Some of us were born with this feeling of what feels and looks right. But other people also have a gift of aesthetic feeling, a gift to recognize beauty. Ordinary users, then, just like designers, recognize beauty and know what’s right and not right. This is not where the problem of handing over creative control arises. The problem is that they don’t know the principles that designers do. But there is a way. We can guide users simply by limiting their creative control, which also makes for a simpler tool.
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“What is the best career advice you’ve ever received?”. Throughout his career, Jeremy Girard has received plenty of advice. But after thinking about that question (from one of his students) for a week or so, Jeremy Girard came up with four pieces of advice that he received early in his career and that were invaluable to him as he was getting started in this industry but that are just as relevant and useful to him today.
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Z-index is an inherently tricky thing, and maintaining z-index order in a complex layout is notoriously difficult. With different stacking orders and contexts, keeping track of them as their numbers increase can be hard — and once they start to spread across CSS files, forget about it! Because z-index can make or break a UI element’s visibility and usability, keeping your website’s UI in working order can be a delicate balance.
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Gulp is one of quite a few build tools available in JavaScript, and other build tools not written in JavaScript are available, too, including Rake. Why should you choose it? Gulp is a build system that can improve how you develop websites by automating common tasks, such as compiling preprocessed CSS. In this article, Callum Macrae will see how you can use Gulp to change your development workflow, making it faster and more efficient.
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As designers, we must understand the role of momentum in effective user interface design and create experiences that keep our users moving forward. How do you know when your design has enough friction to be understood but is not overly complicated? In this article, Martijn van Tilburg considers different design scenarios and how to manage the user’s momentum by speeding up or slowing down their flow according to the situation. He will also discuss a framework for thinking about friction in your next design and when to be strategically innovative in order to maintain momentum.
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In this third part of the series, Joseph Zimmerman will be taking a gander at how Marionette helps make views better in Backbone. Marionette extends the base View class from Backbone to give us more built-in functionality, and to convert all of the common code down to configuration. Some things may be mentioned in this article that refer to the previous articles, and this is part of a series about Marionette, so if you wish to learn about Marionette, you should read the whole series.
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Almost anything you can do through Fireworks’ interface can also be achieved by writing a simple JavaScript extension. Dmitriy Fabrikant learned to develop Fireworks extensions by writing the Specctr plugin. While working on Specctr, he had witnessed Fireworks’ passionate community actively support the app (Sadly, Fireworks CS6 is the last major release from Adobe). Now that we can’t expect Adobe to add any more features to Fireworks, the ability to extend the app becomes even more important, because many designers still rely on it, and through extensions, new features and panels can be added. This article is aimed at those interested in developing extensions for Fireworks.
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Creating a typeface in a day is possible, but it takes months or even years to finish all of the glyphs and for testing and production. When one writes by hand, every letter is a little different. In this article Harald Geisler would like to share a hands-on overview of his creation process of creating a handwriting font inspired by the Sigmund Freud typeface. Handwritten text shows a personal side of its author, one that contrasts with the standardized look of digital communication. This contrast is perhaps what makes handwriting fonts so popular. Harald hopes you find this to be a helpful introduction to creating handwriting fonts.
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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 2014 that 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.
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Unfortunately your website will never be completely unhackable. It’s crucial to take preventive measures and regularly improve your website’s security, but responding accordingly if your website does get hacked is equally important. In this article, Daniel Kanchev will provide a simple seven-step disaster-recovery plan for WordPress, which you can follow in case of an emergency. He’ll illustrate it with a real hack and specific commands that you can use when analyzing and cleaning the website.
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