We all know the importance of social media; content may be king, but it’s a king without a castle if no one is visiting your site. What all website owners need is a way to encourage new traffic, and retain old users. Sure, Google can help a bit, but the real prize is success on social media, and for that you need something like the AddThis social sharing tool. You’ll have seen AddThis
As web designers, we need to make sure we keep our skills fresh and up-to-date. We don’t need to follow every trend that comes along (like long shadows) but we do need to keep learning and improving our skills as the web grows and matures. One exciting new development that is beginning to gather steam in the web design industry is animation. More and more companies are looking to animation
Once upon a time, about an hour away from where I currently live, worked a web designer who loved his Photoshop comps and fixed-width layouts. And well, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but that designer was me. Then, as I was minding my own business, the web-based creative community went berserk over this newfangled concept called “responsive design”. As any young, bright-eyed,
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today. So for a few moments, take a
Unless you’ve been abstaining from social media this week, it can hardly have escaped your notice that Airbnb, the global accommodation finder, has undergone a rebrand, including a brand new logo. The official name for the logo mark is Bélo, and they’d like it to become “the universal symbol for belonging”. It’s an appealing notion, even if the
One of the toughest tests any web designer is asked to undertake — and we all get asked at sometime or other — is to design an email. Sure, we know what we want the email to look like, but how do you make it consistent across all the hundreds of email clients? And what’s this? Layouts built with tables?! Seriously, email design is a hugely difficult task for even the most seasoned of
We all love flat design, but ‘flat’ doesn’t have to mean boring! If you’d like to enhance your projects with some of the coolest repeating patterns around then look no further, because our friends at freepik.com have provided 100 of them, absolutely free of charge, for WebdesignerDepot readers to download. Whether you’re looking for retro-cool, nature-inspired, or
Charles Eames said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” A website is a composite of details—and its content is communicated through them. Whether designed to provide information or serve as an app, a well-executed site is one that has turned a critical eye to everything, from the copy to images to layout. Details matter in web design because positive impressions,
New projects are being released all the time that make us excited, curious, inspired and sometimes a little bit jealous. Today we continue our monthly series of the very best free resources for web designers with a collection that includes cool scripts, awesome fonts, great ideas, and must-see experiments. If this collection is anything to go by, July is shaping up to be a fantastic
Toyota is well-known as the most efficient organization on the planet outside of the human body, and one of their philosophies is to avoid documentation. Instead of making a “process” for when someone on the assembly line needs more bolts, they simply have 5 bins of bolts on their shelf and when one is empty they move it off the shelf and someone comes by every hour and refills
Recently I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the current toolset and accepted practices for creating UI and UX ‘deliverables’. In my experience, building static mock-ups in Photoshop and Illustrator no longer captures the essence of current UI design. Likewise, creating wireframes and UX documentation in tools such as Axure seem to communicate
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week. Note that this is only a very small selection of the links
Oh dear god no. Far too many websites spam you with their sticky shading menus, recommended read and related articles. It is acceptable at the end of an article but...