Articles by Paddi MacDonnell

Foundation 6.4 has been released by the team over at Zurb, and while it’s packed with tweaks and improvements that you’d expect from any release, the big news is that the Flexbox-based grid is now the default layout tool. XY Grid The new grid is called the XY Grid, and it’s truly powerful thanks to the underlying Flexbox...

2017 may be off to a questionable start in the world of politics, but at least we can rely on a steady supply of free fonts to buck up our mood. All the usual suspects are still being released, but we’re seeing a lot less in the way of calligraphic lettering and brush fonts compared to 2016, and an increase in serifs. Bold weight...

You’re a designer: you use Moleskine notebooks, the stickers on the back of your MacBook Pro are artfully arranged, there’s a motivational poster hung over your standing desk, and…you wear your hatred of Comic Sans like a badge of honor. Forget the “no bad typeface” rule, Comic Sans offends your very being. The...

When we talk about the visual elements of a website, we are usually referring to images: photos, illustrations, icons, possibly the UI. What we tend to forget is that text is visual too. It is, after all, the visual representation of the spoken word. And text, just like images, can be beautiful or ugly, intriguing or dull, striking...

When I was a kid I was desperate for a Polaroid camera: to be able to take a photo and see it—almost—right away was fantastic to me. With ‘normal’ cameras, you had to wait until you finished the whole film, then you had to take it to get developed, and that could take a week. So, quite often, by the time you got to see your photos,...

It’s that time again. Here’s this month’s collection of the best free stuff for designers. We’ve got fonts, icons, brushes, templates and few extra little tools to make life that bit easier. Browse through, have fun with them, and let us know which are your favorites! Born Born is a rather elegant ‘humanist serif’...

2016 has been one of the best years for type design in decades. The lettering craze has pushed a lot of illustrators towards digitizing their work. There’s a ton of great font software available these days. And with typography now recognized as one of the most important aspects of a website, everyone wants in on the act. In...

Zurb, makers of Foundation, have a reputation for building robust tools that web developers love. They craft effective solutions because they start out to solve problems they encounter themselves. Now they’re back with a brand new, open-source, ES6 JavaScript @mention engine called Tribute.js. @mention is a user interface...

2015 continues to be a bumper year for type design, there have been literally hundreds of quality free fonts released so far this year with fresh designs being released every week. Brush lettering continues to be popular, there’s a strong vintage influence, and happily stencil-inspired designs are making a comeback....

If you are trying to understand why a site is not producing the results you want, the bounce rate can be a very useful indicator of where problems might be occurring. A high bounce rate is generally bad: on the face of it, it means visitors are landing on a page, then leaving without following through on any actions. Or, as Avinash...

Let me say this first: flexbox is easy. Whether it’s because of early-adoption issues, or because we’ve learned to think in terms of floats and blocks, I often hear from web designers that they think Flexbox is complex to implement. But I repeat: flexbox is easy. There’s one trick to understanding flexbox which I’ll...

Color is one of the most significant elements of any design. It creates emotion, guides us through an interface, and reinforces a brand. It’s rare that you find a truly black and white design, more often monochrome designs are dark gray, or off-white. But the effect is the same. Color is literally how we see the world — different...

The Web is a visual medium. The vast majority of that visual landscape is thanks to image files. Whilst plenty can be achieved with CSS, and inline SVG, most sites still need image files. On average, images accounted for more than half of page size last year, and year on year image sizes increase; there was a 21% growth in image...

Parallax scrolling is defined as a site on which the background image scrolls faster than the foreground, creating the impression of depth. That rigid definition is at the root of most of the myths about parallax: it’s not suitable for multiple pages, it’s not suitable for large sites, it’s unusable on mobile, it’s...