Designing a good logo is the utmost in creative problem-solving. The process makes you really think succinctly about how relationships work. The practice of logo design develops your skills of intuition to recognize obscure but effective solutions and teaches you to discover connections that aren’t apparent on the surface. Adding a universal quality to a logo provides the broadest communicative reach, what almost all identities are intended to accomplish. This three-part series explores fundamental creative strategies for designing effective logos. The first part shows how to use symbols, metaphors and the power of intuition.
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Unless your project is structured beautifully, certain animations are a pain to tweak. Just let the client know what your intentions are for the animations, and let the tweaking and finetuning happen in the code of the final product. Until then, you are simply painting a functional and visual picture for the client and developers, giving them a clear view of your vision. Web design transitions and animations are great to prototype in After Effects. In this article, Matt Reamer will be scratching the surface of how to fit After Effects into your UX Workflow, and he’ll share details, advice, experience and links that you could use as influence and thought starters in your next project.
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In Pieces is an interactive exhibition of 30 of the world’s most endangered species. The experience is an informational reminder of the beauty we are in danger of losing every day, but it’s also a showcase of evolutionary distinction. Users are told the stories and struggles of these unique lifeforms, as well as invited to dive into numerical data, download wallpapers and even obtain a poster featuring the entire collection. In this article, Bryan James explores the inspiration for the project and aspects of how different parts were built, and he’ll dive into how you can use this greatly underrated line of CSS for your own projects.
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As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for June 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed with this creativity mission and are still diligently contributing each month.
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The PHP community is big. A lot of best practices have been learned over the years. The bigger the codebase, the harder it is to keep track of all the working parts and their relationship to one another. And you can add to that the limitations imposed by working in an antiquated version of PHP, 5.2. It’s good to always look beyond the walled garden of WordPress to look for answers. With autoloading and a plugin container we are one step closer to better code. In this article Nico Amarilla will explore an alternative way of developing WordPress plugins, using the lessons learned from the greater PHP community, the world outside WordPress.
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Have usability conventions and the web’s universality steered us away from proper art direction? Have we forgotten about art direction altogether? Marko Dugonjić believes so. As designers, we can achieve much more with type, and with just a little more thought and creativity, we can finally start to take full advantage of the type systems available. Let’s look at ways we can push typographic design on the web further, beyond the status quo of today.
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There is a gap between pure CSS layout and custom design elements created in software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. Sophisticated SVG filters give us more independence from third-party design tools and bridge this gap by enabling us to create visual styles directly in the browser.Wouldn’t it be great if we could style letters the same way we usually style text with CSS? In this article Dirk Weber will show you how SVG filters help you to create playful, decorative web typography.
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In this article, Colleen Roller will show us that defaults are powerful because they provide a way for users to passively decide, thereby easing the difficulty and effort associated with decision-making. Also, that providing a default option is not always appropriate. Sometimes, it’s better for users to make an explicit choice — especially when they are more likely to follow through with a decision and be more committed to taking action on it. It’s imperative to understand that the design matters. UX design professionals have a responsibility to understand how design itself influences — and sometimes even drives — user perception and behavior and, therefore, decision outcomes. The decisions we make as designers matter.
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Jeremy Girard loves being a web designer and he’s incredibly thankful that he decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, there have been a number of times during his career when his passion has waned. This scenario is called burnout. Do you find passion for your work an important part of your career? If so, what have you found to be helpful in keeping that passion for your job intact? In this article, Jeremy shares his moments of burnout in his career and what you can do to avoid them.
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Depending on the website’s architecture, you could store the metadata in a category, a tag, a custom taxonomy or a custom field. In this article Carlo Daniele will show you how to let your website’s subscribers decide when they want notifications, and linked to a particular location. Today you are going to add several functionalities to WordPress’ core, and the CMS allows you to declare our own custom functions in the main file of a plugin.
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