Color is one of the most powerful tools in the designer’s toolkit. It can draw attention, set a mood, influence users’ emotions, perceptions and actions. With the lingering presence of Flat and Material Design, color holds even more prominence in UI design today. Bright colors are equally well suited for both playfully...

There’s a mix of function and fun in new design and development tools this month. From adding emojis to links, to fonts that wow, to CSS tricks, there’s a little something for everyone in this collection. Plus, almost everything on the list this month is free, except for a couple typefaces and tools. They’re sure to be...

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...

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...

Twitter is launching a redesign of its iOS, Android, TweetDeck and Twitter Lite apps. The redesign is intended to make the service “feel lighter, faster, and easier to use” and features a number of changes that mean an update is pending for twitter.com too. As with any redesign, there’s some good, some bad, and some probably-ok-once-we-get-used-to-it....

Most of us are familiar with the saying, “Show, don’t tell.” For those of us working in creative industries, this should be your mantra when building up your résumé. With the rise of the gig-economy and freelance job platforms, which are now home to an abundance of talented freelance designers, illustrators and...

As a web designer, you already know that great design is essential for a website—it’s the concept of design you trust, unless a website looks absolutely amazing, it’s going to be hard for new visitors to trust that site. That’s how essential great design is to a website. However, there’s another essential part of...

You may have heard that “conversational interfaces” are the new hot trend in digital product design. Industry leaders such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are strongly focussed on building a new generation of conversational interfaces. Several trends are contributing to this phenomenon—artificial...

The majority of web navigation menus flow horizontally across the page. This comes from a history of traditional monitors being wider rather than taller. But with so much screen space it’s now possible for websites to use vertical navigation menus instead. And many of them look fantastic. These 10 examples of vertical...

Welcome readers, it’s June, and the Brutalism bug is back. No, really. After disappearing into the phenomenon I called “post-minimalism”, plain old Brutalism seems to be making a comeback. Oh, it’s had a few refinements; good designers would never let their brutalist sites actually look bad. But the underpinnings...

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...

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...

This set of 100 nature icons designed by vecteezy.com is the perfect antidote to the austere, minimalist line icons used everywhere. Drawn in a friendly, clean, emoji-style, they’re perfect for social media, kids’ sites, and any project where you want to communicate health, innocence, and positivity. Our favorites...

Being a designer is tough: you can spend months crafting the perfect experience, ensuring your usability is inclusive, writing careful copy, testing on every browser known to man—even the copy of IE on that old laptop that props open the studio door; then you check your analytics and discover that your labor has resulted...

Affinity Photo for iPad was announced this week at Apple’s WWDC. The desktop version is one of the most elegant pieces of design software on the market, and that excellence appears to have been successfully transferred to the iPad. The iPad edition of the award-winning software has been built specifically for the iPad’s...