CategoryDesign

September 5, 2019 — In this fourth instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you about Alexey Brodovitch, one of the most influential art directors of the twentieth century. Andy will teach you about Brodovitch’s iconic work and show you how to apply some of his design techniques to the work you make for the web. In this article, you’ll learn how scattering images will fill your designs with movement. Andy will teach you how to mirror pictures and text, and how to carve text into shapes using CSS Shapes. Read more…

August 8, 2019 — In this third instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you how to use frameworks to create layouts as engaging as in the well-known Ernest Journal. All it takes is an understanding of layout design and imagination. Curiosity keeps a creative mind open to new possibilities, and that’s what Ernest Journal magazine — the inspiration for this issue — is all about. Ernest Journal’s design is successful because although each article has its own distinctive elements which connect the visual style with the content, those articles use a consistent grid system and foundation styles. Read more…

July 11, 2019 — In this second installment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you how to expand your repertoire of layouts by combining more than one grid into a compound grid. This article will change the way you think about designing with grids. Read more…

July 4, 2019 — Social media communication is unlike any other. It’s abbreviated. It’s personal. And it’s driven by visuals. Doesn’t that sound a lot like what a mobile website or PWA would benefit from? As you look for ways to improve engagement rates with your designs, consider weaving some social media-inspired elements into them. In this article, Suzanne Scacca talks about drawing inspiration from the abbreviated way in which we talk to others there. After all, mobile websites, PWAs, and native apps give us very little space to tell a story and engage an audience with it. Adopting a social media-inspired design would be helpful in quickly getting our message across on mobile screens. Read more…

July 2, 2019 — Prospective clients are not easy to say “yes” to. You worry that your profit margins will be slim — if you end up making any money at all. But what if there were a site builder solution built specifically for that purpose? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will tell you eberything about Sitejet. With Sitejet, you’ll be able to easily collaborate with your team and customers to build, manage and launch websites in record-time. If you’ve ever felt bad about turning away small businesses, Sitejet makes it possible for you to start saying “yes” to them. Read more…

June 13, 2019 — Through this unique “Inspired design decisions” series of article and webinars, Andy Clarke will change that. In the first edition of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy will “Say hello to skinny columns,” a technique which adds one extra narrow column to an otherwise conventional column grid. He explains how to design with, then implement skinny columns using meaningful markup and efficient CSS. He also explains how to design using modular grids to fill your designs with energy. Read more…

May 9, 2019 — Does the word “influencer” make you cringe? If you’re paying attention to the right ones (i.e. digital influencers), you’ll find that their websites actually have some very valuable lessons for web designers. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you some of the tricks they use to establish authority through design. This post is about giving your website the same kind of clout as a digital influencer — and using that perceived expert status to consistently maintain high levels of traffic, engagement and referrals. Read more…

May 7, 2019 — Software development and maintenance has, generally speaking, been a time-consuming and arduous process for developers and engineers who carry the brunt of the work. However, with the introduction of front-end-as-a-service, and a company like Mason pioneering the way, that could all change. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to give you a closer look at FEaaS, who it’s for and why empowering product and marketing teams with it is a big deal. Read more…

April 29, 2019 — Design involves decisions, and those decisions are often flawed because our brains are wired for survival. The same brain features that literally helped us survive in the wild do not serve us well in the 21st-century workplace. In this article, Eric Olive will identify four decision-related traps that impede good design and offer techniques for avoiding these traps. These decision traps are based on research conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and behavioral economists including several cited here. Read more…

April 24, 2019 — The web is more than predictable compositions of rectangles, circles and triangles. With CSS Grid Layout, CSS Shapes and a bit of art direction we can achieve remarkable results — we just need a front-end strategy how to get there. That’s why we created “Art Direction for the Web,” a new Smashing Book for breaking out of generic experiences on the web. Now we can study the once uncharted territory of layout, type treatment and composition that print designers have skillfully and meticulously conquered, and explore which lessons from print we could bring to our web experiences today. Read more…