Contrary to popular belief, user interface design isn’t just about creating pretty pixels on a screen to share on Dribbble (although that can be fun). While UI design is an art form, it’s also a science with a myriad of tools and techniques used to effectively communicate with users. The result is an interface that’s simple, beautiful and easy to use.
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The UX design process is becoming an increasingly important aspect of creating quality website applications and software products. There are many different UX design books out there with a myriad of different techniques and methods that are important for us to know and use as UX designers. It can sometimes be confusing figuring out the right UX design practices to use, so I’ve put together a list of some of the best UX design books I’ve read. I’d love to hear what your favourites are and how they helped you improve your design process.
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Web designers often ask me what web hosting I use to host my portfolio website and my client’s websites, so I thought I’d write a quick post about who I use to host my websites and why. I’ve been using Media Temple Shared Hosting since 2010 and it’s been great. I tried a bunch of other web hosting providers initially, but there was always an issue, whether it was downtime, poor support or slow website loading times.
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I created my first portfolio website way back in 2008 when I finally had enough design work to justify building a website. I was young, inexperienced and relatively unknown in the design community and I wanted to create a website concept that would help differentiate me from other designers.
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I’ve just finished reading The Mobile Book, put together by the very talented guys from Smashing Magazine, and I’m pleased to say that I thought it was an interesting and informative read.
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(This article was last updated on 23 May 2018)
When you’re building website templates, user interfaces or initial application prototypes there is often the need for placeholder images or dummy images. Rather than wasting time and effort finding and cropping custom images you can simply use a free image placeholder service that will automatically create an image for you with your specified dimensions. Here are some of the best free image placeholder services on offer.
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There are many ways to keep your footer stuck to the bottom of the page, but the cleanest and most well tested method I have come across is CSS Sticky Footer. It’s very simple to implement, uses semantic code and has been tested in over 50 browsers. Keep your footer at the bottom of the page with CSS Sticky Footer.
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As web designers we’re all getting a bit bored of using the same old web-safe fonts. Do Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman sound familiar to you? Luckily it’s very simple to embed custom fonts in your website these days. There are plenty of different ways to do it including sIFR, Cufon and @font-face but one of the easiest and best ways to do it is using Google Web Fonts.
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The logo design process can be very time consuming as it is often quite difficult to come up with logo design ideas that match our clients’ requirements. There are so many different elements you need to consider when designing a logo including colour, typography, balance and symbolism to name a few. So where do you start? Today I’ll show you a systematic logo design process which will hopefully add some logic and structure to the very creative and sometimes haphazard task of designing a logo.
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