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Icons are one of the most characteristic elements in many designs; they’re also one of the most readily available resources to be found online, with free icon packs all over the web. Free icons give designers and developers the tools for creating visually appealing demos, user interfaces, apps, and everything in between....

The common belief amongst web designers is that content is king, but that’s not quite true; when it comes to the web, shopping is king. eCommerce nets billions for companies worldwide, as access to global customers means anyone with a quality site can compete with highstreet stores. Unfortunately, building an eCommerce...

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...

When you’re designing for users, and you’re always designing for users, you need to understand them. The problem with user-centered design is that with over seven billion of us, sometimes it’s difficult to pin down exactly what makes us tick. Building a relationship with customers through your sites and apps is essential,...

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading Craig Hockenberry’s short, sweet, and informative Making Sense of Color Management. In the book, Craig points out that while new, Hi-DPI screens present us with more resolution than our eyes can actually see, they’re nowhere close to being able to produce all of the colors that...

If you’re a freelance designer, or developer—heck, if you’re a globally renowned digital agency—you must not do business without binding paperwork; don’t even pick up a sketchbook unless the client is signed up and committed. Every designer has a horror story about the client who seemed trustworthy, and then...

You’re a web professional, so we don’t need to explain the value of a good domain name. Your domain is your identity, and that’s priceless. Sometimes it feels like an appropriate domain name is as hard to find as a unicorn playing an accordion. There’s a few tactics you can use, misspellings and hyphens being the most...

There has always been an innate fear of artificial intelligence in the creative communities, not least in web design. First developers, and more recently designers, feared they were about to be replaced. From Frankenstein to Hal 9000, artificial intelligence forms the backbone of numerous fables about the danger of technology....

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics—often mis-attributed to Mark Twain, the anonymous quote sums up the truth about stats; they can be misunderstood. It’s not uncommon for a single fact about a web site to prove two different truths. Take your site’s bounce rate for example, a high bounce...

Every creative needs a good portfolio. Whether you’re focussed on typography or photography, layout or user experience, your portfolio is what defines you professionally. As with most things, the quality of your portfolio is determined by the appropriateness of the tools you use. All too often we see great work, presented...

Ultra Theme by Themify is the latest word in WordPress theme builders. More than a simple set of styles that most themes provide, Ultra Theme allows you to construct your own designs with a simple, powerful drag-n-drop editor. Taking WordPress into the realm of WYSIWYG site builders, Ultra Theme allows anyone with a rudimentary...

As UX designers, the most valuable tool we have is knowledge of how users are interacting with our products. It’s impossible to design a valuable, and successful site without a deep understanding of how users experience it in the real world. One tool for developing a comprehensive understanding of how your users experience...

Anyone can be a designer: we all know how to match a jacket with a shirt, or pick out a color for a new car, or even just how to stack a burger. Making something look good, is something we all know how to do. What we sometimes lack, is the specialist know-how to make our design vision a reality; especially when it comes to something as...

The life of a designer (or an editor, for that matter) can at times be summed up in these words: the search for stock goes on. That search can also get expensive. And that’s fair. These things take a lot of work to make. The skill and time required to take and edit good photos, create detailed illustrations, or put together beautiful...