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....

With less than 2 months before the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) come into force on the 25th May, tens of thousands of businesses are woefully underprepared, and many businesses outside of the EU do not realize that GDPR also applies to them. Passed by the European Union (EU) to protect the privacy of Europeans’ data, the laws apply to anyone, from Pittsburgh to Pretoria, involved in the collection, storage, or handling of that...

Symmetry is safe. It’s comfortable, non-threatening, and aesthetically pleasing. It can also be very dull. Using ‘asymmetrical balance’ can make things more interesting while still sticking to a grid to keep things ordered. In design, as in so many other things, the higher the risks the greater the potential rewards. Symmetry has long been considered a good thing precisely because it is aesthetically pleasing and unchallenging...

It’s that time of year again: The season of peace, goodwill and ‘what can I possibly get Eric/Joanna/Clare/Michael/insert-name’. It’s the first day of advent, and there are just 19 shopping days left until Christmas! But never fear, if you’re struggling to find the perfect gifts for the designers in your life, we have some creative suggestions for you. Whether you’re looking for the office secret santa, or your very significant...

This week, Mozilla launched Firefox 57—aka Quantum—the biggest update to the browser in its 13 year history. 75% of Firefox’s code has been rewritten for Quantum, 5,000,000 lines of code in total. 700 developers, including 80 volunteers, have contributed to the codebase since August. It is, in effect, a brand new browser. Firefox has always been a cool browser. Open-source credentials and a confirmed underdog status make it the first...

With Black Friday/Cyber Monday just a few weeks away, it’s time to get clients set up and ready to sell. The list of solutions to choose from keeps on getting longer, so how do you pick which one to go with? Start with a list of features that are must-haves for your client, be clear on what their budget is, decide how much development you want to do to get the thing set up, and whether you want a hosted solution, or separate hosting. Once you know what...

With the usual pomp and ceremony of their MAX conference keynote, Adobe have unveiled a whole host of updates to their Creative Cloud suite of applications, together with some almost-new apps. Wrapped up as new offerings are Adobe XD CC, Adobe Dimension CC, Adobe Character Animator CC, and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC. In reality, most Creative Cloud users will already be familiar with the first three: Adobe XD CC has been available in beta...

Adobe shared the results of its 3rd annual consumer email survey today, and while some of the findings are extremely predictable—nobody likes spam—others are downright shocking: for example, business email is 36 times more popular than social message services like Slack. Yeah, let that one sink in… In fact email, that clunky relic of the early days of the web is actually the most popular form of communication online and its popularity...

There are two aspects to designing navigation: How will the content be structured, and how will that structure be presented to the user. Obviously these are not separate, and structure (usually) informs presentation. Navigation involves curation—even though the content that needs to be included may be already decided—how that content is grouped, how the groupings relate to each other, and how the user moves between them, is what makes...

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 technology. In the XY grid you can control layouts both horizontally (x) and vertically (y) thanks to the super-amazing...

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 sans-serifs seem pretty popular at the moment too. There’s also a welcome rise in the number of free non-latin fonts,...

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 infuriatingly omnipresent font is used by everyone, from your grade school teacher, to your grandmother, and every time...

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 or bland, in appearance. The majority of sites out there use purely functional text. In other words, even though...

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, the connection to them was a little more distant. With polaroids, it was there and then. Not only that, the format of...