Building Better Interfaces with SVG by Sara Soueidan. How to Create a Web Navigation Model - Tuts+ Web Design Article. A “navigation model” describes the paths to each user goal on a website. Usually your product will have more than one user, and each user may have multiple goals, so models like this can be pretty extensive. Creating a navigation model is also an opportunity to review any existing content you may have and understand the context in which you will be creating the structure.
As a web designer it’s your job to help users find their way to what they’re looking for. It can be easy to put the needs of your users to one side, but knowing your users, understanding their roles, goals, motives and behavior will confirm how you structure your navigation model. A well designed navigation promotes discovery. In this article I’ve put together a guide on how to create a navigation model, so that your interaction design supports the goals of the user, your client and other stakeholders involved in the project.
Before going any further, create a user persona. Do your homework. Role: Dog Owner. Free Pattern Generators: Here’s 8 Tools You Want To Bookmark. Patterns are widely used in web design as a background. Basically, patterns can be defined as graphics used in repeated form on a field. If you find yourself facing difficulties in creating natural patterns, that’s cause it is quite complicated to create a loop that works both vertically and horizontally, well, at least it’s difficult to do manually. Fortunately there are many tools that you can use to make beautiful pattern easily and we are listing 8 of these that can be found online. Plus, they are free for use.
Recommended Reading: Creating Long Shadow Effect Easily With Long Shadow Generator 1. Patternify lets you create patterns by drawing them pixel by pixel and is a good tool to create really small-sized icons. 2. Gerstnerizer may give you colorless patterns but it makes up for it with patterns generated in lines. 3. If you like criss-cross horizontal and vertical patterns, then Tartanmaker is the tool for you. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. This Site Has All the Dummy Text You'll Ever Need. Using dummy/filler text is sometimes necessary in order to completely show the characteristics of a design mockup to clients.
Lorem ipsum has been the go-to solution since the 1960s. Today, there are many dummy/filler text generators to choose from, so you don’t necessarily need to use Lorem ipsum. There’s, for example, Corporate ipsum which is based off of business terminologies. Or Cupcake ipsum for those who love baked goods. The site called Meet the Ipsums features over 50 dummy text generators in one convenient web page. Here’s what Corporate ipsum looks like: Collaboratively administrate empowered markets via plug-and-play networks. Here’s some Batman ipsum: Hero can be anyone. Meet the Ipsums is a handy resource to have around whenever you need some filler text. 5 Mobile Design Trends That Can Teach Us Something.
There are so many apps within the App Store and there are so many more on Google Play. It’s hard to tell what the up and coming design trends are but it’s significantly easier to pick five current trends and analyze them. Let’s see how color, innovative ideas and simplicity of current apps can teach us a thing or two about mobile app design. Color in Apps Color has always been part of design by default. However, recently may apps use color as the basis of the design rather than just accents. Color greatly affects the overall experience of an app by setting the mood. This can be clearly experienced when you compare a colorful app to one that is mostly white. Take a look at apps like Rubie, Sky, Rise or Peek. At the same time, there are apps like Sky and Rise that embrace gradients made up of vivid hues.
Simplicity of UI Many apps have embraced simplicity and clarity within their design; it’s really delightful to think about this. Take an app like Product Hunt or AirBNB. Innovative App Ideas. ZorroSVG - Put a Mask on it. 10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples. Keeping It Simple Page layout is equal parts art and science. Creating something that’s visually attractive and unique takes an artist’s eye. However, there are several very easy to follow guidelines that you can use to create solid layouts that work for any number of cases. These principles include choosing and sticking to an alignment, structuring your whitespace properly and highlighting important elements through size, positioning, etc. Designers often stress out far too much about the layout process. We have a tendency to approach a project while thinking that it needs to be completely unique in every respect to be worth our time and the client’s money.
However, if you have a good look around the web you’ll see that this isn’t necessarily the case. In this article we’re going to take a look at ten very common layouts that you can find on countless sites across the web. If you’re a web designer, bookmark this page and come back the next time you get stuck laying out a page. North/north. Complete Beginner's Guide to Information Architecture - UX Booth | UX Booth. Information architecture is a task often shared by designers, developers, and content strategists. But regardless of who takes on the task, IA is a field of its own, with influences, tools, and resources that are worth investigation. In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture really is, and why it’s a valuable aspect of the user experience process. Along the way we’ll share the history, contributors, and tools often used in creating an information architecture. Even if you’re familiar with the discipline already, you can probably pick up something you’ve missed.
What is Information Architecture? Information architecture is a more difficult field to define than many others. The Information Architecture Institute is a non profit organization dedicated to furthering the field of information architecture. Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for, in the real world as well as online.
Common Methodologies. InDesign Help. Web Design Blog | Resources for Web designers and Graphic Designers. 25 Effective and Vintage Retro Web Designs. Vintage and retro designs add a sense of nostalgia to your website. Effectively incorporated, a vintage look can create a connection between a visitor’s memories of and longing for “the good old days†and your business.
Fortunately, the previous decade’s design and theme palette offers a variety of concepts that can be used in almost all businesses today. Yesterday’s themes coupled with today’s more sophisticated image enhancement capabilities make for a hard-hitting nostalgic interface. Just choosing the right picture can take your design years back and make all the difference in recreating a bygone era. Opting for a sepia toned image can be as captivatingly nostalgic as their more vividly colored counterparts, and sometimes even the simple use of the right fonts can give your design the retro feel you want for your site. Here are some excellent retro and vintage websites that are effective as well as visually appealing. Retro Edge Web Design Vintage Shabby Chic Target Scope. Web Design - Website Design Tutorials, Articles and Free Stuff. Powerful Workflow Tips, Tools And Tricks For Web Designers. Advertisement Designing and developing can be time-consuming, especially when the project involves a new challenge, putting the team or freelancer into unknown territory.
Moreover, time is a key factor in productivity. Working efficiently enables us to deliver better value at a competitive price. However, some steps can be repeated for every project. These are steps we know and should make as quick as possible in order to have more freedom to experiment with new solutions. This article presents a collection of tools1, tips and tricks2 that will make your standard workflow as fast and practical as possible, so that you have more time for the exciting parts of the project.
Ready? Tips And Tricks Design Workflow “My Secret for Color Schemes3” Erica Schoonmaker shares her trick for matching up colors and creating a nice color scheme. Useful Aligning and Spacing6 Kris Jolls creates squares for the various spaces he has between elements. Coding Workflow “The JavaScript “Ah ha!” OS Productivity Tools. Getting Started With Go/No-Go Decision Making. Your R&D team has come up with an awesome prototype for a widget that has more bells and whistles than the iPhone—and can also do your grocery shopping and pick up the kids at school. Won’t everyone want one? Of course they will! But developing the widget will cost a great deal of money, marketing and distribution will be challenging, and of course you’ve got some pretty stiff competition.
It’s a great widget, but should you move forward with full scale development and production? You just heard from one of your account reps that there’s a terrific opportunity for your company to respond to a Request for Proposal from a major client. The project is huge, the budget is equally impressive—and the work is right up your alley. These sorts of situations are what make management interesting—and they’re also the reason why you make the big bucks. In other words, while it would be awesome to just go with your gut (and many managers do!)
Not every question requires a go/no-go analysis. 50 Style Guide Tools, Articles, Books and Resources. When you get started with the process of creating and applying your own Style Guides, be aware that you're not on your own. Style Guides have been around for a while now so there is a mountain of useful information available. You can learn a tremendous amount from examining what's already out there. There are also several great tools and resources you can put to work in your projects, the majority of which are free. In this article we're rounding up all the Style Guide material you have at your disposal. Note: As you will have read in our introduction to this week's Style Guide series, sometimes the term "Style Guide" is used interchangeably with other similar terms. Take a look at these excellent articles and tutorials on working with Style Guides: Style guide Wikipedia entry A great primer on the classical definition of Style Guides.
Maintain Consistency With a Website Style GuideTuts+ Aaron Lumsden takes us through creating a Style Guide. OSX Human Interface Guidelines Oli.jp Yahoo! A Super-Quick Introduction to Style Guides. This week the Tuts+Web Design team is bringing you an in depth series of pieces on the wide world of Style Guides and all the moving parts that go along with them. The term "Style Guide" is very broad and can encompass several different areas, potentially covering everything from company branding, to interface design, to coding methodologies and more. To get the ball rolling on our Style Guide week we're going to simplify things a little bit. Let's start with the most fundamental question: what is a Style Guide? In a nutshell, a Style Guide is a set of standards that apply to the creation of text or design based assets for an organization, a publication, or a field.(1) It is a comprehensive reference of DOs and DON'Ts which ensure content is produced in a consistent manner, in keeping with the goals of that organization, publication or field.
The types of assets Style Guides can relate to vary widely, and outside of web design can cover everything from print material to apparel. Skitterphoto | Free to use, high quality photographs -updated daily- Style Tiles: An Alternative to Full Design Comps. If you're like me, you'll agree that the initial design phase of a project can be time consuming, fraught with frustration and rarely meets client expectations at the first approval meeting. What if there was a better way to approach things? With Style Tiles, the newest kid on the design-methodology block, there is. Some say that the days of creating full mockups for webdesign projects in Photoshop are dying, if not outright dead.
Others are saying that designing-in-the-browser isn't all that it's cracked up to be either. But are we all getting ahead of ourselves? Maybe it's not the tool that we should be looking at but the entire way that we go about designing a new site and managing the client approval process. In this tutorial, we're going to be taking a close look at Style Tiles — a new way of thinking about the initial design stages, a design approach coined and conceived by the inimitable Samantha Warren.
[Style Tiles allow you to]... Ready to learn more? What Are Style Tiles? 10 Ideas for Creating Innovative and Unique Web Designs. I am a big fan of Twitter. I consider it the one tool that helped me develop from a person who simply knew how to make websites to a web designer because the exposure to fantastic designers, tutorials, recommended readings, and impressive examples helped me build my design toolset and grow my abilities on both a technical and creative level. So whenever someone asks my advice on how to become a better designer, things such as social networks (like Twitter and Facebook), design galleries and RSS feeds are at the top of my list of things that you should be using to learn and improve.
With that said, I think it is important that we take all of these things in moderation and limit our consumption of design tutorials and sources of "inspiration". While all of this is a great method for keeping up with the design community and making sure you’re using the latest and greatest methods and standards, I find it a poor formula for sparking true creativity and innovation. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Web Design Blog, Graphics & Design Resources | Web Design Habits. Color.hailpixel.com · Swatch you doing? Mobile Boilerplate: A best practice baseline for your mobile web app. HTML color codes and names. HTML color codes are hexadecimal triplets representing the colors red, green, and blue (#RRGGBB).
For example, in the color red, the color code is #FF0000, which is '255' red, '0' green, and '0' blue. These color codes can be used to change the color of the background, text, and tables on a web page. Major hexadecimal color codes Below are some of the common color names and codes. With these colors, you can also use the color name. For example, in HTML tags and CSS that use color codes, you could use "red" instead of "#FF0000".
Color code chart Tip: Use our HTML color picker if you need to choose from an almost infinite variety of colors. Blacks - Grays - Blues - Greens - Yellows - Browns - Orange - Reds - Pinks - Purples. Color Hex Color Codes. How to Architect a Better Site-Map. The site-map is often the first point in a design process, when all the research and considerations start to form into something tangible; something you can put in front of your client and say “this is the plan”.
The site-map is the architecture, the frame, or at least the foundation, which defines how people see, navigate and experience a system of information, and functionality. So, I’m sure we can all agree, it’s worth getting this right. Site structures can be changed and updated over time, and this is undoubtedly a great opportunity to constantly respond to changing needs. It is important however to properly research and consider your site-map from the outset. To think about how your content will be grouped and categorised.
There are a few potholes that can be easily avoided and some simple methods you can adopt to achieve a better site map from the start. Bad Habits Die Hard I see two negative patterns which seem to recur in site-map design: Client Goals and User Needs … and Content.