Tools & Resources articles

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...

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....

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...

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....

Do you ever get bogged down with some of your tools? They work, but you know there’s got to be a better way to do something. Hopefully, this month’s collection has the solution. It’s packed with design tools that are lightweight and functional. 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...

In a step clearly intended to maintain dominance in an increasingly competitive market, Adobe have announced that XD CC (eXperience Design) is being released to the community as a free application. XD is amongst the most well-rounded, reliable, and innovative UX design applications available; by making it free of charge to both Mac and Windows users, Adobe are hoping to make it the de facto choice. Intriguingly Adobe executives are now openly...

Material Design came into the world in 2014, announced at the Google I/O conference. It combined and reinforced many of the concepts of flat design that designers at large had already embraced; it also enhanced it a bit. Material Design was also one of the first major design systems to stray back into skeuomorphic territory with its subtle drop shadows, and emphasis on approximating a tactile or “material” interface. Nowadays, we just...

You can build some pretty cool stuff with JavaScript. And you can build most of that stuff with plugins to save yourself the trouble of coding from scratch. One of the toughest features to build is an image cropping UI. This has to support image uploading from the user, then it has to take that image into the frontend and let the user perfect their crop. After that it passes image crop data to the backend so the image can be cropped and saved. That’s...

If there’s one thing that we all have in common it’s having to use two hands to do anything on own phones. Am I right? Well, lucky for most of us, Opera has just released a new web browser for Android (sorry iPhone users) that makes it easier to operate interfaces with while one handed. One of the worst things to try to do when only using one hand is typing. Specifically speaking, it is the worst when you have to move your thumb all the way up to the top...

Are you one of those designers who loves to test new stuff? Then this month’s collection of what’s new will be a treat! New tools and resources are everywhere this time of year, here are a few that you’re sure to enjoy. 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! FirstSiteGuide...

We can never get enough of the icons drawn by Iconshock, and this awesome free set is no exception. Designed to honor the thousands of animals that are extinct, or endangered, the set depicts some of the creatures we have sadly already lost. Included in the download you’ll find 15 animals that have gone extinct on our watch, including the Chinese Paddlefish, and the Tasmanian Tiger. Each icon comes in three variations: color, filled, and line...

Regardless of what kind of WordPress website you’re running, chances are an RSS aggregator plugin can help you deliver more value through it. RSS feeds give you the option to curate content from multiple sources and share it with your site’s readers. This way, you don’t have to worry about creating original content regularly or risk losing traffic to your blog because you don’t have enough content on it in the first place. In this post,...

Google Web Designer just released its 3.0 beta version for public consumption and testing. Despite the product’s name, you still can’t design websites with it. For those of you who figured that out when it first released—and have ignored it ever since—here’s a refresher: Google Web Designer is an app that makes it easier to create interactive content with HTML5, Canvas, and the like. Specifically, it’s designed for creating...

With free tutorials you can teach yourself almost anything online. But premium video libraries are often much more detailed with pro-level instructors. These videos are very helpful when you’re just getting into web design or development. There’s so much to learn in both areas and it can be super confusing if you’re new to frontend code, backend code, or general UI/UX design. Below are our picks for the best online video libraries for...