Finding Inspiration in Uncommon Sources: 12 Places to Look - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Inspiration can be a fickle thing. Most designers, when lacking ideas, turn to design galleries to find ideas. But there are a few problems with that approach. The most obvious is that when taking inspiration from similar mediums, there’s a fine line between “inspired by” and “copied”. To some extent, looking at established website designs can also be somewhat limiting, especially if you’re looking for a fresh solution to a problem. Blog Each year brings with it new challenges for web designers and 2014 is no different. In order to meet the diverse challenges that are thrown at you, your fundamentals need to be clear, but that’s not all. You need to be able to predict and identify these challenges and make sure you’ve a solution in place for them. Web design is a domain that was always competitive, but it’s becoming more so over the years. As a designer, your talent will be judged on the basis of whether you were able to face down a designing challenge and come up trumps.
Video Screencasts #130: First Moments with Grunt There are all these tasks that we need to do as front end developers. Concatenate and compress our files. Run our preprocessors. Optimize images. Run tests. 8 Free Tools to Visualize Information on Twitter There’s a lot of noise on Twitter. People use a variety of ways to filter through that noise, from following specific lists, finding like-minded people through third party sites, or using a variety of services and websites to find the information that matters to them on Twitter. Another interesting way to filter through what is being said on Twitter, and better yet, analyse it, is to visualize it. This is certainly not a new idea, and we’ve written about some services in the past that will allow you to do just that. With the world around Twitter constantly growing and developing, it’s no surprise that since then there are a ton more services allowing you to visualize your followers, Twitter stream and your own personal Twitter stats.
The 200 Best Graphic, App & Web Design Tools & Resources Well we’re back at it again making another one of our infamous Top 100 Tech lists (many of which have been shared hundreds of thousands of times), except this time we’re aiming our sights at the world of graphic, app and web design (and we’ve doubled the scope to 200 amazing items). Technology and design are inseparable these days. Designers rely on computers and software to express their creativity and in turn, technology companies like Apple rely on good design for distinction and differentiation (from industrial design to marketing).
6 Apps for Collecting Digital Inspiration The online design community is simply overflowing with inspiration. Every day countless blog posts are being published showcasing 30-100 amazing examples of “insert item here.” Further, CSS galleries like our own contain hundreds or even thousands of great site designs. With all this inspiration being tossed at you all the time, you need a way to catalogue and store it. Today we’ll look at a few tools out there that do exceptionally well at this very thing.
7 Ways to Lower Your Website's Bounce Rate Bounce rate is the enemy of every website — it's the percentage of visitors that come to your page and don’t go to any others within the same site. It can be frustrating and costly, especially if you've invested time and money into SEO and paid ads to get visitors to your site — you don't want that hard work to go to waste once the person hits your page. Businesses need to make sure their first impressions reel in the visitor in order to reduce bounce rate and to keep the person engaged with your brand. To help you combat pesky bounce rates, we've put together a list of usability considerations that can be used to lower your site's bounce rate and improve visitor retention.
A Guide to Inspiration for Writers, Photographers and Designers - TNW Lifehacks Inspiration is just a website away, sometimes you need to know where to look. Whether it’s communities, tutorials, or other forms of inspiration, there’s no end to the ways you can motivate and inspire yourself, and possibly even come up with a masterpiece in the process. While there are links and concepts that are specific to each creative skill, there are a few places just about anyone can go for creative inspiration regardless of what the final product is going to be. By perusing movie posters and album art, photographers can mimic, or build on the concept, while writers can create a story that goes with the image.