June 14, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release a free set of 40 sports icons in four styles and six formats. Each icon in this set comes in four styles: flat colored, glyph, Google material palette, and line strokes. All icons are included in six formats: AI, PSD, SVG, PNG, CSH and Sketch. Additionally, the line icons morph into four responsive sizes, comprising a unique icon at every breakpoint. That way, details adjust according to size while preserving the icons’ style and identity. The set is still in its infancy with plenty more icons currently in production. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Read more…

June 12, 2015 — The essential property of a pattern is repetition. Because they are continuous, they read like a story. The periodic migration of herds, the transit of constellations across the sky and the distinct features of different terrains are all examples of patterns that create expectations upon which we depend. Designers use patterns based on nature because they are reliable. This three-part series explores fundamental creative strategies for designing effective logos. The first part showed how to use symbols, metaphors and the power of intuition. In this part, Maggie Macnab shows you how to use nature’s patterns in logo design. Read more…

June 11, 2015 — Publishing is cheap. This seduces you, encouraging you to put more and more content online. But you will soon discover hidden costs. Costs that are crippling larger organizations. Dealing with ROT can feel intimidating on a large site. In fact, it can feel impossible. But it isn’t. Often it is just a matter of putting some processes in place to deal with it. If you create a prototype that gives people a sense of how much better the site could be, they are often more amenable than you think. Now is not the time to be timid. Now is the time to confront the ROT. Read more…

June 8, 2015 — Animation on the web has the potential to revolutionize our small bright box. We can go even further than traditional animation because we can accept user feedback and input. With these tools we can throw away the soul-destroying, bleak, dark engagements that govern things like airline ticket purchases. We can bake animation into the core of our user experience process to create dazzling, exciting, and engaging work that pushes boundaries and collectively elevates the medium of the web. We can help people by unfolding scenes like a choose-your-own-adventure that can feel fluid, interesting, and intuitive! Read more…

June 5, 2015 — 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. Read more…

June 3, 2015 — 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. Read more…

June 2, 2015 — 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. Read more…

May 31, 2015 — 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. Read more…

May 29, 2015 — 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. Read more…

May 27, 2015 — 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. Read more…