Popular Design News of the Week: May 13, 2019 – May 19, 2019

Designing an interactive interface or a website is not an easy feat. You have to analyze everything about your audience, in the first place their behavior, and then implement thorough planning. New technologies are making it easier but they are also making the users more tech savvy and hard to impress. Glossy images and hover effects are no longer impressive to users. Neither are animations or gifs - especially when everyone can make their...

How long ago did you start your design business or side gig? Three months? Three years? And how long has it been since you evaluated your business since then? As a web designer, your job is to think critically and creatively for your clients, which is why you ask them probing questions like: How old is your business? What’s its mission? Who’s your target audience? What’s the personality of your brand? Where do you see your business in five...

I really don’t need to explain how important your reputation is, do I? Short version: if people think you suck, either as a person or as a designer, they won’t hire you. It’s not a difficult concept, all things considered. Figuring out what other people think of us is much harder. Controlling what they think about you is next to impossible, as any attempt to “change your image” will probably backfire, unless you’re a consummate actor....

There are plenty of cool new tools and resources available for designers this month, and you’ll be especially happy if you are looking to find photos with ease, increase productivity or even create better documentation. If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered! Creative...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

WordPress is the most used CMS across the world today. It has attained the number one position because it is so simple to use and maintain, not only from a designer’s point of view, but also from the end user’s perspective. In this article, we will look at a few different questions people have about WordPress. Some may seem downright silly, some a little technical, and some questions will be the ones that you yourself always wanted to ask! How...

It’s no surprise that some businesses are convinced that all they need is a Facebook page and some awesome paid posts in order to go viral. I get it. It’s relatively cheap. It’s easy. And they see it as a faster way to success than taking the time to build a website, grow an audience organically, and wait. But social media virality is hard to come by and, when it does happen, can be short-lived. Now, making a website or blog go viral? That can have...

When you’ve worked in the digital industry for long enough, eventually you’re going to have to work with code that you’ve inherited from someone else. Whether this is part of a handover process from another company, written by a developer that has since moved on or written by a freelancer, sooner or later you’ll find yourself sifting through line after line of code that you didn’t write. When this happens it’s easy to slip into a...

Hello all, as Justin Timberlake once predicted, it is now May. Now that I’ve subjected you to the latest and greatest in boy band jokes from the ‘90s, let’s check out this month’s portfolios. It should be noted that as I write this, I am working with Internet that I borrowed from my new neighbor (yes, I did ask) and the speed is fairly slow. That’s not a complaint; it’s a warning. It means I’m going to be a lot happier with portfolios...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Web design gets broader everyday, with new technologies entering the field on a seemingly weekly basis. As a web designer, you need to stay on top of these technologies, and upgrade your skills, or you’ll become obsolete. But it’s tough to keep up when you’re reading countless Medium posts, and scouring the latest ebook for tips. That’s where podcasts come in. The (usually) short episodes are like talk radio for the web, and are a great...

Design work is very time consuming. But it’s not just the labor you put into building websites that takes time and concentration. Because the projects you work on typically have a short shelf life, you’re constantly having to find new gigs, woo potential clients, and sign them onto your service — which is like another job in and of itself. So, when do you find time to look for more work when you're so busy actually doing it? You could set aside...

The Internet as a concept, and as a community, is much like a teenager: it’s struggling to establish its identity, everyone is trying to tell it what to do, and it tends to lash out at both people who deserve it as well as those who don’t. It does so at random, and you’re not its real dad, anyway. The practice of designing websites, however, has gone right past the teenage years and blown past the whole human-life-span metaphor entirely. Web...

Sometimes designs are of an acquired taste. That’s our theme for this month. Each of the projects and trends featured here are things that you’ll probably either love…or hate. But wait to judge these projects until you navigate through them; most of them seem to grow on you the more you dive into the content. Here’s what’s trending in design this month: Chaos by Design Have you ever looked at a design and wondered “what were they thinking?”...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Who’s your audience? It sounds like an easy question, but it’s not. Knowing your audience helps keep eyeballs on your site, website traffic up, and visitors eagerly returning to your site to consume your content, and buy your products. But a lack of understanding leads to a potentially dangerous domino effect. If you don’t understand your audience, you won’t understand what content it wants, and without that knowledge, your site...

Every day, people are asking themselves things like, “React or Vue?” “VR or no VR?” “CSS Grid or Flexbox?” These are the wrong questions entirely, because the technology you focus on or use next should always be matched to both the job and the people at hand. Besides, here are the answers: Personal preference. Not yet, wait ‘til the market starts to truly expand again. CSS Grid for known quantities, Flexbox for unknown quantities....

As you draw closer to the finish line with a website, does your client see it just as clearly as you do? Or are they still wavering on design and copy choices even while you’re in the final stages of QA, or talking about additional features they’ll want to add to the site “some day”? Unless you are getting paid — and paid well — for every single hour you put into a website, you have to be willing to enforce a final stopping point. If you don’t,...

Welcome to our roundup of the best new sites to be launched (or relaunched with significant updates) in the last four weeks. After last month’s flirtation with monochrome, this month’s set of sites return to the overriding trend of 2019: color. Huge images are still popular, and parallax is still finding its way into our scrolling experiences. Enjoy! Middle Fork Rapid Transit Middle Fork Rapid Transit is an adventure vacation company...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

For one reason or another, you may find yourself wanting to publish things online anonymously. Now to some, the “A-word” conjures up images of hackers, Guy Fawkes masks, and people generally saying terrible things to each other on Twitter. There’s long been an ongoing debate about whether anonymity is something that should even be allowed on the Internet. Yes. Yes it should. There’s no doubt that there are terrible people in the world;...

I work out of a small office in a co-working environment. Next to my dedicated space is a hot-desking area used primarily for video conferencing. Thanks to a bank of west-facing windows, an overenthusiastic heating policy, and unseasonably hot weather, meetings are often conducted with the doors open, and it’s then that I overhear some of the most engrossing insights into the minds of both clients and designers, that I’ve ever encountered....