“Spec work” stands for speculative work. It’s a term used to refer to any job for which the client expects to see examples with no guarantee of payment.
The Internet has accelerated its growth in the form of “design contest” websites, and these businesses have advertising machines that draw in thousands of unsuspecting designers who think it’s normal to give away their intellectual property for nothing.
With the increasing prominence of “spec work” businesses, we’re witnessing more and more about the downsides of the practice, and there’s one initiative in particular that’s documenting what goes on — SpecWatch.
David Airey, a well respected graphic designer, has approached WDD with this important issue and we felt it was necessary to bring light to this important subject.
Here’s the exclusive interview David conducted with SpecWatch for WDD readers. Designers take note…
Web designers have a wealth of tools available to them, for doing everything from organizing their thoughts about a particular design to debugging the final design.
But with so many tools out there, how do you ever determine which ones are really useful and which ones are just going to waste your time?
We’ve compiled a massive list of some of the best and most useful tools out there for web designers.
Purposely left off the list are common tools most designers are likely already using (like Dreamweaver or Panic’s Coda, Photoshop or GIMP, and similar common software programs that pretty much every designer already has in their toolkit).
These are tools that will save you time, make you a more effective designer, simplify or speed up your design process, or otherwise make your life easier.
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 that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.
To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot
A well developed and organized sign-up page has to relay a large quantity of data in a small area and must be quick and easy to read and understand.
Overly creative plan names are more likely to hurt your sign-up process instead of help, as they’ll take longer to understand.
It’s better to save your creativity for the other pages which will be redirecting the user to the sign-up page.
Start a trial and error phase to test out what your audience might specifically be attracted to as this will vary from site to site.
Here are 25 creative examples of sign-up pages which you can use as a starting point for inspiration when designing your own.
The use of typography in video allows us to reclaim the lost art of arranging typefaces in a way that would make an 18th century typesetter’s head spin.
This type of art is also known as Kinetic typography.
The text is presented in a manner intended to convey or evoke a particular idea or emotion.
In this compilation we showcase 18 creative uses of kinetic typography which include short movies made with After Effects, stop motion animation and other techniques.
If you have an example of kinetic typography that you would like to share with us, please feel free to post a link to it in the comments section.
Cheat sheets and reference guides are useful for both beginners and advanced web professionals.
They can be used to help you remember syntax or as a tool to aid in memorization.
In this post, we aim to cover the reference guides for all of the most commonly used platforms, software and coding languages.
Below you’ll find a compilation of the 30 most useful and well-organized cheat sheets, checklists and reference guides.
If you know of a useful cheat sheet that we haven’t covered here, please share the link in the comments’ section at the end of the article.
The other day my daughter, Sophia, announced that she wanted to set up a lemonade stand.
Seeing as how I didn’t really want to spend the better part of my weekend selling lemonade, I tried to talk her out of it by showing her how much she’d need to spend to buy the lemonade mix, get the cups, that sort of thing.
Regardless of my best efforts, there was no changing her mind. She wanted to go into business and there wasn’t anything I was going to do to stop her.
So as I succumbed to my role as venture capitalist in her first business startup. I decided that at the very least, this would be a great chance to teach my daughter about counting money, basic business principals, that sort of thing.
We published the Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter at just at the right time when everyone wanted to know about this Twitter thing, how to start using it, and how to sleeve it into their websites and blogs.
The guide is still being tweeted at the rate of a few tweets per day, which is remarkable considering that it was published a few months ago.
We’d like to thank everyone for the excellent reception of that post and we will continue to report on Twitter as it evolves.
We’ve also incorporated all of your suggestions in the comments on the guide into this update post.
As usual, we encourage you to submit more news about Twitter in the comments’ area so that we can include them in this post or in future ones.
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 that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.
To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot
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Jul 19, 2009
Vintage art reminds us of a time when we were dependent less on technology and more on skill and technique.
But we cannot compare the typography of 100 years ago to that of today, with the arrival of so many new typefaces, new ways to create fonts as well as new ways to get our artwork out into the world.
Even though the application of typography has evolved so much from a century ago until now, the most common use of typography continues to be for ads, store signs, and logos.
Below, you will find 50 typographic examples that exhibit a range of artistic styles from the last 100 years or so.
Cats and dogs. Cain and Abel. Designers and developers. These are just a few of the great historical face-offs.
Designers and developers often seem to come from different planets and have completely different brains.
Developers want a website to work right, designers want it to look right.
A few weeks ago, we explored the main pet peeves that web designers have with web developers, and suggested some solutions for them.
Today, we will discuss the other side of the coin: the five most common gripes that developers have with designers.
Whenever a user is trying to reach a website’s page that is non-existent or missing, they are usually directed to a page where they’re informed that that specific page cannot be recalled by the HTTP server; this is what is called a 404 error page.
As designers, when we create a web site, normally we’d also include a 404 page.
Depending on the site design, overall focus, and demographics, you’ll want to create a suitable page that will cut straight to the chase and also convey a bit of creativity at the same time.
In this post you will find a showcase containing 50 of the most creative 404 pages that we found on the net.
Jason: If a contest holder withdraws a contest and plans to rip off the designers who submitted entries, it will not come as a surprise to him/her. He or she knows...