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 October 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
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While a good measure does improve the reading experience, it’s only one rule for good typography. Another rule is to maintain a comfortable font size. Designing on a desktop or laptop browser means that we are spending most of our time at an arm’s length from the text, and we don’t spend much time seeing how the text renders on small devices. A good font size (not too small) is readable. A good font size (not too big) promotes horizontal eye motion. A good font size with the proper line height will help your readers find what they’re looking for.
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At Typeform, David Okuniev was inspired to simplify online forms by a movie that’s decidedly a blast from the past: the 1983 film WarGames, which centers around a student who remotely logs into a research computer and, through its terminal interface, nearly sparks a nuclear war. Stripping forms down to their basics and building them back up into something better took four years of work, but that core idea guided the team all along: questions are better than lists. In this article you will find David Okuniev’s story of how he turned that idea into a product that’s helped companies of all sizes get a 55% completion rate on their forms.
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It’s easy to get lost with so many options for hosting your website. You have quite a lot to choose from! How much should you pay? Is support important to you, or are you a tinkerer who likes to do your own thing? Hopefully, reading this article will help you have a clearer picture of the different packages available, and you will be able to make a decision based on your website, requirements and budget!
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As much as we aim to design our mobile apps and websites for contextual use, testing their usability in context can be challenging. One approach to mobile testing is participatory design. A participatory design test session typically takes about an hour and has four parts. In this article, Marina Lin conducted this type of study while researching how visitors to Cars.com’s app use their mobile device while purchasing a car on a dealer’s lot.
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Icon design is a very specific skill that overlaps illustration, screen design and, of course, visual design. An icon designer needs to understand lighting, proportions and, most importantly, the context of the icon itself. Is the icon you are designing going to be used on the web? Perhaps in a mobile app? Somewhere else? These are the questions that icon designers must asks themselves before starting work on a project. The answer will affect the icon’s details, reflections, shadows, background and many other features.
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Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, Ala Ramildi and René Keller will share some insights on how they built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript! PixelMogul is the first game that they created entirely in house. Adobe AIR and Starling made it possible for them to carry over their experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform and to focus on development. The fast-growing and active Starling community was a big plus, too. They would definitively go the same route for another project of comparable scope.
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Showing that some things are the same and some are different is the first step in visual communication. It’s the primary way that viewers derive meaning. Contrast and similarity have different functions. They are used in varying degree and in combination. You’ll always see some of both because neither exists without the other. Changing one means also changing the other. They are clues to design elements. The goal is to contrast similar layers. The way we structure contrasting and similar elements creates hierarchy, flow and compositional balance.
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Dammed up inside our heads are creative waterfalls of fresh interactions, transitions, and animations. But how are we supposed to communicate them to our teams, our developers? How do we get them out of our heads? Through a game of charades? Not being able to “show” the interactions and animations that bring our designs to life is one of the common struggles plaguing our industry. Exacerbating the urgency of this challenge is the simple fact that we now design for screens that can be tapped, pinched, swiped, zoomed, and more.
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The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
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