Great websites always seem to combine great design with great code. Since building a website is a pretty simple task you find many people learn HTML and CSS and figure that if they can learn that then they can design any website they want. While technically they can you will often find that there are some key mistakes they make because they don’t wish to take the time to actually learn about design.

Programmers are designers in their own right, but they design code and wonderfully architected systems. To design something visual is completely different and just because you have a good eye for design doesn’t mean you have a good mind to apply it.

Since so many programmers have personal projects that usually means they have to create their own websites. If you are a freelance coder, one of the greatest assets you can have is knowing the full web development process from beginning to end, and this includes design.

Here are eight mistakes that I often see developers make when applying design to a website.

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Some of the truest words I’ve heard to date are, “If you don’t plan on creating your own business, then you plan on being broke.”

While, there are many people out there who have made a nice living working for other companies, it shouldn’t be crazy to think about going into business for oneself, whether it be a full time job or a part time gig. With the changing economic climate things aren’t guaranteed and, quite frankly, the time spent helping someone else achieve their goals could be time well spent on chasing your own dreams.

As graphic designers, freelancing and creating our own small business is usually a pretty common thought; it’s almost a given. Even if we don’t market ourselves as freelancers, I’m sure some of us have gotten into doing side jobs to put some extra cash in our pockets. Some designers just like to offer design services while others have full businesses revolving around clothing design or creating products, or perhaps partnering with someone else to offer more products and services.

Regardless of what it is that you do, in order to see some growth in your business you’ve got to figure out who you are targeting. Many of us may believe that our product is for everyone, but trying to get your product in front of everyone is going to be painful and expensive. What you want to do is figure out who you are specifically targeting, figure out that niche and put your efforts into them. Finding out more about them will help your effectiveness and eventually help your reach because once you know who you’re selling to, you’ll better know how to design for them. Read more

In a previous article of mine, somewhere on the web, I mentioned finding a mentor. People commented that they would really like to find one or really needed one. None of them had any idea how to find one. The reward for opening my big mouth was a dozen or so emails asking me to either become their mentor or instruct them how to find a mentor. As promised to so many, here’s an article explaining it all.

The practice of mentoring goes back as far as the days of the cave men (and women) when the elders of the tribe, probably 16 years old at the time, taught other non-upright beings how to dodge sabertooth tigers, make spears, clean and prepare the pelts of sabertooth tigers and other survival techniques like pooping outside of the cave.

It was easier then as meetings and the Blackberry hadn’t been invented and there was time to mentor the young. As time marched on and humans evolved to live to at least 32 years old, people created apprenticeships to train the replacements who would do the shop work when the craftsman was no longer able to pound barrel staves, cobble soles, or flunken gerflunkenheisers until the wee hours of morning before the daily witch burnings.

Mentorship is the modern gerflunkenheiser flunkening. It’s not a dead art and you’d be surprised how common it really is.

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With the passing of Steve Jobs this month, designers around the world are creating tributes.

Considering the impact Jobs had on the technology and design fields, it’s not surprising to see the number of creative designs created to pay homage to his legacy.

A great collection of these tributes have been recently posted to Behance.net.

Below, we’ve collected fifty of these designs, all inspired by the life of Jobs and the impact he had on the world.

Feel free to share other designs that we may have missed and let us know which ones you like best in the comments…. Read more

I remember being 13 years old and just learning the joys of Photoshop 5 and 6. Looking back, I was so terrible, but in that moment you couldn’t you tell me a thing. That was when message boards and online forums were extremely popular, and you were not cool at all unless your signature (affectionately referred to as ‘sig’) was in top trendy style. I remember downloading brushes and patterns daily and fooling with every filter.

I decided to call myself a designer then, and fortunately, I stuck with it—I had my hands in a bunch of other things I sucked at at the time, one of which was softball. I’m glad I eventually cultivated my design hobby and got serious about it.

It seems like when kids (and some adults) get their hands on some version of Photoshop or Illustrator or what have you, they automatically deem themselves designers. Now, I’m not one of those people who get mad at the newbies coming in and ruining stuff because I’m all about community and I want to see everyone succeed—but I will say, you can’t just jump right in and think you know everything. There is A LOT to learn when it comes to graphic design and not just about what programs you use, but how you use your skill.

Whether you’ve been designing for 10 minutes or 10 years, there’s much to be learned and figured out. Depending on your path with design, some things will vary, but for the most part, there are three main stages of realizations/characteristics most designers go through. Read more

The web has never been more accessible to creators than it is today. Every day, more user-friendly tools, apps and technologies pop up seemingly out of nowhere.

In such a rapidly changing landscape, what is at stake for web users might well be the quality of what is produced.

Quality assurance often comes down to standards, and for better or worse, design lacks a regulating body.

Some countries (Canada, Norway, United Kingdom, and others) do have rigorous qualifications to belong to professional design groups, but none are required to practice. So how do standards gain traction if they aren’t made mandatory? Read more

From time to time, an industry experiences fundamental changes that radically alter it. Along with this comes an explosion of opportunity: opportunity for individuals to stand out, for new products to emerge and for entrenched companies to be replaced. Now is such a time in the web community.

For as long as I can remember, the primary focus in web development has been on ensuring that websites render the same across all browsers. We took great effort to ensure that a client’s website looked exactly the same in everything from old versions of Internet Explorer to the latest Firefox, all at once.

In the past few years, we have witnessed growing interest in what is known as progressive enhancement, which is the technique of serving advanced features and styles to modern browsers but not to older unsupported browsers.

This approach never seemed to settle in across the board. Most agencies still strive to make their websites universal. And progressive enhancement was often regarded as an excuse to ignore annoying problems. As it turns out, web people are rather crafty and have created tools that overcome countless browser problems. Read more

We developers sometimes take design for granted. And let’s be honest: who doesn’t hate taking things for granted.

Some say we will never truly appreciate the importance of design until we have been trained in the essence of design and beauty. Well, I say BS to that. I want to break us our of this box and clear away the cobwebs from our code-oriented minds.

Development, by its very nature, reflects the knowledge base of the person in charge. And the skills required to develop such a knowledge base can leave us in the dark about design. Developers often sweep design under the rug in order to be able to learn the intricacies of PHP and MySQL.

But as someone who has been writing code for 13 years, I can tell you it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many of the world’s greatest developers have an excellent grasp of UI and UX and of what their users want. The best way to get a handle on it is to figure out what you want in a UI. Read more

Mobile development is all the rage, and the interactive industry is in great turmoil as countless tablets and smartphones come to market.

Mobile app development gets most of the attention, while the mobile web somewhat quietly creeps along. But the mobile web is making progress every day as more and more developers launch mobile-optimized interfaces.

The great thing about the mobile web is that it is fundamentally built with all of the same tools used in traditional web design and development.

This makes it far more approachable than app development. Also, many users will want to visit a company’s website on the go, without necessarily needing a full-blown app. Read more

Today we’re bringing you another great set of icons right fresh from the oven! This set of eCommerce icons is appropriately titled “Kaching”.

The icons are available as PNGs (48×48 and 400×400) and we have also included the source files in PSD and Illustrator format to allow for your own full customization.

The icons were designed exclusively for WDD by WordPressThemeShock, a great site that offers quality premium WordPress themes as well as a bunch of amazing design sets (buttons, textures, backgrounds and much more). The site was created by the same awesome team behind Iconshock.

All icons are free to use for both personal and commercial purposes, with attribution required (you can waive the attribution requirement by paying a small fee).

Redistribution is not permitted, so if you would like to share these icons with your friends, please direct them to this page so that they can download their own copy from here.

The preview and download link are right after the jump, so go and grab yours today while they’re still hot! Read more

Headings introduce content.

We can apply many effects and tricks to graphic-based headings to entice readers to continue reading, to set the tone or to make one heading stand out among many.

But sometimes the most obvious techniques, such as modifying visual weight and layout, work a lot better.

Overlapping titles use a small amount of big text and a big amount of small text to communicate more than a plain heading could do on its own. Sounds contradictory? Only if you ignore the fine points.

Read on to learn how to create memorable headings with overlapping text. Read more

In this post, we’ll discuss how a thoughtful, well-designed business card can help your company give a good first impression and send the right message. We’ll look at elements to include in your design and the different approaches to take.

We often hear of the importance of first impressions in both our professional and personal lives.

In business, the first impression we make on potential clients and other professionals can affect how much business we get. If we fail to dazzle in the first meeting, we might not be attending the follow-up meeting in which we could raise the bar.

Also, we tend to forget that first impressions often begin with a business card. Let’s be honest: in most networking situations, we tend to lead with our cards. Read more

As you probably know, we love great icons and we always like to give away some great sets.

Today we have a set of 60 exclusive free icons that we call “Childish”. As the name implies, these are ideal for children’s websites or for websites that are more relaxed, with a fun feeling. They’re definitely not suitable for a serious corporate website.

The set contains all of the icons in 4 different sizes, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64 and 128×128.

In addition, there’s a vector file containing all of the icons so that you can easily resize and modify them as needed.

All icons are free to use for both personal and commercial purposes, with attribution required (you can waive the attribution requirement by paying a small fee).

Redistribution is not permitted, so if you would like to share these icons with your friends, please direct them to this page so that they can download their own copy from here.

There is a full preview right after the jump and you’ll find the download button right underneath it… Enjoy the new icons! Read more

Usually the subject of contrast is reserved for beginners. Books will say “black and white have contrast, red and orange do not” – but there’s so much more to it.

Beginners books usually only touch on color contrast, but what about size and shape contrast? Often the easiest way to tell an amateur designer from a professional one is to look at their use of contrast.

Creating a structure of importance using size, shape and color is what gives a page impact and legibility to the reader.

In this post, we’re going to look at contrast in detail, examining big typography, funky shapes, clear divides, imagery, and how they properly fit together using contrast for a good user experience.

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We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.

From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.

Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?

Ikea for example, starts with price and then work backwards. Their main concern is the price of the product to the end user. It’s up to the designers to create something appealing which fits within that.

37Signals wrote a whole book about how they operate with similarly heavy restrictions when building web apps; they set a date to launch and then they stick to it, no matter what.

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The ability to tint black-and-white photographs with color has been a staple of photography for decades, and modern image editors make warming and cooling grayscale images a snap.

This concept of a steady progression of shades can be used to present information as well.

This technique of tinting digital photos works well for presenting information and can improve usability.

Just as a gradient shows a range of colors, a monotone or duotone can be used to show a range of data.

In this article, we’ll learn how to apply color to enhance infographics. Read more

It’s been nearly five years now since the redesign vs. realign debate began.

Many designers are still approaching website changes as redesigns, with little thought to whether they should be redesigning or realigning the site for their clients.

In fact, many designers are still a bit confused about which one is appropriate for which projects, or even what the difference really is.

Understanding the difference between redesigning and realigning can result in happier clients who are better reaching their website goals.

There are times when redesigns are appropriate, and there are other times when realignments are appropriate. It all depends on how the client’s current site is working for them, and what their goals are.

Read on to find out more about the differences between redesigning and realigning, and how to determine which one fits your current and future projects. Read more

As designers, it’s common to wonder what the differences are between our chosen discipline and others.

After all, there are a lot of similar rules and guidelines that permeate design, no matter what the field. And sometimes that leaves us wondering how difficult it would be to switch between design disciplines.

In this post, we’ve compared architecture and web design. While there are a lot of similarities, there are also tons of differences between these two areas of design.

Most of these are directly related to the fact that web design deals primarily with virtual space, where architecture deals mostly with the real, physical world. If you’d like to share additional similarities and differences, please do so in the comments… Read more

Most people know that good feedback is essential to designing and developing quality websites.

But what constitutes “feedback” can be ambiguous: for some, it is little more than a hasty spell-check; for others, it is akin to submitting and defending a PhD dissertation.

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for those seeking feedback on their work, there are some proven ways to get helpful input from others.

Here are a few ideas and tools to assist you in your quest for an improved product.

Have more ideas? Please share them in the comments area. Read more

Recently, the notion of killing the design community has come up on a few blogs (sometimes indirectly), creating many intense conversations on the direction the design community has taken over the past couple of years, and what can be done about it.

The possibility that such discussions are going to improve the design community is quite troubling.

In the interests of taking advantage of this recent trend (namely, writing about “killing the community”), I felt it would be necessary to address this issue by describing some easy-to-learn and practical tips that will help all of us do our part in killing the community. Read more

According to Newton’s Law of universal gravitation, what goes up, must come down…. but that’s not always the case!

One of the great things about design is that we can use our imagination to break free from the norm by rewriting the laws of physics.

In this post, we invite you to look at our reality in a new light and expect the unexpected.

The ads in this post feature impossible compositions that cause the viewer to question the laws of the universe while bringing an extra dimension of wonder to our world.

We’ve collected 30 examples of adverts that defy the law of gravity to varying degrees…. enjoy! Read more

Drop-shadows and gradients are two of the most common design elements on the web.

You’ll find them accompanying many different styles. They’re handy effects for web designers because they’re attractive, useful and easy to create with any graphics program. But they have a dark side: they’re frequently abused.

Using amateurish drop-shadows or gradients is almost as bad as affixing a scarlet letter to your shirt to let the world know you’re a beginner or a hack. Even subtle, barely noticeable mistakes can create tensions that undermine otherwise beautiful and effective designs.

In this article, we’ll look at what drop-shadows and gradients do, we’ll talk about how to use them effectively and we’ll look at some examples of mistakes and how to fix them. Read more

Wikipedia is currently undergoing a much needed redesign to improve the user experience.

Anyone can preview this redesign by creating an account, logging in and then clicking the “Try Beta” link at the top right of any page.

The “Wikipedia Usability Initiative” has been divided into two phases. Phase 1 was the prototype phase, and it ended in the summer of 2009.

The project team is currently in the second phase, which is the development and testing phase.

The project has also been separated into four releases; as of the writing of this article, the second release (Babaco) is currently in development.

In this article, we’ll discuss Wikipedia’s design changes and the reasons behind them.

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Today we’re featuring the awesome talent of Niark, a wondrous 34 year old French freelance graphic designer and witty illustrator living in Paris.

Niark takes his inspiration from street art, music and graphics.

He works in a broad scope of areas such as advertising agencies, music labels, art toys, streetwear and more.

His style features bright colors and abstract illustrations and finds balance in seemingly chaotic environments.

If you want to learn more about Niark, take a look at his portfolio. In this post, you’ll find a collection of his best works that you can use for inspiration. Read more

As you search the web you’ll come across a wide range of interactive and graphical maps.

Deciding when, where and how to integrate or display a map on your site is the first step, the second should be what technology and illustrations to use.

If you’re all about interaction, JQuery, Ajax, or Flash are all effective technologies that hold their own ground.

Map illustrations are a dime a dozen however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.

As designers, we’re constantly searching for ways to improve and style our designs, this is exactly what the following 30 infographics and sites display below; the breaking of rules. Read more