What’s New For Designers, June 2019

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...

Pop quiz: which of the following statements is sarcastic? Edge is actually a kind of decent browser, just missing some features. Writing CSS using JavaScript is a viable and sensible way to get things done, now that we use JS for everything else. We might as well. Brutalism as a movement has, in some ways, made some of us into better designers. It can be hard to tell, can’t it? For the record, it’s number 2. But really, you might have seen people...

Tracking content performance is the key to a successful campaign, but you can’t do that unless you know which metrics to track. How do you measure whether a content piece (blog post, ebook, social media post, etc.) is meeting the goals it needs to? In order to meet these goals, you’ll need measurable indicators that can help you gauge the progress and make any necessary adjustments. These measurable indicators are known as Key Performance...

Everyone is familiar with .com and .net, but did you know you get your own free .design domain? Because it’s a fairly new domain, there are still plenty of short .design names available. So the good news is, you can shorten or improve your existing branding by switching to the .design domain. Eg. johnsmithdesign.com -> johnsmith.design You can also get your own unique email address such as hola@yourname.design or you can even use it as...

Which Roles Do You Need to Fill? This really depends on why you’re hiring someone as well as the direction you see your business going. Consider the following: Your client base is growing and you’re tired of turning down work. In that case, you’d likely want to hire designers and developers to share your workload with. You spend more time responding to emails and managing finances than actually building websites. If you’re passionate...

Hey WDD Readers, it’s June! Depending on where you live, you could either be heading out for a day of Summer fun, or curling up in your home at the bottom of Chile with a hot drink. And if you’re in Chile keeping warm, can I join you? This month, we got lucky enough to have lots and lots of pretty colorful designs in the mix, as well as a bit of classic minimalism and monochromatic goodness. Enjoy. Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look...

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...

Drawing is one of the most common and fun past times. Nowadays, with the release of new and powerful Android tablets and iPads, you don’t even have to break out your drawing pad and favorite drawing utensils. There are dozens of drawing apps that allow you to draw digitally and hone your artistic skills. The only problem is, which drawing app to pick? To help you answer that question, we’ve rounded up the best drawing apps for Android and iPad....

Whether you are an established brand or a startup, content marketing is one thing you should be thinking about. In fact, 98% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are advocating for the trend and their reasoning is simple; it works. In recent years, many startup founders have talked about how sales of their products skyrocketed after being featured in popular websites like Techcrunch and Business Insider. So, without beating around the bush,...

Every day, millions of people visit websites all over the world, and are confronted with a simple message: “We use cookies to make our site work, because we have yet to find a viable alternative to this somewhat insecure method of tracking our users, their preferences, their purchases, their mood swings, and the color of their aura. Mmkay? We good?” Okay, you can probably tell there was a little sarcasm, there, but I’m not entirely kidding...

When you design a website for a client, you’re in charge for the most part. You’re the one that’s mastered the art of web design, who understands search engine optimization strategies, and so on. However, there may be cases where the decisions your clients make before hiring you end up adversely affecting how you design their website. Web hosting is a critical part of every website, whether you’re building on a self-hosted platform...

We’re heading into the Summer season where traditionally everyone gets a little more lax about life. Even the website designs seem lighter with more whitespace and simple designs. That translates into a few trending elements as well. We’re seeing plenty of navigation elements with a new twist, circles and perfectly symmetrical grids seem to be making a comeback. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. 1. White Nav on a Color...

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...

Saving color palettes you find online or as you’re working on a design is not always an easy process. You could use the browser’s Inspect tool to grab the hex code or grab a screenshot and use Photoshop later on to pull the colors from it. Or you could simplify the process and grab a dedicated color picker tool that will allow you to grab color from any website, on desktop or on mobile without having to leave your browser window. Here are 10 best...

I’ve never really enjoyed writing brand guidelines, I always felt it got in the way of the “real” design work i wanted to be doing. But I also really don’t enjoy designing a carefully thought out, beautifully executed logo only to see it used and abused by a poorly informed client. To work on creating a visual identity and then to send it out into the world with the equivalent of a hastily scrawled map on the back of a cigarette packet is woefully...

The Internet of today is a highly competitive place. With so many individuals and businesses spending money and time on digital marketing and SEO — trying to outperform their rivals and sit at the top of the Google heap — it’s harder than ever to get users to visit any given website over another. Given the difficulty of acquiring new visitors, you might think that all the webmasters of the world would do everything in their power to provide...

Tricking people can be… well… tricky. The problem, at its most fundamental level, is that people only like to be tricked when they expect to be tricked. Obviously, if you trick them and take money they never intended to give away, well that’s theft. They rightfully get angry. If you say, “Hey, wanna see a trick? Give me a dollar.”; well then they expect some David Copperfield-level magic, don’t they? In fact, they demand it. And that’s...

Welcome to our monthly roundup of the freshest web designs, released (or rereleased with significant updates) in the last four weeks. This month’s selection eschews popular trends in favor of intelligent design that supports brand identity. As always, scrolling plays a big role, but parallax is less dominant than it normally is. Across the board, designers are opting for the less obvious choice, which gives us a rich variety to indulge...

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 websites running on WordPress, there’s a myriad of plugins that can ramp up their SEO ranking and enhance organic traffic. But with more than 50,000 WordPress plugins available in the official directory, it becomes quite daunting to choose the most suitable plugin for managing your SEO. Today, we‘re going to look at the top three plugin options, and explain why they’re essential to boosting your SERPs. 1. Yoast SEO One of the most...

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the best ways to get new business — and high-quality business at that. But unless you’re focused on a very small space where everyone knows each other, it can be hard to get your clients to refer you to others on their own. That’s why you need to be willing to ask clients for testimonials and online reviews. Look, consumers are smart. They know that anyone can build a website for their business and claim that...

In a perfect world, we’d all have all the content we needed before we ever touched a wireframe, on paper or otherwise. The hate for lorem ipsum is real, and I do understand why, but it’s a simple fact that we do not live in a perfect world. Clients are often ready to hand over a down payment, but not actually ready to build the site yet. If you find yourself in this situation (and it will happen a lot at the beginning of your career), you’ll need to...