Tips to Find Balance Between Personal and Paid Work Before Life Rips You Apart
I am sure all of us have a lot of work to do during our freelance workday or even during the full-time agency job. But I am also sure that most of us have side projects as well. While some can be beneficial for your pocket and experience, sometimes you just want to develop your own tool, write a blog post or design something for friends or do some pro bono work. After eight hours of work, it is highly unlikely that you want to continue doing the same thing at home, so the question is how to manage doing both while still remaining motivated and focused on the goals. Moreover, if talking about what catches our attention all the time – money – personal projects are not usually the ones that put cash in our pockets.
Read More
A Handy Guide to Proper Web Typography for a Successful Design
Basically, typography is the art and technique of arranging typefaces for communication purposes. In other words, typography is a simple arrangement in order to transmit a message, while good typography is the attention to visual accuracy and details, even the small ones. Typography started when writing appeared. The most simple arrangement of letters was also some sort of typography. Nowadays, typography is an element we see everyday and everywhere — Prints, Books, Newspapers and letters, TV and Web. Even the foremost websites were caring about typography, and were trying to improve it as much as possible with the resources available at that time.
Read More
Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Successful Blog
We are all aware of just how fast the Internet grows. The American search engine giant, Google, reports that more than 1 trillion websites were indexed in 2008. Twenty years ago Google only indexed 15,000 new URLs per year. In a stunning report from Mashable last summer we found out that 150,000 new URLs are created daily. While it is nearly impossible to figure out the exact number of web pages out there, it is clear that mammoth is the right word to use to describe the internet in 2012.
Read More
Guide to User Flow – The “Foolishly Ignored” Backbone of Website Design
User Experience, Responsive Web Design and similar terms have made such a serious impact on the lives of web designers that they have almost forgotten the core of website design – User Flow. I hope that we, the web designers, remember that website design is not just about “how it looks” but also about “how it works”! It is easy to get sentimental with your passion – website design – which forces you to jump right into the website design phase without considering the end user expectations. Website designers concentrate so much on the information architecture of a website that they tend to forget the user flows that are the basis of all conversions benefiting the website. We can either give up on end user just for the look (and all other silly adjectives) of our website or start giving priority to User Flows in order to increase the returns from the website.
So, once you have made up your mind that you will break the shackles of information architecture, aesthetic looks, user experience, responsive design and other silly terms then you can start reading further. It is time to design user flows.
Read More
18 Hosted CMS to Solve Your Needs and Grant You Unlimited Jedi Power
When it comes to choosing a CMS, there are a lot of options to choose from. One can go with traditional ones, such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! Alternatively, one can opt for a hosted solution too.
Hosted CMSs tend to be quite popular with designers. While they may not be able to compete with self-hosted ones in terms of scalability, they have several advantages of their own. Apart from included hosting, they also come with A+ grade support from the CMS manufacturer, and thus you know that if something were to go wrong, you won’t be left feeling lost. Secondly, most of them feature intuitive interfaces to help you develop websites easily.
Read More
An Interview with Lea Alcantara: One of the Best Female Web Designers in the World
Lea Alcantara is a web designer who runs her own business at Lealea Design. She was listed as one of the 50 best female web designers in the world. Her article series on The Art of Self-Branding got a lot of recognition from web designers world-wide. She also gives occasional talks on branding.
Read More
Cool Tips and Resources to Make Your Website Tablet-Friendly
Is your website ready for the Tablet Revolution? Unless you are one of those Doomsday Preppers and you’ve been living in your bug out bunker for the past few weeks, you know iPad 3 just hit the market, and people are going crazy over it. It’s only taken a few years, but the release of Apple’s iPad, among all of the other tablets, has created a new HUGE trend that website owners need to be aware of. The Tablet Revolution, as some are referring to it, has cause many website owners to rethink their website design and layout.
Read More
How To Grow as a Designer by Building Your Own Network
Being part of a web design and development community offers you many possibilities and chances for self-development. Each one of us knows about these communities and, at some point in time or another, wished or even was part of one of them. Knowing other individuals in your industry is something I recommend to everybody, as you can get a lot of help from such experts. Communities are not only created around people, but also around offline web design agencies, which give you even a better set of possibilities and a different network that you can use during your career.
Read More
How to Use Squidoo to Increase Your Website’s Traffic
Are you looking for new ways to increase traffic to your website? Have you ever considered creating a Squidoo Lens to help drive more traffic to your site? Squidoo is a really cool tool that’s been around for years, but it’s never really taken off, so a lot of folks have never heard of it.
That said, because it has built-in SEO tools, it’s an amazing tool for search engine optimization and for driving traffic to your website. In other words, it’s a great “top end of the funnel” tool for your website. In this article, we will explain what Squidoo is, the benefits of using it, how to build a Squidoo lens, the different types of Squidoo lenses out there, and finally how you can use it to increase your site’s traffic. If you’re ready, let’s dig in!
Read More
Answering a Designer’s Question: Should I Choose Web or Print?
Print and web are both huge areas of design and mean a lot in today’s world. Print has been with us for more than 100 years and we know pretty much everything about it, while web is a new area of design that became mainstream about 10 years ago. Before this, web design was totally unknown and only experts and developers knew its potential and helped it grow to how we know it today. Both areas of design have advanced so much in the past 10-15 years that they started to cross each others paths and while this can be beneficial, it can also create problems. We will talk about the advantages and disadvantages in this article and also about how the two areas of design differ from a designer’s perspective.
Read More
