop. Here we have his heart luggage tag design.

Get the retro look with PaperPolaroid’s cassette luggage tags.

This devil luggage tag will certainly get some people looking at your suitcases!

Ideal for those who can’t switch off on their holiday break, the 2GB USB Flash Drive tag will have you working away.

Aqua Owls’ fabric tag looks ace! Ideal size for slotting in a business card too.

Vegetable tanned leather, stamped by hand in Colorado with a mallet – Owen & Fred.

Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” luggage tag – aptly named and looks really cool.

$9.95

These Frog, Owl and Monkey tags are excellent for your kid’s luggage and school bags.

Let’s hope you won’t regret having these cheeky tags when your suitcase falls apart and it’s your underwear going round the luggage carousel!

This lego tag is excellent! Don’t worry its not of lego scale size..

Not only informative, the IdentiGrip luggage ID tags help you to gain a soft but firm purchase on your bags and cases.

Sorry, I moustache you, is this your baggage, Sir?

These durable rubber tags will ensure nobody mistakes their luggage for yours. Woof!

Very cute and handmade Hello Kitty luggage tags.

These designs inspired by nature will ensure that your bags stay safe and not left to the elements.

Fly Emirates with these strong, bold tags. Great for Arsenal supporters!

Nightmare before Christmas luggage tag. People think twice before touching your handle!

Opt in for the pink elephant tag and you’ll be able to spot your luggage a mile off.

Kim-Vu’s Down Under tags are perfect for those heading to the outback.

Psychedelic flower designs with a picture of San Francisco. More of a keepsake than a traditional luggage tag, but nevertheless eye-catching.

This Cool Cat luggage tag will certainly get some heads moving!

Butterfly and Heart luggage tags.

The Mercedes-Benz plastic card tag to match with your car.

Of course you can always pick your tags up from a tourist shop on your travels. Nice designs by Mary Ellis.

Could you imagine having the same luggage and tag…?

Luggage tags work great on backpacks, as well as suitcases.

Recycled luggage tags are one way to save the environment and own a completely unique tag.

So that just about sums up the 30 most eye-catching luggage tags post. Do you have any luggage tags you have hand-made or crafted yourself? Got any cool tags not mentioned above? We’d love to see yours!

Written by Matt Payne: Matt Payne on behalf of madebyoomph.co.uk. Oomph print plastic cards of all types – from contactless cards, membership cards, discount cards, hotel key cards and gift cards.

3 Keys To Choosing The Home Business That’s Right For You

2012-07-16T13:42:00.001-07:00

The thought of working at home makes some people terrified and as a result, many people shy away from this lucrative form of business. For starters, narrowing down to the business you want to engage yourself in is very crucial as this will determine what you will deal with as a business. However with the hard economic times and lack of jobs, many people are forced operate from home in order to make themselves self sufficient.

Thanks to the availability of internet and online communities, it has become easy for one to lay hands on what they want to venture in. The online community has a wide array of jobs for everyone, from; graphic designing, data entry jobs, call center jobs, online marketing as well as offline marketing. All these jobs are freelance based, therefore many mothers and people with disabilities who cannot commute for long distances, can easily earn a decent income. But before you can decide on what you want to engage in, there are certain considerations that you should have in mind. So, what are the 3 keys to choosing the home business that’s right for you?

1. Planning

Planning is the backbone of every successful business venture, and failing to plan is the right ingredient for your failure recipe. You need to plan on where you want your business to be say, in six months time, and set targets for yourself. Furthermore with planning, you will get to know what you will need to start the business and the manpower you will require to make it through.

2. Passion

Your passion will greatly determine what you occupy yourself with. It is evident that, if you have a passion for doing a particular task, for instance cooking, you are able to cook, with or without monetary motivation. The passion alone will drive you to reach higher heights in your business. In addition, you will never get bored by doing what you like most.

3. Skills, expertise and experience

If you do not have the required skills for a venture, then you are taking the path of failure, by engaging in the business in the first place. Make sure that, you are conversant with what the business requires for it to be a success.

Importance of having a home business

Having a business you run from home, has its own advantages, some of which are;

You have the freedom to steer your business in the direction you feel is right. Although you have the freedom, be careful not to waste all your investment and time down the drain. Engaging the services of a consultant is beneficial to your business if you want to make a major step.

The days of having your boss on your back are over, thanks to your home business, you are your own boss. Although you might be tempted to exercise you’re a being a boss, this is the time when you have to work really hard for your business to succeed.

Having your own home business gives you the advantage of exercising the different facets of skills you possess; the days of monotony and routine work are long gone. With each new day, you are likely to get different feels of your business, therefore bringing life and the excitement of the unknown into your business.

Working from home will allow you to plan your schedule according to your comfort. If you feel productive working at night or day the choice solely lies with you. All that matters is the completion of the task at hand.

With the above guidelines, you are bound to reach your full potential with the right home business.

Written by Greg Wong: Would you like MORE sales, MORE profit, MORE growth for your business? Read REAL customer reviews of the leading credit card processing companies and start accepting credit card payments at lower costs today, visit www.ratecreditcardprocessing.com now!

Time-saving tools for getting things done online

2012-07-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

As a web professional you know that time is the one thing you never have enough of. With the apps and websites below you will save time and energy communicating your ideas and creating the products and tools you need to make more income online. That should be incentive enough for you to click on at least a couple (if not all of them) and check out what they have to offer.

Mighty Deals – A Deal website that actually has stuff you can use.

Have you ever noticed that ‘deal’ websites usually have deals on, well, junk? I mean, occasionally you might find something good but for the most part its stuff you just don’t use. Mighty Deals is different in 1 way; the majority of the items they sell are actually useful to us web professionals. Vector graphics, theme packages and other, useful, tools are there every day, and they change it up frequently too. That’s why they’re the top deal site for me.

Best Feature – Their ‘Deal of the Day’. 1 super deal every day.

tn3Gallery – WordPress photo editing made simple.

WordPress is one of the best blogging websites in the world. With tn3Gallery you now have a tool to make it even better. Use this excellent plug-in to make your pics and videos look great with slide-shows, transitions and a bunch of other cool stuff that will make your blog really stand out from the rest. It really is easy and the results look professional. For an amateur photog like me it’s a dream.

Best Feature – No need for external tools as they’re all built right in.

Code Year – An online code writing course.

I actually don’t see the need to learn code from where I sit but, if you’re a web programmer or want to be someday, then Code Year is the course to take. It’s an introductory track for anyone who wants to learn how to program and starts with the basics, teaching concepts in a practical context. From JavaScript to HTML and CSS they will teach you about code and how web technologies can be combined with JavaScript to build interactive websites.

Best Feature – It’s all online, so you can learn code anywhere.

My Permissions Cleaner – Protect yourself by protecting your permissions online.

If you knew how many apps and websites have permissions to use and distribute your personal info you’d probably be scared to death. The average is almost 20!! My Permissions Cleaner helps you to keep track, clean up and, when necessary, deny those permissions as you see fit. If you’re worried about where your personal info is going, and you should, check out this app.

Best Feature – It gives you access to a lot of info you might not even have known about.

unbounce – Landing pages the easy way.

Landing pages are the ‘money-magnets’ of the internet. If you’re an internet marketer you probably have many. They’re not extremely hard to create if you’re experienced, but if you’re just starting you will like (and need) the help that this site gives. Easy set-up, easy tracking of your landing pages, and a host of other tools to help you make them and, in the end, help you make more money.

Best Feature – When you sign up you get 1 free landing page.

App Cooker – A powerful app building resource.

OK, I don’t find too many new websites or apps that make me say this but ‘wow’. This one looks amazing. App Cooker looks to be the next level in app creating, letting pros as well as amateurs create apps for the iPhone and iPad. I checked it out and it looks powerful. I will be buying this platform myself, which says a lot. If you ever had an inclination to make your own iPhone or iPad app, now is the time and App Cooker is the place.

Best Feature – Right now it’s priced very low so get in while you can.

Balsamiq – Communicate your ideas quickly and simply.

Balsamiq is a wireframe app that helps you to produce mock-ups of your ideas quickly, like using a whiteboard, and get them to your people and your customers to hash out your ideas and get those ideas to the production phase quicker. It looks easy enough, but honestly I’m not sure if this is better than a whiteboard except for the ability to send it over your smart phone. Then again, I work alone so I’m not an expert on this particular subject.

Best Feature – The wireframes look like mock-ups and are easy to share.

Written by Raul Dumitrescu

Beginners Can Learn Web Design Online

2012-07-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

Learn web design online and you save both time and money while making a smart investment in yourself. Whether you are looking to learn a new skill that will allow you to earn a good income or whether you are looking to learn how to create your own website for your personal or professional use. Getting the training that you need to master this craft is the right first step to take.

When you choose to learn web design online you are choosing the most cost effective way to increase your professional knowledge, skills and abilities. Everyone knows that having a high quality web design is a crucial part of having an attractive and appealing website.

Without an attractive, functional and search engine friendly web design a website is certain to fail. This is one of the main reasons why it is so important that you learn these skills for yourself.

By choosing to learn web design online you will be able to learn the disciplines, technologies and tools needed to be able to create your own personally designed web pages. And if you plan on having your own website then you will be able to make any and all changes or improvements that may be needed to help you grow your business and increase your income.

Many website owners may start an online business by paying someone else to design or create their website for them and end up wishing that they taken the time to learn these key online skills themselves.

It can become a financial nightmare to always have to pay someone else to make the changes or improvements that you need made on your website to grow your business. However when you take the time to learn web design online, this can be a skill that you can benefit from many times over.

Even if you are planning to work as a website developer for a company or as a freelancer, there will always be a need for talented people with well developed web design knowledge, skills and abilities.

As a result of choosing to learn web design online you will also be able to enjoy the following benefits:

1.) You will be able to reduce your cost of learning by as much as 80% over what a traditional institution might cost you.

2.) You will be able to learn at your own pace. This means that you can focus as little or as much time as you need to thoroughly learn, practice and absorb the material so that you fully understand everything being covered.

3.) You won’t have to deal with the extra hassles associated with taking classes at a traditional institution, things like getting up early in the morning to get dressed, rush through breakfast, pack a lunch, commute to class, and then deal with the commute home from class.

All of these things can take a big chunk of your time, which will only extend the amount of time it will take you to learn the design skills that you are interested in. By choosing to learn web design online you really are creating a win/win situation by saving both time and money.

You can find more information and tips for beginners on learn web design online at http://www.webmastercourse.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bob_Pardue

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Build an Awesome CSS Slider With Four Overlays

2012-07-16T10:27:00.014-07:00

Today’s project is a fun one. We’re going to build a standard CSS image slider with a twist: the visible image area will be divided into four distinct sections, each with a hidden message that is revealed when the user hovers over it.

The ultimate effect is pretty awesome and I think you’re going to like it a lot. Along the way we’ll play with some animations, transitions, positioning contexts and a lot more. Let’s dive in and get started!

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Sneak Peek

If you’d like to sneak a look at the finished product before we build it, check out the link below.

Demo: Click here to launch the live demo.

Props to “How Do You Roll”

My inspiration for today’s tutorial comes from the sushi place where I plan on eating dinner tonight. I stopped by their website for directions and instantly wanted to see if I could replicate the effect on the home page. The restaurant is called How Do You Roll, feel free to go check out their awesome site.

HTML

Let’s get this project started! As always, the first thing we want to do is outline our basic HTML structure. This slider is comprised of one big image area that’s split into four vertical columns. Consequently, we require one wrapper div with a “slider” class and four inner divs, each with a “panel” class.

<div class="slider">
  <div class="panel"></div>
  <div class="panel"></div>
  <div class="panel"></div>
  <div class="panel"></div>
</div>

This is our basic structure, but we need to flesh it out a little with some content. I want each panel to serve as both a source of information and a link. So the user should be able to hover, see what the panel is all about, and click to proceed to a different page. To accomplish this, we’ll toss in an h2 and a paragraph and wrap the whole dang thing in an anchor. It seems like a weird way to use an anchor, but it’s perfectly valid in HTML5.

<a href="#">
  <div class="panel">
    <h2>One</h2>
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
  </div>
</a>

Now that we have an overall structure and the individual panel formation figured out, we put it all together and we have all the HTML that we’ll need for this project.

<div class="slider">
 
    <a href="#">
      <div class="panel">
        <h2>One</h2>
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
      </div>
    </a>
 
    <a href="#">
      <div class="panel">
       <h2>Two</h2>
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
      </div>
    </a>
 
    <a href="#">
      <div class="panel">
        <h2>Three</h2>
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
      </div>
    </a>
 
    <a href="#">
      <div class="panel">
        <h2>Four</h2>
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
      </div>
    </a>
 
</div>

Starter Styles

To kick off our CSS, let’s get some of the generic stuff out of the way. First I threw in a little universal reset to get us all on the same page. Replace this with a better reset or normalization technique if you’re using this in a real project.

I also added a background texture and reset the link styles for the slider, just for good measure.

* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
 
body {
  background: #eee url(subtlenet2.png); /*http://subtlepatterns.com/?p=1341*/
}
 
.slider a {
  text-decoration: none;
  color: fff;
}

Slider CSS

Now it’s time to style the slider div. Basically, we want to set a specific size for it, then give it a background image that is the same size. Then we’ll add some margins to center it, some border-radius to round the corners and a box-shadow to set it apart from the background a bit.

The big thing that you might miss in this chunk is the overflow:auto line. This is important because we want our panels to take on the rounded corner effect that we’re applying to the parent slider div.

.slider {
  height: 400px;
  width: 800px;
  background: url(http://lorempixum.com/800/400/sports/8);
  border-radius: 20px;
  overflow: hidden;
  margin: 50px auto;
 
  -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
  box-shadow: 2px 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
}

Progress Check

At this point, you should have a big image with rounded corners and a drop shadow along with a bunch of ugly, messy text, which we’ll fix in the next step!

Panel CSS

Our slider container is looking sharp, now it’s time to put the panels in order. Given that our container is 800px by 400px, each panel needs to be set at 200px by 400px, meaning that each panel will occupy the full height and one quarter of the width. From there we just need to float them to the left and they’ll line up just like we want.

The interesting part here is that I’ve set the color and background to transparent, which makes the panels invisible. This is because we only want them to show up on hover. The default state should indeed be hidden.

The final step here is to add the CSS for a transition so that the panels fade into place when the user hovers. Notice that I actually declared two separate transitions separated by a comma (one for the color and one for the background-color).

.panel {
  width: 200px;
  height: 400px;
  background: transparent;
  color: transparent;
  float: left;
  overflow: hidden;
 
  -webkit-transition: color 0.5s ease, background-color 0.5s ease;
  -moz-transition: color 0.5s ease, background-color 0.5s ease;
  -o-transition: color 0.5s ease, background-color 0.5s ease;
  -ms-transition: color 0.5s ease, background-color 0.5s ease;
  transition: color 0.5s ease, background-color 0.5s ease;
}

Panel Typography

Next, it’s time to get the typography in order. Admittedly, I didn’t do this with the panels set to invisible but instead gave the elements a color, styled them and then reverted them back to hidden.

Make sure you style both the paragraph and the h2. I made the header big, bold and moved down from the top quite a bit. Both the header and the paragraph also get a set width of 150px, which makes it easy to center them in the space despite the left alignment.

.panel h2 {
  font: bold 35px/1.5 Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
  width: 150px;
  margin: 55px auto 0 auto;
}
 
.panel p {
  font: 200 11px/1.5 Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
  width: 150px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

Panel Hover

When the user hovers over one of our panels, I want it to become visible again. I do this by giving the background and text a color. I set the background to black, with a little transparency to let the underlying image show through, and the paragraph to white.

.panel:hover {
  background: #000; /*for old browsers*/
  background: rgba(0,0,0,0.8);
  color: #fff;
}

Progress Check

You should now have fully functioning panels! If this is all you were looking to achieve, you can stop here, no further work necessary. Even without the next step, it’s still a great effect.

Animate The Background

This last step is completely optional, and mind you it won’t work at all on older browsers, but the original inspiration for this piece had an image slider in the background. We have a static image back there and we’re now going to go back and animate it.

To do this, we need to go back to the slider declaration block and add a few things. For starters, turn your single background into four background images, with the last being the same as the first so everything loops nicely.

Next, make sure that you set the background images to have no repeat and copy the position values shown below, which will line up the images in one long horizontal row.

.slider {
  height: 400px;
  width: 800px;
  background: url(http://lorempixum.com/800/400/sports/8), url(http://lorempixum.com/800/400/sports/2), url(http://lorempixum.com/800/400/sports/3), url(http://lorempixum.com/800/400/sports/8);
  background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0px;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  border-radius: 20px;
  overflow: hidden;
  margin: 50px auto;
 
  -webkit-animation: slider 15s infinite;
  -moz-animation: slider 15s infinite;
  -ms-animation: slider 15s infinite;
  -o-animation: slider 15s infinite;
  animation: slider 15s infinite;
 
  -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
  box-shadow: 2px 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
}

As you can see, I also threw in the animation CSS. First we name our animation (slider), then set the duration and number of iterations. To finish off the entire project, we need to define how that animation will work with keyframes. The code for this is confusing so let’s outline each step.

Step One: First background image visible

Step Two: Move everything to the left 800px, second background image visible

Step Three: Move everything to the left 800px, third background image visible

Step Four: Move everything to the left 800px, fourth background image visible (which is the same as the first image)

To split this up, we need to start at 0% and end at 100%, which leaves two steps in between. The easy solution is to make steps two and three at 33% and 66%. The math isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough. Notice how the images move over each time, bringing the next background into view.

0%: background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;

33% background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;

66%: background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;

100%: background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;

Now, this alone is going to make the slideshow constantly move, which we don’t want. What we want instead is for each slide to stay still for a few seconds before advancing. This is accomplished by adding in a few redundant steps so that the slides don’t advance until 10% before the next step.

0%: background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;

23%: background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;

33% background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;

56% background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;

66%: background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;

90%: background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;

100%: background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;

Now that we’ve got the processed outlined, we can make it happen with CSS. This requires a ton of code for the various browsers but it’s the only way we can pull it off so we’ll just have to live with it.

@keyframes "slider" {
 0% {
    background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 23% {
    background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 33% {
    background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 56% {
    background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 66% {
    background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 90% {
    background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 100% {
    background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;
 }
 
}
 
@-moz-keyframes slider {
 0% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 20% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 33% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 56% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 66% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 90% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 100% {
   background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;
 }
 
}
 
@-webkit-keyframes "slider" {
 0% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 20% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 33% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 56% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 66% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 90% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 100% {
   background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;
 }
 
}
 
@-ms-keyframes "slider" {
 0% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 20% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 33% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 56% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 66% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 90% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 100% {
   background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;
 }
 
}
 
@-o-keyframes "slider" {
 0% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 20% {
   background-position: 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0px, 3200px 0;
 }
 33% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 56% {
   background-position: -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0px, 1600px 0;
 }
 66% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 90% {
   background-position: -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0px, 800px 0;
 }
 100% {
   background-position: -3200px 0px, -1600px 0px, -800px 0px, 0px 0;
 }
 
}

See It In Action!

We’re all finished! Now it’s time to have one last look at the demo.

Demo: Click here to launch the live demo.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed building this fun little slider as much as I did. I love how it represents a slight tweak on an old idea. It’s quite practical and really allows you to take your sliders one step further.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. Have you seen a slider split up like this before? How would you make it better?

Pull Off Awesome Scroll Effects With Stroll.js

2012-07-16T10:27:00.013-07:00

Scrolling effects are all the rage these days. As the user moves down the page, content does more than move up the screen, it comes alive and becomes more interesting. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to pull these effects off with pure CSS. If you don’t know JavaScript, you’re out of luck.

That’s where Stroll.js comes in. It’s a super easy to implement library that makes applying mind-boggling scroll effects a breeze. All you have to do is paste in a couple of brief lines of JavaScript, the rest is all handled with HTML and CSS. Keep reading and I’ll show you how it works.

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Meet Stroll.js

Stroll.js is a neat little JavaScript library that brings a bunch of eye-catching animations to the scroll action on list items. The idea is that you have a group of items in a scrollable list and you use Stroll.js to make browsing that list more interesting.

The project home page (shown above) has a bunch of demos that you can try out to see the types off effects that are included. The animations themselves are actually built with simple CSS3 transformations so you should easily be able to add to and customize the library with your own ideas.

Let’s Build a Demo!

Every time I come across a cool project like Stroll.js, I immediately want to dive in, kick the tires and see how it all works. Reading boring documentation is all well and fine, but I really can’t get a feel for something like this until I try it myself. That’s what we’re going to be doing today.

Demo: Click here to launch.

HTML

To start off, we know we’re going to need a list because that’s what Stroll.js is all about: animating list scrolls. The list items on the demo were just a simple line of text, but I want to push it much further to see how Stroll.js handles it. We’ll make each list item contain an image, headline and paragraph.

If you use Zen Coding like I do, type the following into your HTML editor (otherwise, just type out the next part manually).

ul>li>img+h2+p

As you can see, we started with an unordered list, then gave it a list-item child, which contains the three elements we just said that we wanted. When you hit tab or whatever shortcut your editor uses, this will expand into the following HTML:

<ul>
  <li>
    <img src="" >
    <h2></h2>
    <p></p>
  </li>
</ul>

If we dig around in the documentation, we can see that the type of effect that occurs is based on the class applied to the unordered list. To start, I’ll go with the “flip” effect. Also, the JavaScript will target the list’s parent item, so we’ll need to add one of those.

<div id="main">
  <ul class="flip">
    <li>
    <img src="" >
    <h2></h2>
    <p></p>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

Next, we’ll need to flesh out the content within the list item. I’ll toss in an image, headline and some placeholder paragraph text.

<div id="main">
  <ul class="flip">
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/1">
      <h2>Headline One</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

Finally, we’ll expand our list to include a total of eight list items. This doesn’t seem like a lot but they’ll be nice and large so we’ll have plenty of room for scrolling.

<div id="main">
  <ul class="flip">
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/1">
      <h2>Headline One</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/2">
      <h2>Headline Two</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/3">
      <h2>Headline Three</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/4">
      <h2>Headline Four</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/5">
      <h2>Headline Five</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/1">
      <h2>Headline Six</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/1">
      <h2>Headline Seven</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <img src="http://lorempixum.com/200/200/city/8">
      <h2>Headline Eight</h2>
      <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

Progress Check

You should have all your content on the page at this point. It’ll look like a big mess right now but we’ll fix that in the next step with CSS.

CSS

Now that we’ve got our content in order, it’s time to prettify it with some CSS styling. This will be accomplished with four distinct categories of styles: basic, images, typography and list.

Basic

There’s nothing special here, just a lazy man’s reset and a background color for the body. Obviously, in a real project you’ll implement a more detailed and specific reset but for demo purposes there’s no reason to dive into something that deep.

/*Basic Styles*/
* {margin: 0px; padding: 0px;}
 
body {
  background: #333;
}

Images

For the image styles, we’ll add a margin of 20px to give them some breathing room and a border-radius of 50% (look ma, no browser prefixes!) to make the thumbnails perfectly round. Also, we’ll float the images left so that the text appears along side them rather than under them.

/*Images*/
img {
  float: left;
  margin-right: 20px;
  border-radius: 50%;
}

Typography

For the type, we need to define our h2 and paragraph styles. I used shorthand to give the header a bold, sans-serif treatment and the paragraph a normal weight, serif treatment. Also notice that the paragraph has a slightly lighter color to help differentiate the two visually.

/*Type*/
h2 {
  margin-top: 25px;
  font: bold 30px Helvetica, Arila, sans-serif;
  color: #000;
}
 
p {
  font: 13px/1.5 Georgia, Times, serif;
  color: #757575;
}

List

Now it’s time for the biggest chunk of CSS, the final piece that will make our list items look perfect. Set the position to relative, the width to 800px and the height to 510px. Then apply some margins and padding and be sure the list-style is set to none.

The thing that you really have to get right is the overflow. Set the overflow-x to hidden and the overflow-y to scroll that way your list will actually be scrollable.

/*List Styles*/
ul {
  position: relative;
  width: 800px;
  height: 510px;
  margin: 50px auto;
  padding: 0;
  list-style: none;
  overflow-x: hidden;
  overflow-y: scroll;
}

Now that we have the unordered list styles worked out, it’s time to drill down and set the list-item styles. Once again, set the position (relative), height (200px), and padding (20px). Then set the colors for the background and type, set the overflow to auto and the z-index to two.

The tricky part here is that second selector. I’m using nth-child(odd) to vary the color of every other list-item, which helps each stand out from the next. This isn’t supported well on IE, but neither is Stroll.js so we’ll use it anyway. However, always remember that you can use Selectivizr to increase your selector support. Ultimately, if the scrolling effects aren’t widely supported, it’s no big deal (they’re pure eye candy), but you should make the other visual styling as cross-browser as possible.

ul li {
  position: relative;
  height: 200px;
  padding: 20px;
  background: #eee;
  color: #252525;
  z-index: 2;
  overflow: auto;
}
 
ul li:nth-child(odd) {
  background: #fff;
}

Progress Check

Most of our work is done! Our list looks fantastic, all that’s left to do is bring it to life with a tiny bit of JavaScript. It won’t hurt a bit, I promise.

JavaScript

Now, I promised when we started this project that you didn’t need to know JavaScript to proceed. However, here I am throwing JavaScript at you! What gives? The truth is, you do need a tiny bit of JS, but a copy and paste action will work just fine and it’s easy to customize for your project.

Toss this code in at the end of the body in your HTML.

<script src="js/stroll.min.js"></script>
<script>
  stroll.bind( '#main ul' );
</script>

See? That wasn’t so bad. All you have to do to customize it is make sure that you target the right ID. We used “#main” in our project today, but feel free to change this for your own uses.

It’s Alive!

With that we’re all finished! All we have to do to change the effect is apply a different class on the unordered list. For the demo, I used the flip, curl and tilt effects.

Demo: Click here to launch.

What Do You Think?

Thinking about how to make scroll events more interesting opens up a whole new realm of interesting design possibilities. As with any effect, these can be used for good or evil. Taking them too far or abusing them will result in a dizzying page that no one will want to use. Use Stroll.js sparingly and it will have a much greater effect.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think of Stroll.js. Do you like scrolling animations or would you prefer that developers stop finding new places to stick more animations? Let us know!

Brackets: Adobe’s Innovative Text Editor Project

2012-07-16T10:27:00.012-07:00

Unlike Apple, Adobe seems to love sharing its product ideas when they’re in their infancy. This is both a good and a bad thing. As a user, it’s fun to see what Adobe has up its sleeve. Admittedly though, it’s frustrating to spend time working with a project only to see it vanish completely, never to come to full fruition. There’s also the frustration involved with using any sort of early beta project. Allowing users to check out the barely functioning version of your product might dissuade them from ever trying the finished one.

For better or worse, Adobe often shows its burgeoning products to the public, and the latest app in this trend is a text editor called Brackets. Adobe claims this new text editor will be innovative, open, focused and extensible. Will brackets live up to these lofty promises? Read on to find out.

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What Is Brackets?

The Brackets project home page promotes the application as an “open-source code editor built with the web for the web.” By that, they mean that it’s actually built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which makes it super easy for anyone to extend and tweak. This is great because it’s also 100% open source.

Good PR

The fact that Brackets is completely open source is very interesting. I’m not sure Adobe has ever really ever sunk legitimate time and effort into a free, open source application. It represents a pretty significant event and it’ll be really interesting to see where it leads.

Ultimately, I think it’s a really great move on Adobe’s part to engage in projects like this. It’s an undeniable truth that their reputation with web developers has been pretty rough as of late. I myself have written entire articles on why Adobe doesn’t understand developers.

The entire Brackets project is a decent answer to that complaint. If there’s one thing that you can do to win the favor of the web design community, it’s to jump in and give us something that we can all work on and get behind.

Beyond that, Brackets is finally a project purely for coders, not a half-baked WYSIWYG aimed at eliminating coding from the web development workflow. Adobe is positioned better than anyone on the planet to create a text editor that becomes the industry standard and yet the forerunners in this game come from everyone but Adobe: Sublime Text, Textmate, Coda, Espresso; all of these come to mind before any Adobe product.

Git Your Code On

Given that Brackets is an open source project, it makes sense that it’s currently being hosted on Git Hub. This means that anyone with CSS, HTML and JavaScript can fork away and contribute to the project. In fact, Adobe is banking heavily on this being a community driven project. If you think there are features missing, fix it!

If you want to try out Brackets for yourself, hit up the downloads page for the project and grab a .zip. Keep in mind that what you’re going to find is a little bit unconventional because the app is very much in an early state of development that is in no way intended for gneral public use.

When you download the .zip, open it up and you’ll find all kinds of files. The app itself is contained in the “bin” folder, so what’s all of this other stuff?

The rest of the files that you see actually contain the full source of the app. Given that it’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it’s not a native application, it’s simply wrapped in a native shell so that it can access local files.

Because you have access to all of the source files, you can get started right away with hacking it open and changing things around. Pretty neat!

Using Brackets

When you open up Brackets, you’ll see right away that Adobe is attempting a dramatic departure from their typical panel-clad interface full of icons, toolbars, menu options and the like. They admittedly realize that these things merely serve to get in the way of web development and opt instead for the simple two column interface shown below.

As you can see, it’s a sharp looking editor, heavily borrowing from that famous Loren Brichter UI pattern that has become so famous (dark sidebar, light interface). Currently, the menu options are nestled inside of the app window but this is only a temporary issue that will be resolved long term.

Syntax highlighting is obviously up and running, the file browser on the left looks nice… but what’s so innovative about this thing?

Quick Edit

Adobe is saying that they have tons of ideas for how to make Brackets a truly innovative text editor. Given that this market has been short on real innovation for a few years now (with the exception of Sublime Text 2), that’s something I can get excited about.

Unfortunately, the project is new enough that there’s not too much currently being shown in this area. However, there are at least two features worth discussing, the first of which is called Quick Edit.

Let’s say you’re browsing through your HTML and you want to make a quick change to your CSS. In every other text editor, you have to jump over to the CSS file. However, in brackets, you can insert your cursor into the class and hit Command-E to open up the Quick Edit feature.

As you can see, your HTML splits open and reveals a hidden CSS layer. On the right, you can see the CSS rules that effect your selected class. Simply click on one to choose it and edit the text on the left to update your actual external .css file.

This is a really, really nice feature and it’s definitely the type of unique, innovative thought that we’ve all been waiting for developers to bring to web text editors. Hopefully, we’ll see lots more features like this very soon.

Live Preview

The second great feature is the ability to link your HTML doc to your browser. By clicking the lightning bolt in the upper right corner of the interface, you open a preview of the current document in your browser.

Once you have that preview behind you, it will update live and instantly as you change the page’s CSS. No refresh button required.

Currently, this only works in Chrome and with CSS. If you edit the actual markup, you’ll have to refresh the page manually. Again, this likely won’t be true long term.

How Is It?

It’s absolutely unfair to judge Brackets in its current state, but Adobe has made it public so I think public discussion is appropriate.

As it lies, Brackets is no where near something you’ll want to pick up for daily use. Lag, glitches, unexpected behavior; all the marks of an early beta release are there. Further, aside from Quick Edit, there’s really not much to be impressed with as a user. They haven’t even finished adding the typical features that you’d expect to find in a professional editor: split screen mode, multiple selections, etc.

That being said, more important than what the project feels like in its current state is where it’s going. Brackets has the potential to turn into something really awesome if it’s correctly fostered.

Sublime Text has shown us how incredible a simple text editor can be with wide open customization options and a rich plugin architecture. Brackets picks up this tradition and takes it even further. If Adobe really digs in for the next two years and pushes development hard, this could become one amazing text editor.

Unfortunately, the skeptic in me is a strong beast that often overrules my optimism. Adobe loves to start projects, build hype and then abandon them in favor of a new venture that promises more to earn more attention. Will this happen to Brackets? No one can say.

Bottom line: it’s completely refreshing to see Adobe approach a project for web developers from an angle that actually makes sense to real web developers and I hope they don’t screw it up.

What Do You Think?

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about a brand new Adobe project in recent years, but may be the first time that I’ve had anything nice to say. I’m excited to see where this project goes in the next year and will eagerly download new versions to see how Brackets is progressing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Brackets. Is this the next great web development text editor or another Adobe flop? Do you appreciate the open source route? Will you contribute to the project? Let us know!

Winner Announced: Win a Free Copy of CSS Hat and Turn Your Photoshop Styles Into CSS!

2012-07-16T10:27:00.011-07:00

CSS Hat is the coolest Photoshop plugin to come down the pipeline in a long time. With a single click, CSS Hat can magically transform your Photoshop styles into CSS that you can copy and paste right into your project.

We gave CSS Hat high praise in our review and now we’ve managed to snag a copy for our readers. Read on to see how to enter!

The Winner: John Shaw

Great news! We’ve chosen the lucky CSS Hat Winner! A huge congratulations to John Shaw, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with instructions for claiming your prize so keep on the lookout!

A million thanks to all who entered and to the CSS Piffle folks for organizing this giveaway with us. If you didn’t win a copy of CSS Hat today, don’t fret, it’s available for purchase online and worth every penny. What are you waiting for? Go get it!

What Is CSS Hat?

CSS Hat isn’t some complicated WYSIWYG that you have to learn, it’s simply a panel that sits in Photoshop that reads your styles on a given layer and turns them into CSS.

So for example, you could design a button by creating a vector shape with rounded corners, add a gradient overlay, inner shadow, drop shadow and fill color using standard Photoshop layer styles, then CSS Hat will spit out a nicely formatted chunk of CSS that will essentially pull off the same effect!

How Do I Enter?

Now that I’ve piqued your interest, I’m sure you’re wondering what it is that you have to do to get your hands on this much coveted prize. Fortunately, entering is simple, all you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet. That’s all there is to it!

Win a Free Copy of @csshat and Turn Your Photoshop Styles Into CSS! http://goo.gl/nkDvY

Good luck to everyone who enters! Check back here on July 5th to see the list of winners. In the mean time, check out the CSS Hat website for more information.

The 30 Best Web Design Gallery Picks of 2012

2012-07-16T10:27:00.010-07:00

We’re well past the half way point of 2012, and it’s been an absolutely amazing year for web design. CSS3 and HTML5 are at the height of their game, responsive design is the poster child of modern web practices and we’re beginning to wrap our minds around new concepts such as serving up retina quality images to high resolution devices.

With all of this great stuff happening in the industry, the Design Shack Web Design Gallery is positively bursting with awesome new inspiration and I think it’s a great time to highlight the best sites that we’ve seen in 2012 so far. Read on to see our hand-picked selection of the thirty best sites submitted this year.

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Quarter Rest Studios

A great site for a collaborative music design studio based in Brooklyn, New York. I particularly like the minimal layout and the use of imagery.

When was the last time?

A intriguing site that aims to challenge you and ask questions. I like the integration of the experience and the images and videos used.

Riley Cran

A simply superb portfolio site for a designer and illustrator in Vancouver, BC. I love the total lack of descriptive text, it helps to intrigue you further and draw you in.

Goosebumps Pickles

A simply gorgeous site for a Pickle company that uses stunning photography to grab your attention within a split second. I love the full use of the space and the joyously vibrant colors!

Forside

Subtle colours and professional design, with wonderfully chosen photography to match the layout.

Made by Vadim

A lengthy one page website, packed with well presented examples of Vadim’s work. A gorgeous selection of typography to boot!

Go Beyond Pixels

For a conference focused on mobile design, Go Beyond Pixels really hits the spot! It combines various styles and colours into a long one-page design, with amazing detail invested into tiny elements.

Google Ventures

This design for Google Ventures is a beautiful mix of photography and design, with a unique scrolling effect as you move further down the page.

CSS Piffle

A beautifully designed website that aims to help you make the most of CSS. I like the linear layout and the use of iconography throughout.

Art & Code

A simple, but effective, portfolio section of a site for a design agency. I like the way the designs come to life as you scroll over them, and the simple and intuitive layout.

Mike Ingham Design

An incredibly beautiful portfolio that values space and clarity. I love the layout and the fantastic use of whitespace. The way this designers previous work is displayed really works to draw you into the portfolio.

Fit for a Frame

A simple but perfectly designed site for a company that sells prints to fit in Ikea frames. I like the use of typography and the intuitive layout of the site.

FancyRhino

An intriguing site for a design company that uses horizontal scrolling, a fascinating design decision. It’s a shame you can’t easily scroll sideways and have to grab the bar, but I like the style of the site and the use of typography.

ShopLocket

A strong site that aims to introduce you to a new way to implement selling through your site. I like the strong vertical layout that takes you through the key things you need to know, and the consistent use of iconography.

Flint Boutique

A gorgeous, and perfectly pitched, site for a company that creates one-of-a-kind, custom invitations and wedding stationery. I love the typography and restrained, yet bright, use of colour throughout.

Rally Interactive

Here we have a particularly interesting design that uses triangles for displaying examples of previous work. I like the the clear layout and intuitive use of navigation.

FiftyThree

A simply perfect site to advertise a new iPad app. FiftyThree have done a beautiful job with Paper, and this website is designed to show it off. I like the restrained use of text and the subtle but intuitive footer that includes the navigation.

WWF Food Story

This is a superb site from the WWF that features a series of simple but effective infographics. I love the illustrative style and the responsiveness of the graphics, it really helps get the point across.

Merchworld

A solid and immediately striking site for music merchandise. I’m drawn in by the stark use of a grid layout. I particularly like the way the design responds to resizing.

Galpin

A design portfolio that makes a striking impact through its use of typography and concise use of text. I like the restrained use of colour and the way the site immediately plunges you into this designers portfolio.

Austin Beerworks

A stunning site for a brewery that makes a bold impact through its use of impressive typography. I love the colours of the background and the restrained use of text, you’re intrigued to see what the next slide will be.

Blind Barber

I really like the strong image focus that this site has, the huge background images giving a real sense of character and consistency to the site. The use of typography and simple iconography helps to unite the site and create a engaging experience.

Myownbike

Here we have a simply gorgeous site that’s dedicated to fixed gear bicycles. I love the minimal layout and restrained use of text, but the thing that shines through is the phenomenal photography – it’s jaw-droppingly good!

Nixon Creative

A simply gorgeous site for a web designer that makes a great statement about his design philosophy. I like the bold illustration and the restrained use of text, it all helps to draw you into the portfolio of his work.

Ride For The Brand

A superb. and effortlessly engaging, site for a digital agency that makes a mark through its unique design and navigation. Simply move your cursor to the right to get the collage of typography and illustration moving!

Andy Patrick

A superb portfolio site for a web and print designer that makes an immediate impression. I love the use of typography and the consistent design throughout the site. The gallery looks great, perfectly showcasing previous examples of his work.

Beckin Design

This is a superb site for a group of interaction and industrial designers who create unique home and outdoor products. I love the colour palette and the uniquely minimal feel of the site.

Dan Viveiros

A great portfolio for a designer that makes a distinct impact. I really like the colour scheme and the use of icons and imagery. The typography is also an effective tool to convey the stylistic ideas of the designer.

FortySeven Media

A brilliant site for a design agency that looks to blow the competition away. I like the use of typography throughout and the open nature of the site – although I’m not convinced by the cheeky head shots.

Adrian Baxter

An immediately engaging personal portfolio for a web developer that captures your imagination. I love the comic book style and the unique illustrative feel of the whole site. It really makes an impact.

Submit Your Site!

Our web design gallery is not only a great source of inspiration, it’s also an awesome way to get your site noticed. Every site in our gallery is handpicked by our gallery guru Joel Bankhead (who also wrote all of the site descriptions above) and he can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with lately.

To submit your site to our gallery, check out our submission page. In the mean time, browse through the other designs and give your creative brain a boost.

Web Design Critique #82: Paul O’Rely

2012-07-16T10:27:00.009-07:00

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.

Today’s site is the personal portfolio of Paul O’Rely, designer from Brazil. Let’s jump in and see what we think!

If you’d like to submit your website to be featured in a future Design Critique, it just takes a few minutes. We charge $49 for critiquing your design – considerably less than you’d pay for a consultant to take a look at your site! You can find out more here.

About Paul O’Rely

A self-described interactive designer and web entrepreneur, Paul is currently 28 years old, resides in Brazil and is “passionate about things that are creative, simple and surprising.”

Here is a screenshot of his website

First Impression

I’ll say right off that bat that I really like Paul’s site. It’s fairly unique, there’s plenty of interesting things to look at and interact with, and the message is crystal clear: here’s who this person is, what he does and how to contact him. These are honestly the most important aspects of a designer’s personal portfolio and I think Paul nailed them all (a little copy editing may be in order but otherwise, great work).

If I had to issue some sort of overall complaint, it would probably be the lack of a significant “wow” factor in the header. The site as a whole is great (there’s some clever voodoo in the footer), but when I load up the top portion of the page, there’s nothing that really grabs me and invites me to look further. As I mentioned, he’s focusing on doing a superb job of introducing us to the site and himself, and I wouldn’t want to detract from that, but I still feel like there could be something more done with this spot to impress visitors.

Now that we’ve discussed the site as a whole, let’s dice it up and talk about the various specific aspects of the design. Most of what I have to say is positive so this is one of those sites that will serve more as a good example than a bad one.

Only One Page!

I’ve heard people bash single page sites, but I dig ‘em. Paul has actually done quite a bit with this single canvas and yet it still manages to feel downright overflowing with whitespace.

Given the relatively simple purpose of the site, I don’t really see the need to break this content up into separate pages. The flow is logical and easy to follow: up top you meet Paul and learn what he does, next you see his work samples, then you have the opportunity to contact him if you like what you see.

The exception to the one-page paradigm is of course his blog, but that really feels like a completely separate entity rather than an extension of this site.

Typography

Paul has some great looking custom fonts on his site, which are of course served up courtesy of Typekit. The bold slab serif in the headline is called Adelle, a nice change from the typical ChunkFive that you see everywhere.

I also really like Paul’s choice of what to pair Adelle with: Museo Sans. The Museo Family is actually mostly slab serifs, but they do have one sans serif version. This is a really smart choice because Museo Sans is specifically designed to look good next to slab serif typefaces.

Though Paul did well with the first two font choices, unfortunately I think the third is a big miss.

As you can see, the contact form uses Lobster. There are a three reasons that I don’t particularly like this choice. For starters, Lobster is quickly approaching cliché territory just because it’s so ubiquitous. Not to say that you can’t use popular typefaces, you just have to do so with caution and tact.

More importantly, you’ve already chosen your big, bold, unique typeface for the page and deviating from that purely for the contact form is a bit jarring. The two can be combined, but it has to be in an integrated fashion with a clear hierarchy like the example below rather than through arbitrarily switching between them.

Finally, virtually any time you have a lot of text, a script typeface is going to be a remarkably poor choice from a readability perspective. The simple truth is that it’s a lot more work for your eyes and brain to sort through and decipher an entire paragraph that’s written in a loopy, connected script.

Given that this is a contact form, it’s possible that clients will approach Paul with a lengthy pitch. Forcing me to write in Lobster is a great way to ensure that I never use your contact form.

Colors

Paul’s site uses a basic five part color scheme. Here’s a quick chart of the colors you’ll see on the page:

As you can see, this is a very bold color scheme designed to grab your attention. For the most part, he utilizes a balance between the charcoal, creme and blue, the first two of which are mild enough that they make the blue really stand out. The green is only used for the status item as a violation of the normal flow, which really draws your attention to that point.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find some splashes of red in there too. I think this seems inconsistent and unnecessary though. It would be better to utilize repetition and take this as another opportunity to use the green (or maybe just use red without green).

Engagement and Interaction

Another thing that Paul does really well is get you engaged and interacting with the site. For example, the header shows a sort of bar chart of his talents, which has different categories that can be clicked on and expanded with a smooth animation.

Scroll further down the page and you find an interactive vertical image slider showcasing his work. Once again we see excellent use of transitions and click events as well as some nice easing work.

When you get down to the footer you find a lake of swimming fish. This part is actually really impressive! Nothing about it feels like a boring, uniform, looped animation. The pattern of the fish and bubbles feels random (whether it really is or not is almost irrelevant).

I also really love how the fish vary their speed in a realistic way. They swim slow, then almost stop so they can wiggle and shoot forward. Hats off to Paul for a great bit of animation work here!

Summary

To sum up, I love the site. It’s really well done and I can tell that Paul poured over it and put forth a lot of effort. Almost everything on the site looks great, from layout and fonts to colors and illustrations. My biggest complaint is the use of Lobster in the contact form and my secondary concern is rethinking the header to pull in some of the “wow” factor that you get when you really dig into the site.

Your Turn!

Now that you’ve read my comments, pitch in and help out by giving the designer some further advice. Let us know what you think is great about the design and what you think could be stronger. As always, we ask that you also be respectful of the site’s designer and offer clear constructive advice void of any harsh insults.

Help Prevent User Screw-Ups With These Awesome Tips

2012-07-16T10:27:00.008-07:00

As a user, don’t you hate it when you click a button, only to realize that the resulting action really isn’t what you wanted at all? Sometimes this is a minor annoyance and sometimes it’s a complete disaster that ruins hours or even days of work.

As a designer, it’s up to you to help your users avoid these tragic mistakes whenever possible. Today we’ll look at some methods that you can use to achieve this goal.

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What’s The Big Deal?

When you’re designing an interface, whether it’s on the web or in some sort of native application, you always want to carefully consider what can go wrong. Try to imagine the worst case scenario for every particular action that a user will take in the course of using your app and do whatever you can to make sure they understand the consequences of a click.

Why go through all of the trouble? Because there’s nothing that will make a user hate an app quicker than if they make a big mistake with it. Whether it’s completely their own fault or not, they’ll blame the application or, at the very least, develop a distrust for your product. When you give users the chance to discuss your product, “regret” and “distrust” are two words that you don’t want to come up in the conversation.

Tip: Warning Messages Suck

Now, when given the goal of making sure that a user never makes a mistake, some UI designers will go overboard and institute warning messages for every little action that the user could possibly take. Unfortunately, from a user’s perspective, this is the most annoying thing that a developer could do.

If I feel like you’re holding my hand too much through the process of using your app, I’ll resent you for thinking that I’m an idiot. I’ll also quickly get frustrated that everything takes so long because I have to work through the same warning messages over and over.

So When Can I Use a Warning Message?

The real trick for you as you’re planning the app is to decide what actions merit warning messages. There’s a happy medium between never warning a user and overdoing it, and it’s a tricky spot to find.

The guiding question is a simple one: “How easy is it to fix the problem if something goes wrong?” Put yourself in the user’s shoes and try to imagine the worst case scenario.

Let’s imagine a situation where you’re building a simple todo app similar to Wunderlist shown above. One action that the user might take is to check off a task and make it disappear. If they do this on accident or change their mind, ideally, they’d be able to get it back. But even without that functionally, typing in a simple todo title again really isn’t that much work. It should only take a second for the user to rectify their mistake. Given this fact, a warning message probably won’t be necessary for deleting a todo.

Now, what about if the same user wants to delete an entire list of todo items? This is something that could potentially be disastrous. If I have over a hundred todos and accidentally delete an entire list, I’m going to freak out if I can’t get it back. In that case, a warning message is definitely appropriate.

Help Prevent Screw-ups

Now that we have a feel for how warning messages can be good or bad, it’s time to take a look at some different methods that you can use and how they help prevent user screw-ups. Some of them use warning messages, others are a little more clever and tactful.

Preemptive Warnings

The reason that warning messages are so annoying is that they stop you dead in your tracks. This is only pleasant if you realize that you were about to make a big mistake, the rest of the time it simply blocks your progress.

One way to eliminate this while still helping your users prevent mistakes is by using preemptive warnings. These don’t get in your way or inhibit your progress, but they do help you realize that you may have made a mistake.

You see this most often in live form validation. Check out how the Mailchimp sign up form tells me that I’ve made a mistake after typing in a user name that is only three characters long.

Are You Sure?

This is the most common type of warning used throughout web and native apps. It’s what we saw before with Wunderlist: a box that pops up, stops whatever you were trying to do and asks whether or not this is something you really wanted to do.

You likely see these pretty much all day every day if you work on a computer. For example, Mac users see one when they try to empty their trash.

If we weigh Apple’s decision to put this here against the criteria that we set up earlier, then it checks out. As the window states, emptying the trash is not something that a user can do. Once you hit that button, those files are completely gone unless you’re the type of tech savvy nerd who knows how to get them back.

What Do You Want to Happen?

Sometimes a given action could be interpreted in more than one way. In these situations, you either have to choose between the interpretations as the designer or give the user the power choose what consequences the action will have.

Photoshop is an excellent example of this. When you drag a layer mask to the trash can, you get the following window.

Here Photoshop is saying, “Hey, I know you want me to ditch this layer mask, but should I apply it first?” This is a helpful option because sometimes it is indeed the case that I want the mask to disappear completely and other times I want it applied to the layer. They also provide a hidden keyboard shortcut (Option) for pro users who want to skip this window.

Never Show This Again

There’s another interesting lesson to be learned from Adobe’s warning message. Notice that it has this little box that says “Don’t show again.” This is a really clever way to get the best of both worlds as a developer. You do your duty to always warn your users of an risky action, but also give them the choice to opt out of such warnings if they don’t need them.

Adobe’s Creative Suite is positively overflowing with annoying warning messages and this opportunity to opt out saves me from going insane while using their apps.

Timed Cancel

Today as I went to delete a YouTube video I noticed a UI trick that I had never seen before. A warning message popped up to inform me that I was about to delete all of the movies in my account, which is obviously a pretty big deal and is probably more often than not an accidental choice.

The weird part was that rather than allowing me to proceed with the action right away, they gave me the message, a cancel button and a button with a timer on it.

Only after a brief countdown did the second button turn into something that would allow me to delete the videos. Until then, it actually forced me to either cancel or read the message and make sure I knew what I was getting into.

This is a pretty nifty little idea, but keep in mind that users are likely to find it extremely annoying. Reserve this level of caution for actions that truly have dire consequences from which there is no return. Perhaps if a user wants to scrap his/her account completely or delete a large amount of data.

Show the Result Before the Action

One of my favorite ways that I’ve seen developers prevent screw-ups isn’t a warning message at all. Instead, it’s a simple preview of what things will look like after the action is taken.

There’s a great free Mac app called NameChanger that does a fantastic job of this. The app is meant to help you batch rename a bunch of files. On the left, there’s a column that shows the current filenames and the text to be replaced. On the right, there’s a column that shows the text you want to insert and the resulting filenames.

The clever part here is that this is all just a preview, no files are renamed until I hit the “Rename” button up top. This allows me to closely examine what I’m about to do and decide if everything is correct. I’ve also seen FTP apps use this same technique when syncing the contents of two folders. Given that you could be deleting valuable information by accident, it’s awesome to have a preview that shows what the folders will look like after the action.

How Do You Prevent User Screw-ups?

If you’re creating an app for anyone but yourself, you can pretty much guarantee that there’s going to be confusion over some aspect of the interface. Carefully considering user error is a must in all aspects of design and the tips above should help get you started in the right direction when you’re structuring app workflows.

Now that you’ve seen my examples, it’s time to chime in with your own. How do you help your users prevent mistakes? What other sites have you seen around the web with interesting solutions like the one we saw on YouTube?

3 Quick Ways to Show Attention to Detail in Web Design

2012-07-16T10:27:00.007-07:00

With today’s current design trends I’m of the view that attention to detail is perhaps the most important part of any design, be it web or print.

In this article, I’m going to exhibit a few examples of designs on the web that lack that little bit of detail that would make the websites a much more pleasant place to explore.

Disclaimer

“By no means am I saying that I’m perfect”

I must point out that I’m not criticizing anything anyone has done in the past, I’m merely telling you what I’d do to make the design more detailed and a better experience for the user when they use the site. By no means am I saying that I’m perfect, I’m still learning and these techniques may not even be the absolute best fixes, but little touches here or there will show you’ve made the effort to make the site as good as you think it could be!

For example:

The comments section of Dribbble doesn’t have a maximum width so you can manipulate the look of the website with no trouble. I know it’s only a small detail but I do think attention to detail is the most important aspect of the design.

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Text Areas

Text areas were the first element that caught my eye and gave me the idea to write this post so I’ll start here.

This example is somewhat ironic as it comes from the popular design sharing website, Dribbble.
If you go on any player’s shot on the site you’ll see a comment box at the bottom. Now because I’m a bit of a fiddler, I always play around with elements on websites when I first discover them and I noticed that I could “break” this one:

The Fix

With the textarea element, the best practice is to use min/max-width & min/max-height. The code currently in use is:

textarea {
width: 424px;
height: 100px;
}

I would convert this to:

textarea {
min-width: 424px;
max-width: 424px;
min-height: 100px;
height: 100px;
}

This code then keeps the width of the comment box fixed at 424px at all times but allows the user to increase the height of box depending on how much they write in there.

Thanks to Chris Allwood who directed me to the ‘Textarea Tricks’ post by Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks on the textarea element on the different things you can do to manipulate it.

Hover & Active States on Links

Hover and active states are probably the easiest bit of detail and functionality you can add to a design.

When it comes to links, designers usually change the colour on hover, add an underline or make it bold. Using these simple techniques will be a good fit for certain designs but there are a couple of other details I don’t think get used often enough.

The Fix

Indent from left:

a:hover {
padding-left: 10px;
}

Adding a background:

a:hover {
background: #06c;
color: #fff;
text-decoration: none; /* Obviously only use this if there was an underline on the link to begin with */
}

Push down on click:

a:active {
position: relative;
top: 1px;
}

Bonus Tip

All of the details I mentioned above can be made ever so slightly nicer with the use of CSS3 transitions. I often use the following code to animate the effect slightly which is a pleasant bit of detail:

a {
-webkit-transition: all 0.3s ease-out;
-moz-transition: all 0.3s ease-out;
-ms-transition: all 0.3s ease-out;
-o-transition: all 0.3s ease-out;
transition: all 0.3s ease-out;
}

There are a number of different variables that you could use, this is just the main property that I use on a regular basis. NetTuts+ has a good article on fundamental CSS3 transitions that is very useful.

If you really want to go the whole hog, I recommend you check out Dan Eden’s Animate.css. I used it on Cardinal Menswear and think it makes a big difference to the experience when viewing the site.

Watch Out for Negative States

When designers use negative hover and active states.

Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry wrote an article on negative hovers in 2011 which made me think about some of the details that I’d applied to sites I’ve worked on in the past. I realised that I was guilty of creating a :link with an underline and then on :hover I’d remove that underline and after reading Harry’s article it occurred to me that this could be confusing to a visitor.

Text & Image Selection Colour

Even though this is a very minor detail, it is super easy to do so I always think it shows the designer cares when he/she adds this bit of code for the people that are going to notice and appreciate it.

The Fix

::selection { background: #06c; color: #fff }
::-moz-selection { background: #06c; color: #fff }
 
img::selection { background: #06c }
img::-moz-selection { background: #06c }

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned a trick or two from this article, I’ll certainly be keeping my eye out for new, little details that I can apply to my designs in the future.

Have you got any tips or tricks that you think I’ve missed or should consider using? We’re always learning as designers and I think it’s important to keep eachother on our toes so that the users of our websites get the best experience possible!

Please, leave a comment below with any suggestions for snippets of code you’ve used in your designs.

How to Organize Your Shoots and Catalogs in Lightroom

2012-07-16T10:27:00.006-07:00

Typically I stick to strictly design related topics, but today we’re going to stretch that a bit with a quick discussion on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Tons of designers take photos for their projects whether they consider themselves “photographers” or not so I’m sure lots of you will find this to be a useful topic.

The main struggle that I see with Lightroom users is simply organization. How can you keep multiple shoots separate? Where should you import your files? These are important questions and the answers aren’t very intuitive so today I’ll walk you through my basic process for keeping various shoots organized.

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What Is a Catalog?

The most significant concept that you need to wrap your brain around when working with Lightroom is what a catalog is and how that relates to the photos that you take.

Instinct tells you that a Lightroom catalog is a sort of box that holds all of the photos that you throw into Lightroom. This is an entirely false misconception though that likely comes from years of Photoshop experience.

Lightroom ≠ Photoshop

In Photoshop, when you open a file, edit it, and hit the “Save” button (not “Save As” but plain old “Save”), you actually write over the file that you started with. When you close your newly update file, the version that existed before is gone forever unless you’ve made some sort of backup.

Lightroom however, performs a pretty neat trick. No matter what you do to a photo in Lightroom, even if you move every single slider and press every button to jack up the appearance of an image beyond recognition, the original file remains completely unchanged. The workflow is a purely “non-desctructive” one that always keeps your photos as they were taken completely intact.

What Voodoo Is This?

Wait a dang minute you say, how can Lightroom perform this crazy feat? The answer is that the entire application is built on a different foundation than Photoshop. In Photoshop, you open, edit and save images individually. As I just stated, the original file changes as soon as you hit that “Save” button.

Lightroom though looks at an entire folder of images all at once (or several folders of images). It’s more like Bridge in this regard than Photoshop. A catalog then is a container or database that holds information about the original images: where they’re stored, what the camera settings were when the photo was taken, metadata, etc.

“The only thing that has been changed is the catalog’s interpretation and presentation of the photos, not the photos themselves.”

The awesome part is that Lightroom can change much of this information instantly in a live setting without affecting the original source image. It stores these changes as a part of the catalog.

As an example, imagine that you took a trip to the Grand Canyon and shot three hundred full color photos. If you import these photos into a Lightroom catalog and change them all to black and white, the only thing that has been changed is the catalog’s interpretation and presentation of the photos, not the photos themselves. If you navigate your computer’s file browser to the original folder of images, you’ll find that they’re still full color photos.

If you want these changes to actually take affect on the photos, you have to perform an export action. This will effectively open each file, perform the actual destructive changes that you told Lightroom that you’d like to make, then do a “Save As” so that new files are created in the location of your choosing, still leaving your originals untouched. This all happens behind the scenes so all you see of this process is a progress bar.

The Bottom Line: A Lightroom catalog is merely a database that holds information about your photos, not the photos themselves.

So What?

“If you have your catalog backed up but you lose the original files, you’re hosed.”

Why should you care how Lightroom works? As long as it does its job, that technical stuff is all useless information right? Wrong. This knowledge has major implications for how you organize your images.

The common expectation is that when you import photos into a Lightroom catalog, the photos will be somehow contained inside of that catalog file. The danger here is that while you might think that you’re backing up or storing your photos in an external hard drive, you could in fact merely be working with the Lightroom catalog.

If you have your catalog backed up but you lose the original files, you’re hosed. All of your hard work will be gone. Educating yourself on file organization practices could save you tons of time and frustration in the long run.

My Process for Organizing Lightroom Catalogs

Now that we have a solid grip of what a catalog is, how it’s different than the source folder and how important it is to keep track of both, let’s take a look at how I personally organize all of my photo shoots so you can get a good idea of what a professional Lightroom file organization workflow looks like.

Note: I’ll be using Lightroom 3, if you have a different version, things might look slightly different but the basic process will be virtually identical.

Step 1: Make One Directory for Everything

The very first thing that you need to do, before you even open Lightroom is to manually create a file directory, either on your computer or on an external drive.

As you can see in the image above, I have a “Clients” folder inside of my Lightroom directory. Inside here, I create a new folder every single time I have a gig and name that folder after the people or subject for the shoot.

Inside of a shoot’s folder, I place literally every file relating to that shoot. The reason for this is so that everything is extremely portable and easy to find. If I click and drag the “Kim&Tru” folder shown above to an external hard drive, the shoot and associated Lightroom files are entirely copied over and can be transported to another machine or saved as a fully functioning backup.

Step 2: Create a New Catalog

Once you’ve created the empty folder for a shoot in your photography directory, then it’s time to launch Lightroom and create a new catalog. This command can be found under the “File” menu item.

It’s very important that you place this new catalog inside of the folder that you already created for the shoot. Once again, the goal that we’re shooting for is everything related to a shoot resting in one convenient location.

Every Stinking Time?
You may be scratching your head at this point wondering if you really have to create a different catalog for every shoot. The easy thing to do is import everything into one huge catalog, so why not do that?

The answer is easy: If you take lots of photos, throwing everything into one massive catalog is a horrible, messy way to work. Not only will you toss out the benefits of having individual shoots that are easy to move around and back up, you’ll also cause your main Lightroom catalog to become bloated and slow. Keeping your shoots organized into individual catalogs ensures a lean, speedy working environment.

Step 3: Import Your Photos

Now you’re finally ready to import your photos. To do this, go to File>Import Photos…

This will bring up the Lightroom Import Dialog. On the left side, you’ll choose your source. This is wherever the images are coming from. Typically, this will be your camera or card reader (this dialog often pops up automatically when plugging in a card reader) but can really be any drive that holds photos.

Once you find the photos that you want to import, your instinct will be simply to hit the “Import” button and be finished, but you’re not done yet!

It seems logical that your photos would automatically be imported to wherever your catalog has been created, but that’s not the case at all. By default, Lightroom will import photos into its own self-created directory. To fix this, make sure you set your destination folder in the column on the far right (you’ll have to do this every time you import a shoot).

Just like before when we created the catalog, it’s absolutely critical that you choose the folder from step one that you created for this shoot. When I shot “Luke’s Senior Session” I created a “Luke-SeniorShoot” folder in my clients directory, then I put the “Luke-SeniorShoot” catalog in this folder and chose it as the destination for my import. Keep in mind that Lightroom will typically create a subdirectory or two when performing these actions.

Step 4: Edit and Export

From here you can perform all of your typical organization and editing. I typically go through a five step editing process:

Browse through all of the photos I took and apply a single star to those that I like (just hit 1).

Create a Smart Collection of single star photos.

Edit the single star photos, applying a second star to each once it’s finished.

Create a Smart Collection of two star photos.

Export the two star photos.

Once you reach the export step, once again you’ll return to that one folder that you’ve placed your entire shoot in up to this point. In this folder I create an “edited” subfolder where I place my finished images.

As a completely optional step, I choose some “favorites” that I spend some extra time working with in Photoshop.

Step 5: Changing Catalogs

Using the process outlined above, we’ve met our goal: the entire shoot is wrapped up nicely in one parent folder and all of our shoots are contained in a single directory. At this point, you might be wondering how to close one shoot and open another in Photoshop.

The answer here is simple, navigate to that shoot’s folder and find the file with the “.lrcat” file extension. This is the Lightroom catalog file. To launch it, just give it a double click.

You can also open Catalogs right from Lightroom through the “Open Catalog” option in the file menu. I particularly like to use the “Open Recent” menu any time I want to open something that I’ve recently worked on.

Changing catalogs requires a Lightroom relaunch so it can redirect all of the connections to where they’re supposed to go, but this should only take a few seconds.

Stay Organized and Never Lose Files

Reading through this tutorial makes it seem like managing Lightroom catalogs is an awful lot of work. In reality though, it’s actually really simple. Keep in mind that what takes you minutes to read about can be accomplished in seconds.

Besides, the payoff is worth any extra effort. If people pay you to take photographs that you then take into Lightroom, then you simply can’t afford to not understand how the application works with your files so you can set up a system that’s clearly organized and easy to backup/transfer.

Several parts of my process can be performed differently, it’s the ultimate goal that you really want to keep in mind. If you have a different or better way of achieving the same results, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment below and explain how you organize your Lightroom files.

Web Design Critique #83: Tech Cores

2012-07-16T10:27:00.005-07:00

Today’s site is Tech Cores. Let’s jump in and see what we think!

About Tech Cores

“We have spent long nights and drank countless cups of coffee to bring you our out of the box take at a technology blog. As always, feel free to read up on our staff as well as browse the fruit of all our labor.”

Here is a screenshot of the homepage:

First Impression

“I’d much rather see a site stray towards generic than the typical mess of clutter that tech blogs throw at us.”

My first impression of Tech Cores is a little mixed. On one hand, it’s a very clean design that has a solid layout. It feels almost like a news app rather than a news website (in a good way). The wide, three column UI with categories on the left, a feed in the middle and individual articles on the right definitely feels like the Reeder for Mac model applied to the web.

Also contributing to this feeling of cleanliness is the lack of ad clutter, or really ads of any sort. It’s strange to see someone invest time into a site like this these days without an ad-driven profit model.

All that being said, despite the fact that the layout is solid, I think the actual visual styling of the page, the icing if you will, feels quite generic. With the mixture of smooth gray and blue gradients, it almost looks like something that the iOS SDK just spit out.

This isn’t necessarily a horrible thing, it’s just something to consider. As a former print guy, I care a great deal about branding and nothing about the look of this site seems “own-able,” meaning that there’s nothing about the design that’s distinct to Tech Cores.

That aside, I think that overall, the site will still look quite attractive to the average visitor. I’d much rather see a site stray towards generic than the typical mess of clutter that tech blogs throw at us.

Responsive Layout

A major goal for this layout was obviously to be very flexible and responsive to different viewport sizes. As the page narrows, the first step on this road is to drop the third column, leaving the somewhat fluid news feed as the widest portion.

On a desktop, the layout doesn’t respond very well to shifts in sizes, things get messy fast when you hit around 700px wide. However, taking a look on my iPad, it looked just fine in both the horizontal and vertical orientations. This means that they spent more time focusing on specific device widths than arbitrary viewport sizes, a strategy that I don’t necessarily agree with. The responsive behavior also seems a tad buggy, I didn’t get a screenshot, but I did once have an issue with the wrong column collapsing on the homepage.

Bringing up the site on a mobile device, I noticed that, while the feed responds decently to the super narrow width, the header with the logo has completely been destroyed.

Still, Well Done!

This section sounds like harsh criticism, but it’s not. I want to make this clear, responsive design is still very new and everyone is still trying to wrap their mind around how to do it best. For crying out loud, the site you’re currently reading isn’t responsive at all (yet) so we can’t be too quick to judge others.

The fact that Tech Cores has taken steps towards optimizing their experience for various very different devices is no small feat for a homegrown news site and I give them major credit for how much they have accomplished.

Branding and Message

I’ve already ranted a little bit about how the site as a whole could be more unique from a branding perspective. Beyond the color scheme, there are other places that this same problem arises as well.

For starters, I’m not particularly fond of the logo:

I really don’t have much to say about it other than that it’s just not doing it for me. I can see an idea in there that could be turned into something really cool in the hands of a talented logo designer, but this has an amateur look to it that feels a little thrown together.

More importantly than even the logo is what your site tells me about itself. Imagine that I somehow stumble upon this site, what do I see? The word “tech” gives me a hint and I see lots of images of mobile phones, so do you review mobile apps? Upon closer inspection I find a Mac app review, though Mac OS is neither mentioned in the title nor on any of the associated tags.

My point is, don’t make me work for it, just tell me what’s up with this site. There’s a mile of empty space at the top just begging for a tagline of some kind. Even just inserting something into the browser’s page title bar would go a long way. For example, Gizmodo’s title bar says “Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide.”

This isn’t longwinded and overly targeted, it only uses a few well chosen words to tell me what all of the content on the site is focused on.

Usability

To wrap this up, I’d like to talk about some of the various, scattered usability-related issues that I have with the site and how it works.

The site uses a lot of Ajax techniques, so content loads without feeling like a complete page refresh. This is sort of nice and sort of annoying at times due to problems that arise. For instance, if I go to the home page and click on one of the featured stories on the far right, then hit the back button, it gives me some random, generic post instead of actually taking me back to where I wanted to go.

I’m also not crazy about the main news feed. None of the text content is live and selectable, a trait which carries across to the pop up windows such as the About section. The feed also has no sort of hover effect or cursor change to indicate that anything in it is clickable.

Further, like it or not, users are going to expect the logo to be a second home page link. I clicked on it a dozen times over the course of this critique and was constantly frustrated by the fact that nothing happened.

Lastly, I think the “tip us” button is a little confusing. It might not be a big deal, but when I saw it, my brain instantly said “they’re asking for money” and I ignored it. Only after a second or third look did I notice that you were actually asking for tech related tips and not a donation of some kind.

Summary

To sum up, Tech Cores is a well structured tech news site that could use a lot of tweaking. That core architecture is often the most difficult part of a major redesign so I think from here, incremental changes won’t be as rough as they sound. Consider a facelift of color and texture, tinker with the media queries, and make sure the site has a clear brand, both aesthetically and from a messaging perspective.

Your Turn!

Designing on a Retina Screen: My Thoughts on the Retina MacBook Pro

2012-07-16T10:27:00.004-07:00

220.5 pixels per inch: 2,800 wide and 1,800 tall for a total of over five million pixels. That’s the screen that I work on now, full time. This gives rise to tons of questions: does Apple have any business making such a screen? Will it help or hinder the industry? Can you really do design work on that thing if you’re designing for non-retina screens?

Today I’m going to tell you all about my experience with the machine that threatens to change the way you do your job. I’ll hold nothing back as I rave about what I love and rant about what drives me nuts. Read along and see if you agree with my conclusions.

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Dang You Apple

For the past decade, we designers have been focused on how to tackle a major paradigm shift in the form of ever varying screen sizes. This challenge has stretched us to our wit’s end but brought us out the other side better designers, capable of achieving impressive feats of truly flexible websites that look great on any size screen.

Mediaqueri.es showcases responsive web design that looks great anywhere.

While we had our attention focused on one major paradigm shift though, another snuck up on us: resolution. The momentum behind this shift has recently come from Apple with its “retina” quality displays, now present on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and MacBook Pro, with the iMac and MacBook Air no doubt to follow some time in the next year or two.

Apple may not be the first or only electronics manufacturer to push high resolution displays, nor are they almost ever the first to anything. However, like it or not, they have historically set the mark for widespread adoption of major technology shifts (this is the part where you skip everything else that I say so you can rant about how much this isn’t true in the comments).

As with the screen size revolution, this presents designers with a huge paradigm shift that changes everything. This hurdle may prove to be even more difficult to overcome than the last and it requires our immediate attention and speculation. Back in March, I posted a discussion on this very topic.

Since then I’ve purchased a Retina MacBook Pro, the machine that broke the retina display out of its nice little iOS walled garden and into the realm of something that people of all types of professions will use for work. After weeks of working on the machine full time, I thought it would be appropriate to share my experiences with you.

Should Retina Screens Even Exist?

“As we see high density screens get larger and larger I start to question, why? Just because we can?” – John Carey
Fifty Foot Shadows

I’ve read several articles lately from creatives who are actually quite angry with Apple for pushing the industry down such a troublesome path. Like Ian Malcom castigating John Hammond for his hasty decision to bring dinosaurs back from the dead, these critics insist that just because Apple can make such a screen, doesn’t mean that they should.

One day with the retina screen convinced me that the critics are wrong. It’s just so dang beautiful. I can barely stand to look at my old MacBook any more. My eyes have been opened and suddenly the same screen that I never had an issue with looks downright dark and muddy.

Should We Have Stopped at the VCR?

The only way to really appreciate what this is like without experiencing it for yourself is to find an old CRT television and hook it up to a VCR so you can watch a movie. Seriously, go try it. Within seconds you’ll wonder how in the world you ever managed to endure such a poor visual experience. Ten minutes of this and you’ll be thanking the technology gods daily for the almighty Blu-ray.

It was a pain to switch from VHS tapes, but looking back now, it was worth it.

With the perspective that we have now, looking back, both the customers and the producers in the movie industry are better off for having left behind the VHS tape as the primary method of video reproduction and distribution. Was the revolution inconvenient to everyone involved? Absolutely.

Content creators had to learn, adopt and even develop brand new ways of doing things. Customers had to abandon old equipment and loads of content, make new purchases that seemed redundant with previous ones, learn new jargon; it was a mess. And that only got them to the DVD stage, many are still in the midst of jumping to either Blu-ray or perhaps even a purely digital solution such as iTunes and the Apple TV.

“Advances are not based on whether or not they will inconvenience anyone. Especially when Apple is in the driver’s seat.”

The arrival of high resolution computing presents the same problems, both for consumers and content creators alike. Unfortunately, that’s how the technology industry works. Advances are made when there’s a market for them and the technological know how is present to produce a quality result that consumers can afford. They are not based on whether or not they will inconvenience anyone. Especially when Apple is in the driver’s seat.

And that’s a good thing. Sure, it may not seem like it, but keep in mind that once upon a time computer monitors only possessed a handful of colors and you can bet that there were people in the industry at the time that insisted that they go no further. I’m sure you’re glad they they did, so stop being one of the people who are dragged kicking and screaming into progress and instead try attacking challenges head on and contributing something valuable to the conversation.

Living and Working On a Retina MacBook Pro

“I knew there would be some troubles, and there are.”

Whether or not retina screens should exist in the mainstream market is really an irrelevant discussion. They do, and you have two choices: adapt or die. As a former print-only designer I faced this choice, Flash developers are currently facing this choice, you might as well join the club.

I’m all about adaptation so I took the early adopter route and jumped on this train before having any idea where it was going. I left behind my 2007 13″ MacBook and bought a shiny new, 15″ Retina MacBook Pro.

I knew there would be some troubles, and there are. Some of those that I was worried about turned out to be no big deal, others that I didn’t count on snuck up and have plagued me to frustration.

A Thousand Hats

On any given day, I wear several metaphorical hats. I’m a designer, writer, photographer, web browser, movie watcher; you name it.

Because of this I can offer insight into a lot of different experiences from a retina display standpoint. The one thing I’m admittedly not is a gamer. I grew up attached to a Nintendo controller and never had an interest in PC gaming so you’ll have to ask elsewhere if you’re looking for insight in that area.

Here’s a look at some main categories of daily use and my thoughts on each.

General OS Use

I’m currently running OS X Lion and it seems 99% updated for retina graphics. Every now and then I catch site of a button that looks pixelated, but only in deeply buried utilities that few even use anyway.

For the most part, this is where the display shines. Everything looks absolutely stunning. Apple has not only updated the core system but most of its apps as well such as iMovie.

Third Party Apps

This area was a concern when I purchased the machine, but it has turned out to be a less significant issue that I thought it would be.

Many of my favorite apps, such as Sublime Text 2, looked rough at first but have already received retina updates that make them better than ever.

Granted, most apps haven’t updated yet but despite being an app-addict there really aren’t that many apps that I use on a daily basis. With the exclusion of CS6, which we’ll discuss later, the only app that I use every day that really bugs me is Twitter for Mac.

This app really showcases the nastiness of non-retina graphics on a retina display. Interestingly enough, live, editable text like that which occurs in the “new tweet” window looks fine, but your entire stream is hideous, from text to avatars.

Web Browsing

“It’s the small images that look bad. The tiny JPG logo at the top of the website, the interface screenshot…”

Web browsing really had me scared. I knew full well that the web is a low resolution world and pointing a 15″ retina screen at it is like taking a magnifying glass to a photo with low DPI.

To my surprise, we did prepare ourselves for this revolution remarkably well, even if completely by accident. In our obsession with saving bandwidth by building web graphics without images, we were actually building a web that is infinitely scaleable.

Most UI these days is built with good old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Throwing a retina display at these graphics only makes them look better! For the record, the same can certainly not be said of Flash sites.

The real problem of course lies with images. Interestingly enough, most of my web browsing goes by without a single scowl, and I’m a resolution nut.

Professional photographs especially tend to look great. Cruise over to Flickr or 500px and you’ll find the experience just as enjoyable as ever, perhaps even more so.

It’s the small images that look bad. The tiny JPG logo at the top of the website, the interface screenshot, these really don’t have much information to work with for pixel doubling and therefore come out looking pretty deplorable.

Movies and TV Shows

The Retina MacBook Pro scrapped its optical drive just like the MacBook Air, so I obviously haven’t had any experience with DVDs, but for the most part, videos are like images. The great look better and the bad look worse.

Digitally downloaded HD movies shine on the display while Netflix /Hulu live streaming looks noticeably jaggy. Fortunately, the distance at which I typically watch a show is much further back than where I work so any resolution issues usually aren’t as noticeable.

Photography

Because I shoot with a Canon 5D Mk II, my photos come out nice and large. They look great on the retina display and I haven’t had any issues with zooming in and editing fine detail. The only real issue is that the software (Photoshop & Lightroom) hasn’t been retina beautified yet, even in CS6.

Writing

From a pure writing standpoint, the retina screen is astoundingly good. Typography at 220 pixels per inch is a beautiful thing. I pull up Writeroom, switch to fullscreen mode, and and block out the world.

After a few hours, it’s easy to forget just how good type looks. However, within seconds of bringing up a text document on a low-res display all I see are pixels. Dirty, ugly pixels.

The type doesn’t just look good at arm’s length either. I can stick my face as close to the screen as my eyes can handle and the type still seems tack sharp.

Typography is beautifully crisp on the retina screen.

Photoshop, Design and Screenshots

Now comes the part that you really want to hear about: how is Photoshop? Can you design on this thing?

iOS Designers Should Find It Useful

I’ll start by saying that I’m not an iOS designer. These guys have been forced to design retina graphics on non-retina screens until now and I imagine that they’re eager to make the switch.

I have the opposite problem: designing non-retina graphics on a retina screen. You might not expect it to be a pain, but to be honest, it really really is.

This is because you lose all concept of resolution when you’re in the lower ppi range. I might be able to ignore little jaggy images when I’m browsing, but when I’m in the creator’s chair, my brain examines every pixel.

Pixel Doubled Artwork Sucks

“In order to properly get a feel for whether or not the artwork is up to par, I have to take a look at it on my old screen.”

On the retina screen, everything that I create or import into Photoshop at a standard web resolution looks like crap. Even if I build something in vector, unless I’m willing to export it as an SVG, and most of the time that’s not an option (yet), it’s still going to get output to a tiny JPG or PNG that looks super pixelated because my screen attempts to double its resolution.

This presents lots of tricky problems, both when I’m working with my own artwork and that of others. For my own artwork, should I build it low-res? Doing so impairs my ability to judge its clarity. Or should I build it high-res and scale it down for outpur? I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but Photoshop can really trash raster artwork when scaling.

It’s also an issue when I’m using artwork from someone else. If you’re a designer, then you probably commonly receive third party artwork that is crappy and pixelated. You’ll consequently either choose to demand better artwork skip using it altogether.

For me, this is much more difficult, because at first glance, it’s always going to look bad on the retina display unless it happens to be huge. In order to properly get a feel for whether or not the artwork is up to par, I have to take a look at it on my old screen.

Screenshots

“Suddenly, the screenshots that I take are double the size that I intended!”

Given the fact that I blog for a living, I think it’s safe to say that I take more screenshots than the average person. I’m always working with screenshots from an app interface or website and including them in posts.

The retina display hit me with a wicked curveball here. Suddenly, the screenshots that I take are double the size that I intended! When resized, UI screenshots, with their raster graphics and tiny text, really look nasty on any screen, so I always try to use them at 100% when possible.

With the retina screen, what used to be a 510 pixel wide screenshot (the standard Design Shack image size) is now 1,020 pixels wide. If I ignore retina users completely and pretend they don’t exist, logic says that I should serve up images that are 510px wide, which means that I have to manually resize them in Photoshop and put up with the fact that they look like they were just run over by a truck, particularly where rasterized text is concerned.

Mind you, they of course look worse to me than most users because, you guessed it, I’m on a retina screen.

Change Your Resolution Stupid

I’ve presented my screenshot dilemma to a few different people and they all say the same thing: just change your resolution! This seems like a perfectly viable solution, but it turns out it’s not that simple.

The Retina MacBook Pro comes with five different resoluion settings. Here’s what happens if I choose two different resolutions, take a screenshot of the same exact window, then stick them next to each other in Photoshop.

As you can see, they come out the exact same size. Changing the resolution in System Preferences does affect the overall size of the total screenshot, but most of the time the elements within the screenshot come out unchanged.

For the record, here’s how much of that window I can fit into a 510px wide document at full size:

If you just cursed, then your reaction was spot on with my own.

Working On a Bright, Sharp Screen

“Spending half the day jumping between a retina and non-retina screen literally made me feel sea sick!”

On my old MacBook, I typically worked at full brightness. I’ve read tons of stuff about battery life, eye strain and whatnot but I never liked the way it looked unless the brightness was cranked.

On this new screen, full brightness is absolutely too bright for most lighting scenarios. Retina screen? More like retina burning screen. This is great though, I’d much rather have a screen that’s too bright and needs to be turned down.

Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed some occasional headaches since switching. The screen is so bright and sharp, you’d think it be easier on the eyes but there might be a point where it goes too far and causes more eye strain than it saves. As long as I keep the brightness in check, I don’t think this will be a major issue long term.

The sharpness of the screen was really only an issue on day one, when I was transferring everything from the old machine to the new one. Spending half the day jumping between a retina and non-retina screen literally made me feel sea sick!

Growing Pains

“With new technology comes new challenges and early adopters like me are the ones who pay the price”

So there you have it, my full list of praise and complaints regarding my new Retina MacBook Pro. Intentionally, this article is focused on the challenges of working on a retina screen more than the benefits. If I’m being completely honest, the benefits blow me away and I’m not one little bit regretful of my purchase. I absolutely love this computer and won’t hesitate to say that it’s the best I’ve ever used.

All of the struggles that I’ve listed above are merely growing pains. With new technology comes new challenges and early adopters like me are the ones who pay the price (figuratively and literally) in exchange for owning shiny new toys that no one else has.

Years down the road, when all new computers are hitting 220ppi and have solid state drives as standard components, the price tag for this technology will be much more affordable and the penalties for using it nearly nonexistent.

Computer screen resolution comparison from The Verge

Just about every complaint that I listed above really boils down to the fact that I own a computer with a higher resolution display than the people that I’m designing for. Once we’re all on the same page, everything will be dramatically simplified.

I will say though that owning a device with a retina quality screen can boost your sense of urgency for the image problem that we now face on the web. You want retina users to have beautiful images, but is it worth the load time hit for non-retina users? Fortunately, some really awesome solutions like Retina.js are starting to spring up that will ease this problem.

Still, a near future where we have to create and upload double the images that we used to isn’t exactly something to get excited about is it?

What Do You Think?

Hopefully, this huge rant wasn’t a complete pile of drivel. My intention was to help designers who are wondering whether or not they should purchase a retina Mac make an informed decision. Too many sources are currently listing either only the good or only the bad and I wanted to share all my thoughts and let you decide for yourself whether or not a retina Mac is right for you.

On that note, what do you think? If you haven’t purchased a computer with a retina-quality display yet, do you think you will any time soon? Why or why not? If you have, what do you think of it? Would you recommend it to others?

Awesome Design in the Wild: Sevenly.org

2012-07-16T10:27:00.003-07:00

Every now and then I come across a site that has one or two really inspiring bits of design and UI that are good enough for me to write about them. On even rarer cases, I find a whole site that’s just so overflowing with uniquely awesome design ideas that I have to share it with you. This article is about one such site.

Sevenly.org is a site dedicated to helping charities through the sale of limited edition custom t-shirts. Beyond the fact that I love the organization and what they stand for, I’m blown away by what they’ve done with the site and think it serves as a learning tool for web designers. Let’s take a look!

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Meet Sevenly

Sevenly’s mission is simple: “To harness the power of art and community to build sustainable awareness and funding movements that support charities in their efforts to change the world.”

In practice, how this looks is they sell super awesome products (t-shirts, sweatshirts, water bottles, etc.) and donate $7 from every purchase to the charity that they’ve chosen to support that week. To date they’ve raised almost $600,000 for various charities.

Great Design

Once again, the cause and strategy earned a click from me on Twitter, but it’s the design that reeled me in and kept me interested. As you can see in the screenshot above, the home page is quite attractive.

It shows off the products beautifully with nice, large photos of good looking, smiling people wearing very attractively designed clothing. The masonry layout gives the page an organic feel and the minimal design/color scheme really pushes your attention towards those big photos.

The site looks great at a glance, but as you begin to use it, there are just so many pleasant surprises and great little tricks that I found myself lost, playing with every page for several minutes. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting touches.

Hover Effects Galore

I’m a huge fan of hover effects, I know they don’t always translate to touch screens very well, but you can account for that. On a desktop, they’re one of the primary ways that we interact with users on a basic level.

Sevenly is simply overflowing with cool hover effects. Slick little animations await you at every turn. It starts with the home page apparel previews:

By default, the product name and price are hidden, but as soon as you hover over an image, it slides down to reveal this information. Jumping over to the side of the page, there are three buttons here, each of which expands into a long horizontal bar on hover.

Following the same theme of changing an element’s size on hover, the little sharing bars have also buttons that become wider when you hover over them, encouraging that all important click.

Pure Scrolling Voodoo

My absolute favorite thing about this page is the scrolling magic that happens on the home page. It’s actually a really simple effect but it’s so well thought out that I couldn’t help but be impressed.

By default, when you load the page, this is what you see:

Odds are, your first reaction will be to scroll down the page. As you do this, the dark section that describes the site gets shorter and shorter until its just a little navigation bar that stays with you as you scroll.

The great part is that it doesn’t stop there. Though you might not think to do it, you can actually scroll up past the original starting position. This does the opposite of what we saw before and expands the darkened section to give you more information about the site’s current charity.

It’s such an elegant way to store a ton of information in a small space and gradually reveal it to users. It’s just hidden enough that it doesn’t overwhelm you when you load the page but just obvious enough that you can’t miss it when you scroll back up to the top of the page after your initial exploration.

Numbers and Sharing

Given that this site is so focused on charity, there are two goals that were laid out for the design. You can tell because they drive the entire layout. The first is a level of transparency and progress, communicated via statistics. Here’s how much we’ve raised so far, here’s what our target amounts are, etc.

The second goal is to encourage sharing as much as humanly possible through leveraging of social media. There’s a huge Facebook comment section built right into the home page and tons of other social buttons and bars around the site.

A Personal Touch

Moving on past the home page, the amazing design doesn’t stop. Next up is the “Team” page, where you can meet various members involved with the project.

As before, we see some fun hover effects being implemented here. Each team member is shown in a circle with only his/her head peaking out. Once you hover over the circle though, they pop out into view with a silly face.

As I looked at this page I realized that it held another surprise: the background is actually a video! It’s very subtle and you might not even notice at first, which it why it’s so dang nice. The video is blurred out and dark so it’s not too distracting.

Storygraphic

The last thing I’d like to show off is the the “Our Story” page, which tells you a little bit about why Sevenly was started. Not content to do anything in the way you’d expect, here the Sevenly team decided to give you an awesome infographic instead of a long, boring story.

Notice the way that this infographic is structured: problem vs. solution. You see this format used elsewhere throughout the site to convey the story behind each charity. First, they state a problem in very simple terms, then convey how they’re helping to solve it. It’s refreshingly simple and straightforward.

What Do You Think?

I’d like to make it clear that I’ve never talked to the Sevenly people, they didn’t approach me to write this article or reach out to me in any way. I simply really appreciate what they’re doing, both as a human being and as a designer.

Be sure to tour Sevenly.org the next time you’re in need of some solid inspiration. Don’t just look, interact with the site and get a feel for all of the nice little design touches that make it feel so refined. Also, if you’re in the market for some t-shirts fitting of your designer status, you can’t beat the awesome Sevenly designs.

Using Checkboxes to Toggle CSS and Create Click Events

2012-07-16T10:27:00.002-07:00

More and more lately I’ve seen developers utilizing tricks to create toggle states using pure CSS. This allows you to skip the JavaScript without sacrificing the interaction. How does this work? Is it an acceptable practice?

Today we’re going to examine two distinct methods for utilizing a checkbox to create a click event that swaps between two images using good old HTML and CSS. We’ll finish off with a brief discussion on semantics and the pros/cons of this technique.

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Like Skinning a Cat

“You essentially create a checkbox in HTML only to hide it and steal its functionality.”

With any CSS trick, there are always a handful of different ways to accomplish the task you’re aiming to achieve. What we’ll be doing here today is learning about how to utilize checkboxes to create two states that can be toggled between using only HTML and CSS. Given that goal, we can easily come up with at least two ways to accomplish it. Even within those two main strategies, you’ll find that there are multiple roads that we could take.

Both methods involve some questionable CSS trickery. You essentially create a checkbox in HTML only to hide it and steal its functionality. The first method simply stretches the checkbox to the full size of the area that you’d like to make clickable and utilizes no label.

The second method makes use of the interesting functionality of labels associated with a checkbox. Even if you hide the checkbox itself, the label can actually be styled, positioned and clicked on to activate the toggle, giving us a completely flexible element to work with that has two possible states.

Let’s dive in and take a closer look at each of these methods.

Method 1

The first way that we’re going to attack this experiment is through making our checkbox eat up the full size of our object and then hiding it. To make this work, all you technically need is a div that contains a checkbox with a class applied. If you want to go further, you can add other attributes such as “name”. We’ll also throw in an image so we’ll have something to toggle.

<div>
  <input type="checkbox" class="toggle" />
  <img src="http://lorempixum.com/500/200/city/1" >
</div>

This should give you a checkbox next to a big image as seen in the following image. Don’t worry about the awkward positioning, we’ll fix that with CSS.

CSS

Now that we have some HTML, it’s time to attack this sucker with CSS. It doesn’t take much code but it is a little bit of a weird process so be sure to follow along closely.

The first thing that we want to do here is style the div. We’ll give it a height and a width to match the image that we inserted before so that the photo takes up the entire div. I’ll also give the div a background image that’s different than the other image that we used. This way if we toggle the visibility of the HTML image we’ll see this one underneath. All of this is really just a test anyway so feel free to structure it completely differently. The real focus here is how we use the checkbox to toggle between two states.

The other important part here is setting the position to relative. We’ll use absolute positioning later for the checkbox and it’s important that we set this element to relative to give the checkbox a starting point.

div {
  height: 200px;
  width: 500px;
  background: #eee url(http://lorempixum.com/500/200/city/2);
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}

Now it’s time to perform the questionable act of turning our entire image into one big checkbox. To do this, target the “toggle” class that we set up before and set the same height and width that we’ve been using all along.

Next, set the position to absolute and reset the left, top, margin and padding, just to be sure the starting point will be where we want it. This will work in tandem with our previous relative positioning so that our checkbox can now occupy the entire space of the image. To ensure that the checkbox stays on top of everything, set its z-index value to something arbitrarily high.

Finally, set the opacity of the checkbox to 0 to hide it completely. The interesting thing here is that hiding the checkbox doesn’t disable its functionality. So now when you click anywhere on the image, you’ll be toggling the checkbox on and off.

.toggle {
  height: 200px;
  width: 500px;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  cursor: pointer;
  z-index: 100;
  opacity: 0;
}

Our hidden checkbox is functioning, but we haven’t set it up to do anything yet. As I mentioned before, we want to toggle the opacity of the HTML image, so we can set up a selector that singles out any inputs with the “toggle” class that are checked, then use the sibling selector to target the image and set its opacity to zero. To make the effect a little nicer, toss in a simple transition.

input.toggle:checked + img {
   opacity: 0;
}
 
img {
  -webkit-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  -moz-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  -o-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  -ms-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  transition: opacity 1s ease;
}

Try It Out

With that, method one is all finished. Below you should be able to see a live demo, click on the image to see it change and switch tabs to see the code.

Method 2

With the first method out of the way, it’s time to explore method #2, which involves the use of a checkbox label. This is added directly before the input. Notice that the “for” value matches the ID for the checkbox. We’ll also toss both images into our HTML this go around just to switch things up.

<div>
  <label for="toggle">Click Me</label>
  <input type="checkbox" id="toggle" />
  <img src="http://lorempixum.com/500/200/city/1" >
  <img class="bkg" src="http://lorempixum.com/500/200/city/2" >
</div>

CSS

Once again, we’ll start by adding some basic styles to the div. There’s nothing really special here, just some dimensions and positioning.

div {
  width: 500px;
  height: 260px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}

Now for something new. Remember that this method involves utilizing the checkbox label instead of the checkbox itself. To do this, set the display to block and give it some dimensions. We included the text “Click Me” in the HTML above so we’ll need to style that as well. Essentially, we’re just transforming the label to give it the look of a button.

On hover, I changed up the colors and added the pointer cursor to further the idea that it’s a clickable element.

label {
  display: block;
  height: 50px;
  width: 200px;
  background: #eee;
  text-align: center;
  font: 14px/50px Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
}
 
label:hover {
  background: #232323;
  color: #fff;
  cursor: pointer;
}

Now it’s time to hide the checkbox again, but we’re going to go about it a little differently this go around just to show you that we can. By assigning absolute positioning and some crazy positioning values, we shoot the actual checkbox out of view. Remember, this works because we can still click the label element to pull off the toggle.

input#toggle {
   position: absolute;
   top: -9999px;
   left: -9999px;
}

To finish this version up, we need three more style blocks. The first positions the second image directly under the first image. From here, we’re using the same code that we did last time to change the opacity on toggle and add in a nice transition.

.bkg {
  position: absolute;
  top: 60px;
  left: 0;
  z-index: -100;
}
 
input#toggle:checked + img {
  opacity: 0;
}
 
img {
  -webkit-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  -moz-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  -o-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  -ms-transition: opacity 1s ease;
  transition: opacity 1s ease;
}

Try It Out

We’ve finished the second method now, try it out below by clicking the button.

Isn’t This JavaScript’s Job?

Without a doubt, this is some fun stuff. With only a wee bit of CSS and HTML, we were able to create a nice little click event. The benefits here are clear: brief code, no JavaScript, ease of implementation, etc.

Unfortunately, both of the methods that we went over above are quite taboo in some circles. This is because they’re both really a bastardization of the checkbox element. We’re not really using the element “semantically,” meaning how it was truly meant to be used, instead we’re just stealing its functionality and wrapping it around other objects.

So how bad is this offense? It depends on who you talk to. An old school coder will tell you that this is bad news. Use JavaScript dummy, that’s what it’s for! Despite this, many of the more impressive CSS tutorials published online recently utilize tricks similar to this (one variation uses radio buttons instead), though they do so without really explaining it in depth. Some of these are so awesome, you simply can’t resist throwing semantics to the wind and blowing past what you previously though possible with only CSS.

With this article I sought to explain how this technique is working on a basic level and point out that it’s, at the very least, considered controversial.

Should I Use This More Often?

I write CSS tutorials for a living. Every single day I try to think of great things that I can teach you. Methods like these present an interesting dilemma. They open up such great possibilities for making amazing pure CSS demos. However, some might consider it a waste of time given the questionable semantic application.

Here I throw it back to you, the Design Shack readers. What do you think? Should I show you cool stuff, even if it makes some semantic sacrifices? Do you want to see some more cool demos built with the two methods outlined in this article? How could you improve this trick? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Breaking Free of Design Crutches

2012-07-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

You don’t want to talk about this topic, you don’t even want to think about it. That’s because, like most of us, you’re probably guilty of using quite a few “crutches” to get you by. Those little things that you default to in almost every design with almost no thought.

Let’s bring them to light. Let’s talk about what I see designers doing again and again and what I struggle with myself. Let’s stop hobbling along and start running towards great design.

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Designing With Crutches

“Basically, a crutch is anything that you defualt to in design rather than spending the time to invest a little bit of original thought.”

What are your design crutches? Nearly every designer has at least one, most of us have a few. Even if you can’t see them at first, they’re there. Hiding in the background, holding us back from our full potential by keeping our designs firmly planted in our little comfort zone. It’s nice here, it never rains and we get free bagels on Fridays. There’s no reason to change anything, move along, thank you very much.

But wait, what are these proverbial crutches anyway and how are they holding you back? To ask this question is to invite disruption into the heart of your design process. Warning, danger, caution, turn back now. This might not be pleasant.

Basically, a crutch is anything that you defualt to in design rather than spending the time to invest a little bit of original thought. It can take the form of almost anything: a layout, font, color scheme; any key decision that you make throughout the design process that can be easily bypassed by turning to “ye olde faithful,” the same one you use every time when you reach this decision point.

Style vs. Crutch

“You’re not soaring above and beyond what you’ve done in previous projects, you’re hobbling along at a crippled pace with the innovative days far behind you.”

This concept of a design crutch is a tricky one to approach because the little bugger makes its home so close to the practice of developing a distinct style.

When I accuse you of reverting to the same old lame design tricks again and again, you can simply reply, “this is my style” and effectively win the argument. Every good creative person has a particular style that they’ve developed that carries a noticeable uniting thread through everything they do, from Da Vinci to John Williams. So why can’t you?

First of all, you sir, are no John Williams. Secondly, though they seem close, these two concepts are in fact distinct. Having a visual style is all about putting your fingerprint on your work. It’s a subtle art, honed carefully over years of experience. When done right, it strengthens your work rather than weakening it.

Compare this to your crutch. It’s not something completely unique that everyone can instantly identify with you, nor is it something that legitimately makes your work stronger. It’s just that thing that props your current work up to the standards of your previous work. You’re not soaring above and beyond what you’ve done in previous projects, you’re hobbling along at a crippled pace with the innovative days far behind you.

Common Crutches

It’s all fine and well to vaguely discuss design crutches from a theoretical perspective. This helps keep them solely in the area of problems that other designers struggle with. Let’s hit a little closer to home by calling out some specific crutches that lots of designers struggle with and see if you can idenfity with any of them.

The Almighty Burst

I’ll start by picking on my print design brethren just to show that this isn’t only a web designer problem. Some day in a time long forgotten, one designer needed a way to catch the viewer’s attention. He didn’t want to redesign his whole ad to incorporate this new message, so he decided that he’d just create an object that could literally be stuck anywhere on the ad regardless of general layout practices. Thus the burst was born.

The design community ranted and raved. This was the savior of lazy designers everywhere. Suddenly pointy bursts were everywhere, screaming for attention wherever they could get it. Some bursts had subtle points like the one above, others streched the jagged spears to the limit as if wielding a weapon that would hold viewers captive.

I have no problem with the burst existing. It does indeed serve a legitimate purpose and can be quite effective. I have a problem with the burst killing all innovative thought in the area grabbing user attention. It was abused so bad that it wasn’t uncommon to see six or seven bursts in a single full page newspaper ad, which of course made it lose all usefulness whatsoever.

Web designers can snicker and roll their eyes at this point. We never resort to such overused fads. Or do we?

Even now as I look at this intentionally cliché example, I can’t help but think, “that’s actually kind of nice.” The problem is that the ribbon has become the burst of the web design world. These things are everywhere. They might look nice, and I commend the first few guys who used them, but at this point they represent a block to original thought. Why come up with something new? The ribbon works!

Following Someone Else’s Lead

I think a healthy chunk of the web design community is guilty of this one, including myself. For years I’ve followed the design trends at Apple very closely, so closely that I often mirror them in my own work. When Apple started putting table reflections on their product shots, I decided to stick reflections on the dog food bags I was featuring in countless ads at the time.

Apple was my crtuch. I knew their designers were good and that saved me a lot of work. By doing whatever they did, my work always stayed attractive and even gradually evolved over time.

The problem of course was that I wasn’t continually working out my design muscles, and so I got weak and fat, so to speak. It’s easy to depend on the industry to tell you what to do next, but doing so kills your ability to think for yourself and come up with amazing creative that’s all your own.

Maybe you hate Apple and tend to follow some other company known for good design such as Nike. It doesn’t matter who it is, if you’re not doing your own thinking, then there might be a problem.

Don’t confuse this with inspiration, we have an entire gallery here devoted to that. Inspiration, when used properly actually encourages you towards unique thought, not away from it.

Helvetica

This one cuts deep because we all love this typface so dang much. Do I think Helvetica is awesome? Absolutely. Is it beautiful? You bet! Is it a huge crutch for designers everywhere? Yep.

Choosing the proper typeface for a project is a time-honored tradition. It involves proper consideration of a number of factors: context, tone, mood, time period, etc.

Some typefaces communicate a concept better than others. The design of the letters tells a story, sets a scene; if you’re stuck on Helvetica for every single project, your story is always the same.

Photoshop Layer Styles

Layer styles are great aren’t they? They’re non-destructive, scaleable and they save you loads of time. What’s so bad about that?

The problem here is that I’ve noticed myself using the same layer styles the same ways with the same settings on almost every project. You get a feel for using these one way and it’s hard to force yourself to switch things up. A drop shadow at something other than 120 degress? Blasphemy!

Once again, we see how a perfectly good tool can be so easily misused and/or overused to the point that it’s just another way to prop up our boring old designs.

I’m not telling you to drop Photoshop layer styles completely, I just want to encourage you to take another look and consider how to switch things up. What if you turned an inner glow dark and used it as a vignette? What if you changed your drop shadow’s blending mode to Color Burn?

Experiment with new ideas, play with buttons that you never push, you’re not going to break it, I promise. You might just find something new and awesome.

What Are Your Crutches?

Getting out of your same old tricks and techniques might just be the refresher you need to fall in love with design all over again. Dropping your crutches and getting back to walking on your own will make your work better, which benefits both you and your clients.

Now that I’ve got your gears spinning on this topic, leave me a comment and let me know what you struggle with. I’ve shared some of my crutches, what are yours?

Awesome stock images provided by BigStock.