Sunday 31 July 2016

Popular design news of the week: July 25, 2016 – July 31, 2016

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Web Design in 4 Minutes

 

How to Code a Scrolling Website

 

Why You Should Delete Pokémon Go Right Now

 

9 Ways to Dramatically Improve your Creativity

 

Marvel Studios Unveils New Logo

 

Hover is Dead. Long Live Hover.

 

Smart Redesign Makes Google Maps Easier on the Eyes

 

10 Professional Fonts for Designers

 

Design Doesn’t Scale

 

25 Must-Have Font Families

 

Bad UX Kills

 

MTV Explaining the Internet in 1995

 

Getting Better at Design is Easy, Just Copy People

 

Twitter Launches New Ad Campaign Because People Still Don’t Understand Twitter

 

You’re a UI Designer. You Just Don’t Know it Yet.

 

24 Headline Fonts to Transform your Designs

 

5 Awesome Design Hacks to Create Highly Shareable Social Media Graphics

 

Site Design: Density.io

 

Appspotr: Create, Preview & Publish Native iOS & Android Apps

 

Prisma for Android: AI that Turns your Photos into Artwork

 

Boltmoji: Usain Bolt’s Emoji Keyboard

 

From 0 to $1B: Slack’s Founder Shares their Epic Launch Strategy

 

Hillary 2016: Hillary’s New App Can Defeat Trump

 

The 38 Greatest Free Web Fonts

 

Designers: Stop Giving Away your Work for Free

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

LAST DAY: Magically Remove Elements From Your Photos with Inpaint – only $9.97!

Source

from Webdesigner Depot http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/07/popular-design-news-of-the-week-july-25-2016-july-31-2016/

Saturday 30 July 2016

Comics of the week #350

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Honorary designer degree

Takes years

Google vacation

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

10 Gorgeous Hand-Made Script Fonts from BonjourType – only $12!

Source

from Webdesigner Depot http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/07/comics-of-the-week-350/

Friday 29 July 2016

Free download: Solaris Eclipse font family

Solaris Eclipse is a beautiful geometric sans-serif, designed by the typophiles at woodstudio.

Based around the geometry of a circle, the simple shapes create a modern aesthetic that evoke the near-future. Perfect for sci-fi, electronic music, or company branding, the typeface is clean, while being packed with character.

The distinct descenders on the lowercase ‘g’ and ‘y’ extend into the glyphs’ counters creating an underlying feeling of motion and energy.

Ideal as a display face, Solaris Eclipse offers designers an original geometric sans that brings with it a distinct tone of voice.

The font comes with dozens of analphabetics, making it suitable for most European languages. It comes in both regular, and bold weights. And it’s free for personal use. Download the files beneath the preview:

Please enter your email address below and click the download button. The download link will be sent to you by email, or if you have already subscribed, the download will begin immediately.

Hot Summer Bundle of 100+ Premium Quality Vectors – only $14!

Source

from Webdesigner Depot http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/07/free-download-solaris-eclipse-font-family/

Thursday 28 July 2016

Looking fast beats being fast

You’d be forgiven if you thought that you had to design your clients’ websites to be fast all the time. After all, in modern, UX best practices, a site has to be fast to reduce the bounce rate, keep site visitors engaged, and keep them coming back.

Users don’t like slow sites because everyone’s used to things getting faster on the web. If they have to wait five seconds for a news site to load, but a comparable news site will load pages in just two seconds, you can bet that the faster site will get the visitors.

However, one very curious aspect of web design is that perception is reality. For your client’s site to please visitors and retain them, it doesn’t have to be fast, it just has to feel fast.

Understanding this distinction can empower you to design sites with great UX and engaged visitors. Here’s how…

Why fast sites matter

It’s not just me saying that fast sites are highly desirable—the data says it too. Moz says that you can improve the conversion rates of the sites you design for your clients if you make them fast.

Case studies bear this out, too: Mobile webpages that are only as much as one second faster than other pages see a 27% boost in their conversion rates. That can be huge from a sales perspective!

Clearly, when sites are faster, visitors stick around longer, become more engaged with your content, and then convert at higher rates.

But visitors don’t sit at their screens with a stopwatch checking the speed of your landing page, no one but you is measuring the actual speed of your site. What matters is your visitor’s experience, which is dependent on their perception.

Skeleton screens

What’s a skeleton screen? A skeleton screen is a blank webpage that gradually fills up with content as the page finishes loading. Skeleton screens are an intelligent and effective alternative to techniques like progress bars or spinners, which trials show create a perception of a slow page load.

Google’s product director, Luke Wroblewski, conducted a case study where he used spinners for a native app’s interface that he was working on. Each time a page loaded, users were greeted with the spinners, which displayed loading progress. The result was that users thought the app was actually slower than prior versions.

This can be explained by the fact that progress bars and spinners call users’ attention to the load process—which creates a perception of slowness.

On the other hand, techniques like skeleton screens call users’ attention to the fact that the page is gradually filling up with content and therefore showing them real progress. By focusing on the actual progress instead of the wait time, skeletons screens make your visitors and users feel like your site is faster already.

Changing up site colors

Colors also have a great impact on the perception of your site’s speed on your visitors. You can make your users think that your site is loading quite fast based on the color that you choose when the page is loading. Choose a relaxing color, and your users feel that your site is actually faster than it is.

According to the Journal of Marketing Research (via Adobe) if you want to make page loading time feel quicker use the color blue on the page while a download is occurring.

There are also other dimensions to color, such as chroma and brightness. The former is a color’s saturation or pigmentation while the latter is the tint that a color appears to have.

Research indicates that low-chroma colors (those that are more subdued) relax users and therefore make them perceive a site as faster. On the brightness side, high-value colors appear as though they’ve been mixed with white; we generally call those pastels. These high-value colors produce more relaxed feelings in your users, therefore helping your site’s perception as fast.

In fact, brightness is the factor that has the most impact on improving users’ perception of site speed.

It should also be noted that research also indicates that more relaxed users in general deliver more positive outcomes for sites, such as more conversions, likes, and shares.

Calls to Action

Simply put, the way you use the call to action on your page can significantly impact how your visitors perceive your site’s speed. For example, if your call to action is buried down at the bottom of a long landing or sales page, so small and hard to read that it takes people a while to find it, or not seamlessly supported by the information architecture on the page, then it will take people longer to find it.

When it takes visitors a longer time to see your call to action, then it can definitely feel that your site is slower than it is. After all, put yourself in the user’s shoes, they land on your page and are trying to make sense of the goal of said page. When they don’t immediately see the call to action button, it’s going to confuse them and take him a while to make sense of what’s going on, which all contributes to a heavy feeling of a slower site.

Therefore, when designing a call to action for a page, incorporate it seamlessly as part of the main page element. For example, Kayak does this well on its car rentals page. At a glance, users can tell that the page’s call to action (the search button) is an integral part of the main page element, which is the search bar for car rentals. As a result, they’re able to quickly understand the whole point and purpose of the site.

Sites that only feel fast still deliver awesome UX

Designers need to always follow the main rule in web design: Design for user experience. One of the best ways to do this is to design for site speed, but, knowing the psychology and behavior of your visitors, you can also design your site to merely feel fast as opposed to actually being blazingly fast.

Don’t treat this as an alternative to building a fast site. While a fast site can be made to feel slow, it’s a lot easier to make a site feel fast if it actually is. Ultimately, what matters is user perception.

Featured image via Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

LAST DAY: The Design Deck – Playing Cards for Designers – only $14!

Source

from Webdesigner Depot http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/07/looking-fast-beats-being-fast/

Wednesday 27 July 2016

50+ fresh resources for designers, July 2016

Hey there! We are proud to return fully stacked with a collection of resources and tools that will make the most out of your web design/development skills. We are committed to bring you the best of the best in terms of freebies, we’re sure you’re gonna enjoy them.

50 vector flat style icons pack

A great set of 50 beautifully crafted flat style icons that come available in PSD, AI, SVG, PNG and EPS format files.

50 Vector Flat Style Icons Pack

70 flat social sketch icons

An amazing set that comes with 70 vector icons in, both monochrome and colored styles, including icons for social media, services, software, and more industries.

70 Flat Social Sketch Icons

Vector avatar generator

A great set of 900 gender-sorted items and 3,400 symbols to generate avatar icons in a nice flattish, outlined style. They’re delivered in Ai format, and organized in 12 different categories.

Vector Avatar Icons Generator

150 isometric flat 3D icons

An amazing set of 150 isometric icons of general purpose items. Inspired by the flat style, and literally taken to another dimension, these 3D icons come in 6 different PNG sizes and include their Ai source file.

150 Isometric Flat 3D Icons

46k Windows 8 icons bundle

An amazing set of more than 46,000 icons designed under the guidelines of Windows 8. They come with source PSD vector files, and 8 size variations in PNG format.

46k Windows 8 Icons Bundle

37 restaurant PSD blocks

37 hand-crafted restaurant blocks, meant to create an impressive landing page for food services using customizable PSD files.

37 Restaurant PSD Blocks

Magic watercolor textures bundle

A collection of different handmade watercolor textured backgrounds. There are 7 different freestyle watercolors, in 4912×3264 resolution.

Magic Watercolor Textures Bundle

True grit’s textures sample pack

An amazing sample pack that includes a bunch of premium, pro-quality textures, vector assets, and brushes. There are 25 bitmap and vector textures, 3 vector halftone patterns, and 10 assorted brushes including dirty, grainy, grungy and worn brushes.

True Grit's Textures Sample Pack

10 incredible marble ink textures

A great collection that comes with 10 marble-like ink textures for backgrounds, in 6000×4000 resolution and 300 dpi.

10 Incredible Marble Ink Textures

Dramatic color grunge textures pack

A collection of 10 JPG images delivered in 3500×2500 resolution.

Dramatic Color Grunge Textures Pack

Gravity business card smart object mockup

An amazing mockup that provides a customizable card design (front & back), shadows, and background. 

Gravity Business Card Smart Object Mockup

50 flat material inspired brushes

A set of neatly crafted brushes for Illustrator that make a beautiful representation of different flat style materials such as ropes, pipes, tubes, wood planks, strings, and more.

50 Flat Material Inspired Brushes

Fuchsia: stylish business card template

A very fancy and stylish business card template delivered in both PSD and Ai formats, completely layered and ready to be edited and printed.

Fuchsia: Stylish Business Card Template

VSApp: mobile & web PSD template

A PSD mobile and web UI kit for delivered in PSD format files that includes a smooth 404 page, bundle sections, slideshows, download pages, and more.

VSApp: Mobile & Web PSD Template

Fade: dark & modern mobile app UI kit

A UI kit for mobile devices, with a bunch of features like an entries editor, music and video player, image gallery and more; all with a green-black color palette.

Fade: Dark & Modern Mobile App UI Kit

Mercatus: mCommerce UI kit

An mCommerce UI kit that has over 120 different screens built for Sketch, with a set of original icons and assets created for the kit. 

Mercatus: MCommerce Mobile UI Kit

FeedApp: modern mobile app UI kit

A great UI Kit for mobile applications based on an app that tracks users moods, from time to time the user can evaluate how they are feeling in 4 different categories.

FeedApp: Modern Mobile App UI Kit

Popo: wide sans font

A beautifully crafted sans font that features wide characters, with a low crossbar design as well as smooth edges and ends for all of its uppercase features.

Popo: Wide Sans Font

Golden Sans: professional multiweight font

A modern high-quality sans font that counts on 7 different weights for its premium version, it supports multi-language features and quite a few glyphs, which make it a very versatile font.

Golden Sans: Professional Multiweight Font

Mercurial: modern wiggly strokes font

A monospace decorative font that features a regular wiggly line on its character’s strokes and that comes with of the full Latin alphabet, a number of accented letters, numbers, and a bunch of glyphs.

Mercurial: Modern Wiggly Strokes Font

SpeedHunter: vintage central line font

A central-lined designed font that features a vintage/retro style that has only uppercase characters, perfect for signs and displays.

SpeedHunter: Vintage Central Line Font

Inflecto: modern sans typeface

An amazing modern sans font, the name of which alludes to its curved design. It was made especially for displays, headers, and big titles.

Inflecto: Modern Sans Typeface

EXO: modern one-page PSD theme

A PSD one-page template meant for company work purposes, using customizable layouts, containing a lot of features like “about us”, “team, history”, and more.

EXO: Modern One-page PSD Theme

Minimal portfolio PSD template

A minimalist portfolio template delivered in PSD format that was made to present artwork or graphic design, containing fully customizable shapes and well-grouped layers.

Minimal Portfolio PSD Template

Pilumnus: fancy portfolio PSD template

A PSD template specifically designed for featuring artists portfolios in a fancy way with a grid gallery and a clever background.

Pilumnus: Fancy Portfolio PSD Template

Fashion eCommerce PSD template

A one-page PSD template designed for building fashion eCommerc websites that counts on social icons, a layered design, a tight-tile and more to see.

Fashion ECommerce PSD Template

Boron: beautiful image blogging WordPress theme

An impressive blogging theme for WordPress that features an image-grid home page, with Ajax content loading.

Boron: Beautiful Image Blogging WordPress Theme

Revolve: modern agency WordPress theme

A vertically scrolling WordPress theme crafted for agency portfolios, personal blogs, business, andc photography. It offers a complete customization, and multiple options for building a website instantly.

Revolve: Modern Agency WordPress Theme

Classic Interior: modern interior design site bootstrap template

An impressive bootstrap template for interior design agencies that comes with PSD files, it features elegant visual effects, and was designed with HTML5, CSS3, and Bootstrap for a clean and responsive feel.

Classic Interior: Modern Interior Design Site Bootstrap Template

Beam: corporate portfolio bootstrap template

An amazing corporate portfolio website template that features a modern and elegant look.

Beam: Corporate Portfolio Bootstrap Template

3D CSS stat graphs

A statistics graph built using pure CSS.

3D Statistic CSS Bars

Fade background color animation as you scroll

A snippet that uses Javascript and CSS to create an animation of a fading background color change as the user scrolls down.

Fade Background Color Animation As You Scroll

Material design interactive lists

An interactive list, using JavaScript to animate the checking and unchecking of items. It also allows the adding of tags to every item for clarity and sorting.

Material Design Interactive Rekord Lists

SVG path transformer

Code that allows the responsive manipulation of an SVG figure created, changing width, height, padding, position and, its full shape overall.

SVG Path Transformer

SVG animated medical icons

Animated medical icons made with CSS and JavaScript.

SVG Animated Medical Icons

DOM deployment to canvas

A script that renders a DOM tree onto a canvas in an aesthetically pleasing manner, it also intends to serve as an educational primer.

DOM Deployment to Canvas

Color-wander: seeded random based generative artwork

A creative tool that generates beautiful artworks in node/browser based on a seeded random which can be used for backgrounds or animations.

Color-wander: Seeded Random Based Generative Artwork in Node/Browser

Botlist: assorted bots store

Botlist is an online app store for bots that accomplish multiple purposes, the search can be filtered, the users can upload their own bots and more.

Botlist: Assorted Bots Store

Solr: open-source enterprise search platform

An open-source enterprise search platform that is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more.

Solr: Open-source Enterprise Search Platform

Horizon: pealtime open-source JavaScript backend

An open-source backend that lets developers build and scale real-time web applications, including convenient APIs and services that make it easy to use modern JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, and React Native.

Horizon: Realtime Open-source JavaScript Backend

JWT Inspector: JSON web tokens inspect & debug browser extension

A Chrome browser extension that decode and inspect JSON Web Tokens in requests, cookies, and local storage. It will be available soon for other browsers.

JWT Inspector: JSON Web Tokens Inspect & Debug Browser Extension

Npm-gui: frontend NPM tasks GUI

A GUI tool for NodeJS-based projects to install, uninstall or search packages, its can easily work with package.json and the node_modules folder.

Npm-gui: Frontend NPM Tasks GUI

Siteleaf: friendly static site CMS

A content management system designed for a better web, featuring integration with existing tools, easy tracking using Github, and an API for your content and much more.

Siteleaf: Friendly Static Site CMS

HyperDev: full-stack web apps developer playground

A developer playground for building full-stack web apps fast, combining automated deployment, instant hosting, and collaborative editing.

HyperDev: Full-stack Web Apps Developer Playground

Opentest: seamless screen, mic, and camera recording for Chrome

A service for Chrome that allows you to seamlessly and simultaneously record your screen, microphone, and camera to store your recordings unlimitedly in the cloud. It also provides you you with direct URL links  for instant sharing.

Opentest: Seamless Screen, Mic and Camera Recording for Chrome

Image visual center tool

A tool that finds the visual center of an image. It calculates a visual weight value for every pixel on the image, and then the algorithm tries to balance that weight in all directions.

Image Visual Center Tool

Formstone: responsive media query events jQuery plugin

A plugin that can track global changes to screen size based on an existing grid system. This is useful when many elements need to be resized at any change to the target screen size.

Formstone: Responsive Media Query Events jQuery Plugin

Cool radial SVG effect slider

A simple, responsive slider, with a radial transition effect powered by SVG clip paths and mask elements. It pops open a growing circle as you click on the arrows.

Cool Radial SVG Effect Slider

React D3 components library

A tool that compiles your code into React components, it also comes with a series of D3 template charts converted to React components for developers who are unfamiliar with D3.

React D3 Components Library

Anypixel.js: software & hardware displays framework

An open-source software and hardware library that makes it possible to use the web to create big, unusual, interactive displays out of all kinds of things.

Anypixel.js: Software & Hardware Displays Framework

OpenShare: customizable social platforms API wrappers

A completely customizable API wrapper for all major social networks and platforms that, unlike other social sharing tools, doesn’t retarget and profit from your users.

OpenShare: Customizable Social Platforms API Wrappers

Holmes: fast & easy page searching JS plugin

A JavaScript plugin that allows you to search text inside a page instantaneously, filtering out all of the non-matching elements.

Holmes: Fast & Easy Page Searching JS Plugin

TensorFlow: open source machine intelligence software library

An open-source software library for machine intelligence. Its vast reach of interactivity makes it applicable in a wide variety of domains.

TensorFlow: Open Source Machine Intelligence Software Library

Anime.js: powerful JavaScript animation library

Quite a powerful animation library developed in JavaScript that allows you bring to life CSS, individual transforms, SVG paths, DOM attributes, and JS Objects.

Anime.js: Powerful JavaScript Animation Library

CloudRail: multi-platform unified API

An amazing multi-platform library that allows you to integrate several APIs into a single service counting on full documentation, easy integration, metadata acquisition, and more.

CloudRail: Multi-platform Unified API

Laura Worthington’s Yana Typeface (3 Font Styles) – only $15!

Source

from Webdesigner Depot http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/07/50-fresh-resources-for-designers-july-2016/