What’s New for Designers, June 2018

No summertime blues here. With so many new tools, the dog days of summer will be filled with playing with new elements and expanding your design portfolio. 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! Cool Backgrounds Cool Backgrounds is a pretty nifty tool to help you create...

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...

“Why isn’t my site ranking in searches? Why has traffic not improved since we hired you? Calls from customers are actually down... do you even know what you’re doing?!” Ah…the music of irate customers, whose site you have lovingly designed and crafted only to see it filled with insipid writing so bad and error strewn, that it is actually putting customers off the company. The Internet is still littered with examples of slick-looking...

Consumers and designers alike look to giants of any industry for inspiration. Often times, the inspiration has to do with the specific product the company develops. In the tech world, there a quite a few giants that inspire us everyday with their new and groundbreaking gadgets. However, you can draw inspiration from these tech giants in the way you organize your bedroom. Here are six rooms comparemymove.com created inspired by the top tech...

Alright, so let me begin by addressing the title because there is a method to my madness: There are literally hundreds of articles out there with tips, tricks, and best practices when it comes to e-commerce; some are generic and some are more technical but they do cover most areas of interest. But how about the big no-nos of e-commerce? How can you be sure you won’t make a single sale today? Well, that’s why I’m here. I’ll go through a list...

It’s been just three years since Adobe unveiled Adobe Stock, and in that time the service has grown from 40 million photos and vectors, to over 90 million assets ranging from professional photographs, to high-quality 3D files; that’s over 45,000 new assets uploaded every day. The bitmaps, vectors, videos, 3D models, and design templates offer both designers and businesses a simple way of employing art-direction as a sales tool, without...

Bauhaus (meaning School of Building) is a legendary design school, based in Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Although it survived just 14 years—closed by political pressure as the Third Reich rose to power—and despite constant philosophical changes under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school has directly, or indirectly influenced every generation of designers since....

Welcome back, Readers. It’s June, and if I got paid extra for every instance of the word “minimalist” in this article, I could probably afford to vacation in Canada. Well, my point is that minimalism is the general theme of this month, because that’s what it has all come down to: various forms of minimalism. Still, within that descriptor, there’s a fair amount of variety to be had here. Enjoy. Note: I’m judging these sites by how good...

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...

By most terms of reference, 70 years is a long time…70 years ago, copywriter David Ogilvy decided to part ways with his former business partner, Edmund Mather; together, they had made up what was known as Ogilvy & Mather. This decision meant moving from London, where the company originated, to Manhattan, where the name of the company would change to just Ogilvy. Now, as of June 2018, Ogilvy has announced a complete rebranding. For a company...

We’ve been developing websites using the Joomla CMS (Content Management System) since its inception way back in September of 2005. During this time we have planned, designed, developed and supported hundreds of websites. In this article, I’ll give you the rundown on some of the wonderful extensions that we consistently use during website development. Although the majority of the extensions I detail are paid downloads, we believe...

So yeah, what the title said. Microsoft is buying GitHub for 7.5 BILLION with a “B” US dollars. This is officially this week’s Big DealTM, and everyone’s going to be talking about it. It would not be quite accurate to say that GitHub powers software development as a whole, but it powers a lot of it. GitHub’s friendliness to — and free repositories for — open source software have made it nigh on indispensable for many developers around...

The best format for images on the web in 2018 is SVG. Not only is SVG resolution-independent—meaning that SVG graphics stay crisp at any size, on any device—but SVG file sizes are smaller than other competing formats. One of the most popular features of SVG is the ability to access parts of the graphic with code, and use CSS to change properties like fill color. But did you know that you can also embed animation code in an SVG file? Animating...

Sometimes the most fun part of looking at design trends is when you start to notice subtle shifts in trends that create new design patterns altogether. Each of the trends this month is an evolution of something that’s been pretty popular, with an interesting spin. Here’s what’s trending in design this month: 1. Full Screen Photo The oversized hero image gets even bigger with full-screen photo displays. The key element in this website...

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...

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 cartoonists in the world today. So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny...

Looking to boost your search rankings? While nothing can help you reach an audience better than great content, there are simple habits that can help you boost search ranking and provide valuable information for users. And it doesn’t require a complete website overhaul or hiring an SEO expert. Here are three hacks to help you boost your website ranking and help more users find your website content. 1. Use Video and Transcription You might...

CSS Grid is here, people are starting to use it, and it’s even referenced by our industry’s latest official buzzword. I could go on about how it’s the future of web design and layout. I could wax lyrical about how anyone not using Grid will be left behind when the Rapture happens, and everybody on Wikipedia’s list of Internet pioneers will come back to take us to the great LAN party in the sky. Comcast (yes, all of them) won’t be invited....

The animation and VFX scene is growing everyday with almost all feature films now containing some clever CGI.  Even the movies with no monsters or other worlds have cleverly swapped out landscapes and beautiful scenery usually changed or added after filming that you would never notice was not real. The United Kingdom has a booming scene with studios such as MPC , Framestore, Dneg, Passion Pictures and many more, even Industrial Light &...

Designing the best user flow for your product is definitely not an easy task. It requires several iterations before getting it right. Creating and updating user flow diagrams has largely been considered a painful process for designers, with many of them skipping it entirely because of this. Presenting user flows to stakeholders and actually getting them to understand and follow the user’s journey might actually be the most challenging...

We spend a lot of time online reading news, navigating websites and using web apps. In some cases, our experience online is not the best that we could have. And all this is due to poor design that didn’t take user experience into consideration. It’s easy to look from afar and notice these errors, but it’s a bit trickier when you are the one handling a project. As designers, it’s our duty to create design with great user experience. And it...

Freelancers go by many names these days. They can be “non-traditional workers” in Canada or “autónomo” in Spain. They can be “self-employed” and “independent contractors” in the US and UK. But, statistically, the trend is consistent. Freelancers now make up 30 percent of the world’s workforce, and the number is projected to grow to 50 percent by 2020. This nuclear growth has been fanned primarily by technology, as an...

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...