July 9, 2015 — Today, Rachel Andrew will be taking a look at how to build a simple yet robust workflow for developing sites that require PHP and MySQL. She’lI also demonstrate a process for using a hosted service to deploy files in a robust way to your live server. By the end of this article, you should be in a position to develop one or many sites locally, using a setup similar to how the site will run on the live server. You will deploy in the confidence that what ends up on the live server is exactly what should be on that server — no more, no less. Once you understand this type of workflow, you can explore how to streamline it further, making time to do more interesting things than fight with servers and hosting! Read more…

July 8, 2015 — What if you are about to start working on a new project which should apply the material design language introduced by Google last year? In this article, Sven Lennartz is here to have your back — with a little selection of handy goodies, icons, templates and tools to help you get off the ground faster. After reading this, you will have a few tools in your toolbox to approach that project head-on, without losing time, and focusing on crafting those websites that your users will love and keep returning to. Read more…

July 8, 2015 — Chris Coyier has published a fantastic post recently covering the debate on the role of CSS in light of growing popularity of React.js, extensively and objectively. That’s the quality discussions we need, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a growing and maturing community. Web technologies are fantastic. Our tools, libraries, techniques and methodologies are quite fantastic, too. Sometimes they contain mistakes, but we can fix them due to the nature of open source. There are far too many badly designed experiences out there, and there is so much work for us to do. It’s up to us to decide whether we keep separating ourselves into small camps, or build the web together, seeking pragmatic solutions that work well within given contexts. Read more…

July 6, 2015 — Our priority as designers must be to solve problems; his is what we do. Responsive web design is a fantastic solution to the problem of creating virtual experiences that adapt to different devices. There are other problems out there that we’re called on to solve, though, not least of which is to make content of all kinds appear interesting and engaging. A page of plain text becomes a beautiful blog post, a mess of unconnected JPGs becomes a professional portfolio. Can we succeed at solving both of these problems? Read more…

July 4, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release a very large icon set: the freebie contains 500 icons in four editable variants: outlined, solid, webby and flat, covering all sorts of various categories. The icons allow you to customize the stroke width and style, not to mention that you can change the color of the elements. They’re carefully crafted on a 60px grid which gives each icon consistency and crispness on all displays. Smashicons come in several styles. The AI and Sketch formats come in four styles: outline for mobile use; solid for hover state; webby for web; and flat for any creative project. The PSD format comes in two styles: outline for mobile use, and solid for hover states. Read more…

July 2, 2015 — Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two highly regarded academics in the field of economics are responsible for much of what we know about heuristics. In psychology, a heuristic is simply a fancy word meaning mental shortcut. We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis; there is no way we could think about all of the pros and cons of each option. Our minds would be overloaded and we would stop functioning. People frequently use heuristics to make decisions; you should use them to your advantage in your design. Here, we’ll discuss four common heuristics that researchers have identified, with examples of how to address them in digital design. Read more…

June 30, 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 July 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 and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

June 29, 2015 — Balancing a composition involves arranging both positive elements and negative space in such a way that no one area of the design overpowers other areas. Everything works together and fits together in a seamless whole. The individual parts contribute to their sum but don’t try to become the sum. An unbalanced composition can lead to tension. In some projects, unbalanced might be right for the message you’re trying to communicate, but generally you want balanced compositions. However, design principles aren’t hard and fast rules. They’re guidelines. There’s no one right way to communicate that two elements are similar or different, for example. You don’t need to follow any of these principles, although you should understand them and have a reason for breaking them. Read more…

June 26, 2015 — Prototyping makes a project better suited to users, elevates user experience, increases the quality of your final code, and keeps clients happy. The problem is that developers often see prototyping as a waste of time. In this article, Daniel Pataki will show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make. While all this seems complex, beginners should be able to follow along easily, including the “create your own server” section, which is a cinch! Read more…

June 25, 2015 — Responsive images have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets. As designers and developers, we have an enormous amount of power to shape how the web works. One of the biggest impacts we can have is to make our websites more performant, which will improve our users’ experiences and even make our content available to whole new markets. Cutting image weight is a relatively simple and hugely impactful way to increase performance, and I hope the information outlined above helps you make a difference to your users. Read more…