As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for May 2014. 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…
With Responsive Web Design becoming a convenient strategy for device-agnostic design, we keep running into annoying technical issues that all those quirky mobile browsers are raising so very often. Inconsistent CSS/JavaScript support, mobile fragmentation and complicated nuances such as device pixels, viewports, zooming, pointer/click events and the 300ms delay. To make sense of it all, we created The Mobile Web Handbook.Read more…
You’ll be able to produce stunning work more smartly and quickly than ever before if you work with people. By sharing assets, constructing files systematically and generating objects using core techniques, the team is freed to focus on crafting concepts and solving problems. In this article, Dan Nisbet will show you how to create a stronger foundation for collaboration, even before the design process begins. He’ll also explore some techniques that are unique to Adobe Fireworks and that have the potential to transform your collaboration.
Read more…
Paul Boag would argue that the single most precious commodity in Western society is time. People hate to have their time wasted, especially online. We spend so much of our time online these days, and every interaction demands a slice of our time. One minor inconvenience on a website might not be much, but, accumulated, it is death by a thousand cuts. On each project ask two questions: “Am I saving myself time at the expense of the user?” and “How can I save the user time here?”.
Read more…
So, does Unity beat HTML5? No, nor is this post intended to answer that question. The purpose of this is to provide insight into what it’s like for an HTML5 developer who strongly sides with the DOM and CSS to get into Unity game development. When Martin Kool’s HTML5 game Numolition was nearly done, he decided to throw it all away and rebuild it in Unity. That turned out to be an exciting and valuable experience, and one that he thought would be worth sharing with other Web developers. Come in, the water’s warm!
Read more…
In this article, Per Buer will talk about cache invalidation specifically to readers who already work with Varnish Cache. To learn more about it, you’ll find background information in “Speed Up Your Mobile Website With Varnish.”
A cache miss depends on two factors: the volume of traffic and the average time to live (TTL), which is a number indicating how long the cache is allowed to keep an object. To have a high TTL, we need to be able to invalidate objects from the cache so that we avoid serving stale content. With Varnish Cache, there are myriad ways to do this. You’ll explore the most common ways and how to deploy them.
Read more…
Users skip or otherwise ignore dialogs, tours, video demos and transparencies. At best, users find them a minor inconvenience. At worst, the patterns significantly aggravate new users who are trying to get into the app. In this article, Theresa Neil and Rick Malley will look at why many common tutorial patterns are ineffective and how you can leverage game design principles to increase user engagement.
Read more…
The best writers often work with an editor (or two), who will help them coalesce their words into something more compelling or easier to understand. Having worked with several editors, Paul Lloyd really came to appreciate this aspect of the writing process. Refinement is an essential aspect of any creative process. As refactoring code can make a program more logical and efficient, editing a text can allow an underlying idea to be more clearly stated, or make a piece more enjoyable to read. And when he heard about Editorially, a collaborative writing tool designed with Web writers in mind, he immediately signed up.
Read more…
You are about to experience truly hair-raising excitement as you get to grips with the intricacies of the hugely interesting CSS timing function, which is a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to CSS animation, and you could well be surprised by just how much you can do with it. For example, they define where an animation accelerates and decelerates, you can break an animation into any number of steps, rather than tweened motion, and much more!
Read more…
We’re moving away from the functional and technical characteristics of the industrial era, into a time when consumers are making buying decisions based on how they feel about a company and its offer. In a borderless world where people are increasingly doing their research and purchases online,companies that don’t take their branding seriously face imminent demise. Enter emotional branding. It’s a highly effective way to cause reaction, sentiments and moods, ultimately forming experience, connection and loyalty with a company or product on an irrational level.
Read more…
