Design articles

A design portfolio is an excellent way to demonstrate your skills as a freelancer. As a web designer, you compete with millions of other web designers. Therefore, you must have a strong portfolio to land a high-paying web designing job in such a competitive space. A strong portfolio sets you apart from others. Having no clients, however, can make it challenging to get your portfolio noticed and build up any momentum. People typically build...

Jakob Nielsen’s How Users Read on the Web is 25 years old this week, and one glance at an eye-tracking study will tell you its key observations are still relevant today. Simply put, users don’t read a web page; they scan it for individual words and sentences. A typical pattern shown in eye-tracking reports is that users will rapidly scan a page, scrolling down to do so. Then either hit the back button and pump your bounce rate, or scroll to...

If you’ve worked directly with a client, then on more than one occasion, they’ve probably come to you and said something like, “I know exactly the design I want, and here’s how I want you to do it…” This might seem great at first because you feel like you have a clear vision of what the client wants, and you could probably create something that meets their needs quickly and efficiently. You feel like you could almost go straight to designing...

What stands out as an incredible web design project for you? Do you count your creation as a success if it’s modern, minimal, and accessible? Maybe you’re the kind of designer that’s constantly experimenting with the latest dynamic design tools or state-of-the-art technology. Perhaps your websites are vivid, animated, and brimming with unique components? Sometimes, creating the ideal design means thinking carefully about what...

Every year, at this time, blogs like this one like to try and predict what’s going to happen in the year ahead. It’s a way of drawing a line under the archive and starting afresh. A rejuvenation that, as humans, we find life-affirming. Ten years ago, I would have had high confidence in these predictions — after all I was eventually right about SVG adoption, even if it took a decade. But the last few years have shown that web design is tightly...

A few days ago, the big tech news was that Jack Dorsey was stepping down from his role as Twitter CEO to focus on Square, the payment processor he founded in 2009. Two days later, it was announced that Square will now rebrand under the umbrella of Block. Like Meta and Alphabet, Block is a parent company — Square will remain Square, just as Facebook is still Facebook. The only actual product name change is that of Square Crypto will now be known as...

It’s normal to pull up sharp in front of a problem; after all, if there was a known solution, it wouldn’t be a problem. But knowing that it’s normal, doesn’t make encountering problems any less frustrating. So how do we avoid sitting in front of a UX problem for hours, achieving nothing? That’s what creative problem solving is all about. In this post, we’ll explore creative problem solving, and how it can help you as a UX designer....

As a web designer, you’re responsible for a lot of things. Your client is relying on you to ensure that their website is user-friendly, accessible, eye-catching, and even good enough on the back-end to capture the attention of the search engines.  However, what many business leaders and clients don’t realize is that they also have a part to play in ensuring that they get the right results from their site; there’s more to the client...

From 45,000-year-old cave paintings to 21st-century space rocket diagrams, illustrations have long played a significant role in human communication. Pictures cross-language and literacy barriers, allowing people to understand and communicate complex moods and feelings that they cannot in words. When we were little, we could understand and appreciate E.H. Shepard’s illustrations of Winnie the Pooh and friends long before we could...

What makes a company special? There are hundreds of organizations out there selling fast food, but only one McDonalds. You’ve probably stumbled across dozens of technology companies too, but none of them inspire the same kind of loyalty and commitment as Apple. So why do people fall in love with some companies more than others? Most of the time, it comes down to one thing: brand essence. Your brand essence, or brand identity, represents all...

Have you ever wondered why we’re so amazed by motion? A moving image is more likely to grab your attention than a static one. Motion is exciting and attention-grabbing – plus, it allows us to access more information in a short space of time.  For a while now, companies have been experimenting with all kinds of motion and animation in their design choices. We’ve seen the rise of animated website backgrounds or live-playing videos instead...

Web design is an ever-evolving field. Those of us that have been in the industry a long time (i.e., six months plus) have seen the launch of more products, the establishment of more ideas, and the promise of more growth than most industries see over a whole career. While the tools we use, the terminology we employ, and the goalposts we shoot for are constantly changing, core skills are transferable and long-lasting and will ensure you not only...

Typography is one of the most important elements of any site, having a measurably large impact on brand and experience. So fundamental is it that making wholesale changes to your typography — opting for a new font, changing the measure, increasing leading — is complex and fraught with potential time-sinks. But there are some simple changes that you can make to your typography that won’t break your grid and can be achieved in 30 minutes...

The Beazley Design of the Year for 2020 has just been awarded to US architecture firm Rael San Fratello & Colectivo Chopeke for their Teeter-Totter Wall project, a series of luminous pink seesaws built into the US-Mexico border wall in July 2019. The 74 shortlisted entrants for the prize range from a poster for vegan burgers to a parody of Pantone’s Color of the Year. Most were self-consciously political. As design has grown in stature,...