The designer’s sketching tools haven’t changed much over the years, but the role of sketches has evolved. Instead of rushing to convert them to a more polished form, designers now often share early sketches with clients. Their roughness suggests that the designs aren’t “done,” which encourages feedback and facilitates collaboration.
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I love Adobe InDesign. For multi-page documents, it’s the most flexible and complete application out there. Yet I remember how counter-intuitive some things were when I was learning it for the first time. Here are some tips I wish I had known when starting out, as well as some answers to questions that others often ask me. This is not intended to be a manual; some good ones are already out there (although I personally learned by doing). Hopefully, these tips will help you make the best of your day-to-day use of InDesign.
If you are preparing a document for print, keep your margins and bleeds in mind from the beginning. Your printer will give you the measurements for the bleed, but generally 1⁄8 inch or 3 mm should suffice. Approximately the same area within the document should be kept free of text and important graphic elements (such as the logo). Set up your document for bleed in InDesign as you create it by selecting the correct settings in the document set-up box.
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We, members of the design community, are on an ongoing quest for knowledge and learning opportunities—anything we can find to enhance our skills and share the precious pearls of wisdom we’ve held close to our hearts. Given that most of us are where we are because of the shared advice we’ve managed to accumulate along the way, tips like these can be powerful tools for facilitating professional growth, which we all strive to achieve. And it helps the community to grow and improve. Thus, they should be not greedily hoarded, but rather openly shared.
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We recently turned to our beloved followers on Twitter—as we like to do from time to time—to help us demonstrate one of the greatest things about the online design community: its willingness and eagerness to pay knowledge forward. We asked our friends in the community to share their favorite design tip with us, and they responded en masse. There were so many fantastic responses that we felt it would have been a wasted opportunity if we didn’t compile them for our readers and discuss them with the community at large.
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A good design considers each UX factor along with users’ needs to exceed users’ expectations and create meaningful interactions. Find here models and paths to help you make better designs.
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Unfortunately, for every person who is obsessed with even the tiniest details of typography, a dozen or so people seem to be indifferent. It’s a shame; if you’re going to spend time writing something, don’t you want it to look great and be easy to read?
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One of the main changes from HTML4 to HTML5 is that the new specification breaks a few of the boundaries that browsers have been confined to. Instead of restricting user interaction to text, links, images and forms, HTML5 promotes multimedia, from a generic <object> element to a highly specified <video> and <audio> element, and with a rich API to access in pure JavaScript.
Native multimedia capability has a few benefits. For instance, end users have full control over the multimedia. The native controls of browsers allow users to save videos locally or email them to friends. Also, HTML5 video and audio are keyboard-enabled by default, which is a great accessibility benefit.
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When it comes to designing in Photoshop, there is a myriad of ways one could use to achieve a certain result, especially when it comes to photo retouching. Designers use technique they are most confident as well as comfortable with, which is great because it’s always useful to peek into the workflow of our colleagues and learn new design approaches. We have had articles on cloning, compositing, masks and obscure Photoshop time-savers in the past. This article is different. [Updated May/02/2017]
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Plugins are a major part of why WordPress powers millions of blogs and websites around the world. The ability to extend WordPress to meet just about any need is a powerful motivator for choosing WordPress over other alternatives.
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User experience design for the Web (and its siblings, interaction design, UI design, et al) has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice. Wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies, mockups and the ever-sacred specifications document (aka “The Spec”) helped define the practice in its infancy. These deliverables crystallized the value that the UX discipline brought to an organization.
Over time, though, this deliverables-heavy process has put UX designers in the deliverables business — measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design. Designers have become documentation subject matter experts, known for the quality of the documents they create instead of the end-state experiences being designed and developed.
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