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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How does your website look on the Windows Phone platform? Approximately 3% of your mobile users will be using a Windows Phone, so you may need to make sure that your site renders properly. If you’re a developer without a Windows Phone device, you might have to get a little creative to ensure that your websites are being rendered properly. In this article Daniel Herken will point out a few different tools and techniques which can help test websites for Windows Phone even if you don’t have the real device handy or if you are not developing on Windows.
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Are you designing at “Retina” resolution in Photoshop? In this article, Murdoch Carpenter will walk you through the problems he faced in creating Retina mockups to be displayed on a tablet device. He will then explain a way to work that is easier and gives you better performance. This is about Murdoch’s experience with Photoshop, but it could be applied to Illustrator and other software. Throughout this article, he will use the @2x and @3x notation. These represent the Retina buckets for iOS. A great example is the app’s icons.
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Tools are an extension of our hands, and as such, they should be versatile, quick and intuitive. A lot has changed between the print era of offset presses and the digital era of cross-platform screens. Developers have attempted to adapt our tools, but Sketch is perhaps the most successful app in this regard. In this article, Patrick Keenan will not only show you a new tool, but also start you on your way to a new design system. Remember, no matter how good it looks, the greater focus is not on the pixels, but on the user. If your sight is true, all else will follow.
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When it comes to providing pleasure or delight in our websites and apps, animations contribute a lot. But always remember that they must be functional first. In this article, Amit Daliot shows us video examples that show functional animation. The following rules map well to every animation Amit encountered so far. They helped him to assess animations that he saw in interfaces, and they are a strong set of guiding principles in deciding how to add animations to a wireframe design.
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With CSS’ clip-path property you will begin to think outside the box, literally, and hexagons, stars and octagons will begin to take form on your web pages. Once you get your hands dirty with clip-path, there’s no end to the shapes you can generate, simply by tweaking a few values. In this article, Karen Menezes will provide demos referenced to an inline SVG, in order to gain additional support on Firefox. Generating a responsive SVG clipped shape is trivial once you have created a responsive shape with CSS’ clip-path. We’ll look at this in detail later.
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The “learn to code” movement is gaining momentum among designers, but you’d be hard pressed to find a similarly strong movement for other disciplines within a team. Perhaps there should be. We should all be striving to learn, but… what exactly should we learn? Maybe it it’s about learning to communicate and collaborate, to respect the nuances of each other’s craft — and the artistry and reason that they both demand in equal measure — without attempting to master it for oneself.
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