This process can be difficult without a bit of inspiration. Thus I’ve put together this wonderful collection of 32 mobile websites. These are all live projects you can visit online either from your web browser or on your mobile phone. Many of the ideas aren’t revolutionary but have taken a long time to become adopted into mainstream. Let us know your thoughts or suggestions in the post discussion area below.
It can be extremely difficult to keep up with these trends. Not everybody can check for new freebies on their own each week and pick up their favorites. So I’ve put together this showcase of 29 brand new freebies released over the past 4 weeks. Grab some of your favorites and see if they can fit into any future design projects.
A brochure design must have a clean and uncluttered structure and must not consist of a broad array of graphic elements just for the sake of giving it a different look. The main purpose of a brochure is to set up a visual amalgamation for prospective clients through the use of images, text and symbols.
Adobe Creative Suite needs no introduction: we all use it, and we all desperately try to keep up with their upgrades and their rising price tags. This week Adobe launched its latest version, CS6, which includes a whopping 19 applications and is divided in four main suites. Like its predecessors, CS4 and CS5, the packaging and graphics have been designed by San Francisco, CA-based Tolleson Design, who have put together a very comprehensive case study with video and behind the scenes here — some of the more relevant images are included in this post.
It’s great seeing so many graphic designers offering free web kits openly. Even 4 years ago you would have had a difficult time finding PSDs for a button set or iPhone user interface. Now there seems to be plenty of resources, almost overflowing! But there’s no complaints here.
As a digital artist I work with user interface kits on a regular basis. They speed up workflow and improve my knowledge of the graphic design trade. I am by no means an expert, but I have built plenty of UX designs and certainly recognize the power of teamwork. A while back we featured the Snow UI kit which offered some great scrollbars and buttons.
Every “creative“ recognizes the name Pantone. And every modern woman that of French Sephora. The collaboration becomes Sephoras Pantone rollout based upon Tangerine Tango, the 2012 color of the year. This point-of-purchase presentation directly echoes Pantone’s brand. CLICK thumbnail for an alternate view. For more on design that parallels Pantone, link to the LovelyPackage site at “Pantone Cosmetics Concept.”
The Web font revolution that started around two years ago has brought up a topic that many of us had merrily ignored for many years: font rendering. The newfound freedom Web fonts are giving us brings along new challenges. Choosing and using a font is not merely a stylistic issue, and it’s worth having a look at how the technology comes into play.
Put down that smartphone; pick up that pencil. Employees are being encouraged by their companies to try visual note-taking to explain complicated concepts to colleagues and clients. Rachel Silverman explains on The News Hub….
There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices? Acclaimed usability pundit Jakob Nielsen thinks that you should make separate mobile websites. I disagree.
There is a real need for serving media that is appropriate for the device and circumstance, since we know so little about any particular web request. I recently posted a blog post with so many images on it the page weighed in at 2.29 MB. I should have posted a warning when I tweeted it: “Don’t click this if on a 3G network, it probably take forever, just check it out when you get home.”
Dana Tanamachi is a graphic designer and custom chalk letterer living in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating in 2007 with a BFA in Communication Design from The University of North Texas, Dana moved to New York City to design Broadway show posters at Spotco—a leader in arts and live entertainment branding.
Ideally, all those images I served up could have had a lower-res version of themselves that display on browsers with smaller browser window sizes and/or slower connection speeds. Even in cutting edge browsers, there is no native way to do this yet. So it’s a good time to start talking about how we want that to work as web builders. Perhaps we can influence how the spec shapes up.
A great logo is not about what one likes or dislikes. It’s about what works. And what we want to determine is: What problem is our client trying to solve? Often a company might want a new logo to freshen up its image, when really it should keep its logo but change its marketing.
Paradoxically, we’ve noticed that many mobile design cycles start with requests for great aesthetics first: “It has to look amazing!” Of course, stunning visuals will attract customers by making a great first impression. However, a long-lasting relationship depends on the quality of each encounter, which is also heavily influenced by how the app performs. An application that looks stunning but performs poorly can damage integrity. Users quickly notice software that is slow or likely to break (whether because of downtime, crashes, etc.), and this impairs both usage and brand perception. Users expect an app to be fast and responsive. If it’s not, it will get poor reviews, low ratings and low adoption numbers.
The visuals in the Twitter app are not as rich as Cookmate’s (which are stunning), but reviews for the Twitter app in the App Store are much better.
Elliot Jay Stocks provides insight into the combination of CSS media queries and CSS transitions. The basic premise is this: you use media queries to design responsive websites that adapt in layout according to browser width, and you constantly resize your browser to see how the website performs, but every time a query kicks in, there’s a harsh jump between the first style and the second. Why not use some simple CSS transitions to smooth the jump by animating the resize? A nice case study.
Watch Adobe Photoshop CS6 details and new features with Julieanne Kost, Photo Gavin, Russell Brown, and Terry White.
by Julieanne Kost
This list is the 15 most incredible WordPress plugins.
In fact the new features of CSS3 allow us a complete control of some properties able to create nice effects without the use of jpgs, pngs or gifs. New properties of CSS3, such as box-shadow, avoid creating pixel-perfect images to make precious your web design.
For a long time I’ve thought about Photoshop (or other image editors) ‘it is an essential tool to develope a website.’ Actually I’m changing this point of view to ‘it is an useful tool to develope a website.’
HTML5 is going to play a big part in the way we web developer for many years to come.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) offer increased flexibility in the presentation of website content. In essence, it just makes everything prettier. Although CSS3 isn’t supported by all browsers yet, it’s becoming increasingly popular because it makes these changes so much easier than trying to get the same effect using something like a Javascript plugin or creating slightly different versions of the exact same image.
HTML5 is the latest version of HTML or Hypertext Markup Language. It is currently only fully supported by a handful of browsers but the next year should see a large increase in usage. It isn’t expected to be completed until 2014, but the features that are available now are a great way to become acquainted with HTML5 and add some cool elements to your website.
A number of years ago we talked about The CSS “Ah ha!” Moment. That is, the moment in which you learned something about CSS that made it click for you and had the feeling of understanding wash over you. For CSS, mine was realizing that every element on the page was a rectangular box that lay themselves out in a particular manner and that I could affect the size, position and contents of those boxes.
More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. Web application interface design is, at its core, Web design; however, its focus is mainly on function. To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that let their users get things done with less effort and time.
