Christian Vasile
Christian Vasile is an enthuziastic Romanian web designer currently living in Denmark. He is passionate for the industry and writes about design, usability, coding and freelancing and is a regular publisher here at 1WD. You can follow him on Twitter at @christianvasile or visit his web portfolio by clicking on the link above.
The Grim Future of Web Browsers
Nothing new appearing today in the IT world is labelled as a surprise, because everything moves so fast and at some point in time you start to know when the big news hit the market. With the technology advancing so fast, especially all the mobile devices we call smartphones today part of the mainstream and are, maybe, the most important thing in our lives. So by sending a message from your QWERTY Android device or by playing Fruit Ninja on your latest iPhone, have you ever thought that you yourself are changing the IT world?
Read More
7 Social Media Myths That You Should Bury Deep In The Ground
Social Media is huge today and each week we see lots of new headlines about companies developing their own platforms, Facebook having even more visitors, or Paris Hilton’s account being hijacked on Twitter. These things happen more often nowadays especially because social media is part of our lives and some of us could not imagine their life without it.
For freelancers it might be a bit difficult to handle social media, because of the loads of information on and about it. There are many myths about social media oand I will list some of them here, so you will not have to think about them anymore from now on.
Read More
Top Five E-Mail Marketing Services
There are lots of e-mail marketing services on the internet and it might be difficult to choose because there are lots of options, features and pricing which you may need to consider. People also try to name the best marketing service on the internet, the same as they try to do with the CMSs, but it depends on what needs they have, so instead of looking at each of their features, today we take a look at what is special about each one of them.
Read More
A Short Course On How To Improve Your Website’s Typography
Typography is one of the most difficult things to sort out when designing, especially because with the amount of typefaces a designer can use, it’s almost impossible to choose the best one without spending hours on it. A simple search on Google will show you that there are hundreds of thousands of fonts, most of them even free of charge; and the number increases weekly. This means the decision is even harder to make today than it was last year.
And it is not only about the typefaces available, but mostly about the skills a designer has. There are Universities that teach typography throughout years, because it is a deep field. Knowing alignment rules, kerning, hierarchy and other terms like these is crucial in making your text say something specific.
Read More
Showcase Of Small But Useful Content Management Systems
There are lots of Content Management Systems on the internet and sometimes it might be difficult to choose one of them. Sure, WordPress is leading and Blogspot is following on the second place, but what if you want to have something else? If you are one of the ones who needs an advice, then this article should be perfect for you. Today we take a look at popular CMS all over the web and describe them so that you know which one fits you best. Although I could write about them, I would rather skip WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Blogspot, because everybody knows about them and I do not think they need descriptions.
Read More
10 Easy Steps On How To Create A Good Photography Portfolio
Creating a showcase of photographs is not an easy task and most of the time the photographers have basic or no knowledge of design at all. Moreover, creating such a portfolio in which the images have to be in focus is a tricky task and even the more experienced designers might fail providing a good layout, therefore I thought of sharing with you a list of tips for designing photography portfolios.
The difference between a web design portfolio and a photography showcase is huge. The focus has to be on pictures, not on content, while the normal way of designing, with the header, content box, sidebar and footer changes totally from a layout to another. The more inspired and original you can be, the better your design will be. When you are a photographer, it is very important to have a platform where you can show clients your work – this has the same importance as for a web designer.
Read More
Graphic Design Basics Part 3: Composition
The second article in the series talked about the Principles of Graphic Design and we took a look at concepts such as Balance, Dominance, Contrast and Harmony. Today we go a bit more in-depth with the last episode and talk about the composition and its basic elements.
Read More
9 WordPress Security Tips To Protect Your Website From Harm
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world, used by more than 60 million people around the globe. WordPress hosts more than half of the blogs itself. The popular CMS is used by huge companies and associations in the world such as TechCrunch, NBC, CNN, CBS or the National Football League of the US. There are more than 2.5 billion WordPress pages in the world, read by more than 300 million people daily, while around 500.000 new posts and 400.000 comments are posted each day.
This is huge and shows how important and widely used WordPress is. WordPress doesn’t show signs of slowing down either, so expect these numbers to increase dramatically in the near future. Therefore we also need to learn how to protect ourselves, because there is no popular web technology nowadays not targeted by hackers and robots.
Today I will talk about tips, tricks and plugins to keep your WordPress blog safe from hackers and robots. This doesn’t mean you have to do all of them, but using as many of them as possible is recommended.
Read More
Graphic Design Basics Part 2: Design Principles
In the first part of the series we covered the basic elements of graphic design with shapes, lines, textures and color among others. Today we go a bit more in-depth and will take a look at the principles of design, which are very important to know because they’re what separate the good designers from the amazing designers. Some of the principles we’ll cover today are applied unconsciously, but they definitely exist and we will show you examples from the web to illustrate the concepts.
Read More
8 Techniques To Create An Irresistible Landing Page
A landing page is a very important tool for online marketing and is also known as a lead capture page. The definition of it is a single page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. These pages are usually designed with a clear scope: to sell or make the user subscribe. They are normally extensions of the advertisement link the user clicks on. You can find links to landing pages in social media, e-mail or search engine marketing campaigns and many other places. You can find them all over the internet. With a clear goal of converting the visitors into buyers or subscribers, the landing pages have to be convincing right from the first moment, otherwise they will not lead to the desired purpose.
Read More
