It is a common practice to mix and match typefaces in order to find the perfect pair for a website. As a rule, designers choose one font for the header and another one for body text. The first one is fancy and bold in order to make the…
Specky Boy
Weekly News for Designers № 488
Debugging CSS Grid Part 1: Understanding implicit tracks – Learn the difference between explicit and implicit grid. Understanding grid placement through building a HTML periodical table – A fun demo that teaches the tricks behind CSS Grid placement. Animating Links – Ways to add some cool effects to…
Why I Charge the Same for Building Websites Designed by Someone Else
As a web designer, the vast majority of my new projects are original creations. The process goes a little something like this: I create a mockup, make revisions until my client is happy, then move on to building the website (usually with WordPress). But there are occasions…
How Many WordPress Plugins Are Too Many?
It seems like one the existential questions of our time – at least, for web designers. But for years, many of us have been trying to figure out the “right” number of WordPress plugins to use within a website. I hate to break it to anyone who likes…
Top 15 Tools and Resources for Web Designers and Agencies Sponsored
Design trends come and go. This makes it imperative for web designers and design agencies to keep a close watch. They need to know the tools and resources they’ re using to make certain everything is up to date. Your tools and resources might appear to be keeping up…
10 Free Online Education Landing Page Templates (AI & EPS)
Today, we have for you a fantastic collection of landing page templates for creating online education websites. Each of the ten templates comes with a unique education-related illustration, a beautifully flat color scheme, and all of the templates have been designed with simplicity in mind so are all…
Things That Come Back to Haunt Web Designers
Making mistakes is part of the human experience. They go together like pizza and breadsticks. But the beauty of a mistake is that you have a chance to learn from it. Still, the reality is that we usually don’t learn until that mistake properly blows up in our…
A Look at Text Distortion Effects in Web Design
We all love typography. And when type is set in motion or spiced-up with some dynamic effects, we love it even more. There are so many powerful instruments that encourage us to let our imaginations run wild, so it’s not surprising that there is a rich diversity of…
Weekly News for Designers № 487
Beautifully Designed Examples of Asymmetrical Split Screens in Web Design – An interesting new take on the split screen design trend. Windows Terminal – Straight from Microsoft, the new command line tool supports tabs, rich text and more. A Designer’ s Guide to Animating Icons with CSS – View…
Reasons to Stick with WordPress
Sometimes, even the best of friends can have a disagreement. That’s the sort of vibe that WordPress and its community have been dealing with for quite some time. There’s still a lot of love, but it goes along with some undertones of frustration. No, it’s not everyone who…
Personalize the User Experience with the Free IP Geolocation API Sponsored
We all want to provide users with the best experience possible. Whether we’re building a website or mobile app, serving up relevant content and features is vital to long-term success. However, this is virtually impossible to achieve without actionable information. If we don’t know who our users are, …
8 Powerful Plugins That Turn WordPress into an LMS
As more people look to further their learning online, there has been a growing market for software to help businesses build and sell courses. Known as a Learning Management System (LMS), these niche apps include (more or less) everything you need to get up and running. Like many…
The Beauty of Colorful Shapes in Brand Identity
Colorful schemes and geometric solutions were named two leading trends in the graphic design sphere earlier this year. Many respectable artists and analysts have bet on these two approaches to prevail in 2019. And their predictions are coming true. Bright visual identities as well as those that feature…
Getting Answers to Your Web Development Questions
Regardless of our education, experience or skill level, every one of us will run into a situation where we could use some help. It might be a bit of code we can’t get quite right or even some confusion as to the best approach for a particular task….
Beautifully Designed Examples of Asymmetrical Split Screens in Web Design
Some trends stay with us forever, turning into classic solutions. Others vanish without leaving a trace. You may think that all trends break into these two groups, but that’s not quite true. There is another category of trends whose life has its ups, downs and calm periods. Such…
Weekly News for Designers № 486
Large Cursors: Pointing the Way Towards a Better Web – Designs that demonstrate the usability and aesthetically-pleasing effects of large cursors. CSSFX – A collection of animated CSS buttons, hover effects, inputs and loaders for use in your projects. Uppy – An open-source file uploader that can grab…
What My Old Design Projects Have Taught Me
If you take a look back through your portfolio, what do you see? Maybe it brings back memories of a certain challenge you faced or a really difficult client. Perhaps you cringe at the sight of a dated look or now-extinct technology. I hear you. Over the past…
Using Typography to Establish Brand Identity
The great thing about typography is that it always makes sense. You do not need to read between the lines to get the point of an idea. Everything lies just on the surface. But, even though it’s self-explanatory, type is still able to provide our designs with a…
Imagining a Single-Browser Web
It is often said that competition brings out the best in all of us. Whether we’ re running in a race or building software, knowing that others are out there doing the same thing pushes us to do more. It’ s the place where progress and innovation come from. However, …
Large Cursors: Pointing the Way Towards a Better Web
Various experiments are conducted these days with mouse pointers. Consider our recent posts regarding cursor effects and the use of circular cursors in web design. It feels like we are obsessed with this tiny device that indicates our movement across the computer screen. Without a doubt, there is…
Weekly News for Designers № 485
10 Modern Examples of Slide-Out Sidebars – These modern sidebars are both user-friendly and save precious screen real estate. OpenShot – A free, open source video editing app. Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX – Yes, there is a difference between the two terms. And that difference can really…
AI-Driven Design: How Artificial Intelligence is Shaping UI/UX Design
AI products have started entering our era quicker than we could imagine. Artificial intelligence has found its place in different industries. From spam filters to autopilots in aeroplanes – AI surrounds us and impacts even the most unexpected areas of our lives. UI/UX design is not an exception….
Social Mail: How To Use Email Marketing To Build You Social Following
In modern day digital marketing, utilizing one or two communication channels won’ t cut it anymore. You’ ll need to make the different channels you’ re in work together for you. So while it’ s easy to think that email and social media are two different entities, there are a number of…
A Quick Guide to Website Photography
The inclusion of a great photo can turn a plain webpage into a visually-appealing one. But not just any old photograph will do. Deciding on the right image is something we should consider carefully. Sometimes, however, designers don’t necessarily get to make that decision. For example, have you…
10 Modern Examples of Slide-Out Sidebars
There was a time when the only place for a navigation menu was on the top of the page. There was also a time when the menu lived within the left or right column (preferably the left one). Then, an era of slide-out sidebars came, and suddenly it…
Weekly News for Designers № 484
Forge Your Own (Animation) Path with These Snippets – Creative examples of path-based web animations. Animation Performance 101: Browser Under the Hood – Techniques for attaining 60fps animations without taxing web browsers. Top Font Combinations – A look at some perfect font pairings for your projects. CSS masonry…
What to Do When Someone Wants to Partner with Your Design Business
Web designers seem to get a lot of unsolicited business offers. Over the years, I’ve received notes from people who wanted to either buy my business or partner with it in some way. Truth be told, I disregard a lot of it as spam. It’s often fairly easy…
10 Creative Code Examples of Media Player Design
With the power of HTML5 and the ease adding multimedia through technologies such as WordPress oEmbed, anyone can add compelling video or audio content to their website. And, while it’s great that default media players are included from a purely functional standpoint, so much more can be done…
Simple Ways to Customize WordPress Plugins
There are times when a WordPress plugin’s functionality gets you close to what you need – but not quite the whole way. In addition, there are also situations where you’ve committed to using a particular plugin and would like to build additional features around it. These are prime…
The Four Ways That Freelancers Are Often Mistreated
To many web professionals, freelancing means freedom. The freedom to work on what you please, when you please. It seems to be the perfect career path in this on-demand world we live in. However, the fact that you’re out there on your own does have some downsides. Being…
