Visual Design articles

If any single tech company embodies the spirit of web-savvy, then it is Mailchimp. Since its beginnings as a side-project in the early-2000s the marketing service has walked the line between creative experiences, and simple usability. Mailchimp is one of those companies that saunters onto the court, lobs a shot over its shoulder, and gets nothing but net. Now, with their latest rebrand courtesy of brand agency Collins (as ever, alongside...

A little less than three years ago, Uber rebranded as the cab-service of choice for dystopian sci-fi pac-man fans. It was a move reportedly intended to recast the startup as the choice of every day people; it actually stripped the brand of all personal connections. This week, a little less than three years longer than it should have waited, Uber have unveiled a far more coherent, far more appealing identity. Designed by the “Uber Brand Experience”...

Hey guys, remember Firefox? Remember the Mozilla Application Suite? That second one isn’t relevant, but everyone knows that nostalgia is an attention-grabber. Now that you’re here, let’s move on with that first item: Firefox. It’s getting a logo change… eventually. The Mozilla foundation wants your help deciding which direction to go. The Firefox logo as we know it was a collaboration by Daniel Burka, Stephen Desroches, and...

Data visualization has quickly become a standard for disseminating information on the web. It’s used across a range of industries, from business intelligence to journalism, to help us understand and communicate the insights within data. Our brains are primed to process information that’s presented visually, making it much easier for us to understand data visualized in charts and graphs than data listed in tables and spreadsheets....

Once upon a time in the long lost world of the 1997 (more or less), a little boy was growing up watching Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, and Xena: Warrior Princess on the weekends. He got a Hotmail account because all of his siblings had one; but he didn’t really know anyone else who had email. Still, the spark was struck, and his interest in the Internet was born. Around the same time, GoDaddy was born; born into a world of wondrous possibility,...

By most terms of reference, 70 years is a long time…70 years ago, copywriter David Ogilvy decided to part ways with his former business partner, Edmund Mather; together, they had made up what was known as Ogilvy & Mather. This decision meant moving from London, where the company originated, to Manhattan, where the name of the company would change to just Ogilvy. Now, as of June 2018, Ogilvy has announced a complete rebranding. For a company...

After years of flat, material and completely minimal styles, the gradient has made a comeback. Everywhere you look, designers are using color fades to add visual interest, create user engagement and just design something that’s worth looking at. If you aren’t a fan of gradients, maybe it’s time to rethink your stance on the issue. To help convince you, we’ve got 10 reasons to love and use gradients in your website design projects this...

Come one, come all! There are new(ish) top level domains for sale, and we’re here to tell you all about them! Okay, for the uninitiated, top level domains are basically those little bits at the end of a website’s home address. You know, “.com”, “.org”, “.net”, etc. If you have a website, you could be paying anywhere from $15 to $10,000 USD a year for one, depending on how popular the keywords are. Well now there are a bunch of new...

A design guide is more than just a document that comes with a new website or brand identity. A good design guide is a work of art in itself and has practical application in everyday design work. It showcases what your project is and aspires to be. It should bring elements of design, voice and even code together in a way that’s manageable, usable and easy to understand. It starts with these six design guide elements that need to be in your documentation....

You’ve seen some of the beautiful bullet journals on Pinterest, and there’s more to this trend than an exercise in creativity. Using a bullet journal can make you a master of the website universe. And it all starts with a pen and paper. For those who aren’t familiar, a bullet journal is a notebook (of any kind) that you use to create lists, calendars and brainstorming notes all in one place. Essentially a bullet journal is a customized planner/sketchbook...

Great designers help teams and stakeholders make better decisions by using questions to identify opportunities, reveal underlying needs, and understand user context. James Dyson, having been inspired by a centrifuge used to separate paint particles from the air, came up with the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner in 1983 after famously going through 5,127 prototypes—the epitome of design thinking. He must have asked a lot of...

Dropbox has launched a controversial redesign of its brand identity, intended to help the SaaS standout in a market increasingly packed with pretenders to its throne. What they’ve unveiled seems certain to split opinion. On the one hand, the previous identity was business-like and sat comfortably alongside other tools in your GUI; on the other hand, that identity is tied to a business model that Dropbox, it seems, no longer aspires to:...

Sometimes your typeface needs to convey feeling as much as meaning, and for that function more designers are turning to dramatic typography. This type of typography is used for more than just legibility and readability (although that is still the primary purpose). Dramatic typography stands out. It reaches through the device screen, demands the viewer’s attention and directs it toward the message it’s delivering. It is an opportunity...

In the last few years, machine learning and artificial intelligence have been hitting the headlines often. The technology has been making progress in leaps and bounds. The physical limitations on computational requirements which once hindered the progress of AI are long-gone. Today, we’re actually pondering a different kind of dilemma: Will machine-learning actually surpass human intelligence in the next few years? Which “skilled”...