Carrie is a freelance writer with years of experience in web and graphic design. Sports fanatic. Information junkie. Designer. True-believer in karma.
An icon is a picture, image, or representation of another thing. So if you are looking to create a great icon, it needs to have a visual presence that’s understandable.
There’s more to designing a great icon than just a quick visual element. You have to think about shape, color, usage, and even what device or operating system it might appear on.
Here, we have 10 tips to help you make the most of icon design.
It’s a common question: What does a new website cost?
It might be for a new brand or company that’s never had a website before or for an existing organization looking for a website design refresh. And the answer is a bit complicated.
It all depends on the path you want to take and your timeline for getting a new website online. Here, we’re going to break down the options available to you and the costs associated with a new website.
Plus, a few tips and rules to follow as you begin the process.
Design tokens are a way to easily identify and understand the elements in a design system. As more designers and companies adopt use of design tokens, their value will continue to grow.
The key to design tokens is that they facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. More people on a team can understand and use design values without specificity, but with accuracy. They’ve already been adopted by design giants such as Adobe.
Here’s everything you need to know about design tokens.
Almost every designer is on the lookout for tools and resources that can make work quicker and easier. A solid fonts and graphics library platform can be just that resource.
Creative Fabrica is packed with design tools for designers, crafters, and more. Whether you’re a crafter, a hobbyist, or a professional designer, there’s something that’s worth taking a look at.
Here, we’re going to take a closer look at the platform and how you can use it in your daily routine, all while building up your library of graphics, assets, and more.
With just the right combination of blur and transparency, you’ve got one of the hottest trends in website and app design – the frosted glass effect.
It is a design technique that uses a gaussian blur, shadows, and transparency to create an element that mimics looking through real-life frosted glass.
Let’s dive into seven different ways to use this design trend.
And, if you need more inspiration, it’s no surprise to know that Dribbble is packed with frosted glass design ideas!
Designing with bold color is a lot of fun.
It’s also a little dangerous.
Bold color choices can evoke emotion, draw attention, and create just the right vibe for a design. On the other hand, bold color can feel frenzied or off balance. Users are instantly drawn into color or turned off by it.
Here’s a look at a few ways to use bold color in web design. We’ll walk through how to bring personality and vivid style into your projects, while keeping a sense of balance and accessibility that makes the site easy to use.
You’ve come across them everywhere: Landing pages that take you to a website but aren’t the homepage.
It’s a great strategy that helps get visitors directly to the information they want to see from a marketing source – social media, advertising, etc. – and is generally designed for a specific goal.
If using landing pages isn’t already part of your website strategy, it’s time to consider them. Here, we’ll look at seven reasons you need to be using landing pages to help drive the right kind of conversions on your website.
Cards are a design element that have been popular for a while. The look and function of them have continued to evolve in a number of ways, from tiny cards that are more of an oversized button to full-screen or split-screen cards that denote click or tap functionality.
The reason this trend remains popular is because of the latter. Cards innately cue users into an element of function.
The most popular iteration of cards right now is in a super flat style that works with almost any type of content. While every example below is different, one thing is the same: the combination of card elements in a flat style.
Let’s look at a selection of websites featuring this design trend and ways that you can make it work for you.
You know it the minute you see it – a design that has so color that’s so impactful you can’t help but look at it.
These designs typically fall into one of two categories. Either it’s a great color palette that you want to find a way to replicate immediately. Or it’s a color palette so bizarre or bad that you can’t figure out why a designer would make that choice!
Since no one wants to fall in the latter category, learning to color match and develop palettes is a vital design skill.
It all starts with color theory but then goes a little further.
There’s a website and app design trend that’s so subtle you almost don’t see it.
Soft UI creates a frost-style or glassy blur where elements sink and extrude from the background to create varying levels of depth and dimension.
Combine this effect with a softer, more pastel color palette, and the result is a light, “soft” interface with depth in shadows and subtle overall effects.
Here, we’ll look at the trend with examples.
Are your designs as inclusive as they could be? Do they appeal to all people of all genders equally?
While design theory can put a lot of emphasis on creating personas for better user experience and design journeys, they can sometimes not be as inclusive as you might like. Do you get so involved in the persona that you forget every other type of user that might visit your website?
The first step toward a more gender-neutral web, is recognizing common practices and changing the way we think about some of the things we design with every day.
The key to making it actually work is authenticity. You have to believe in gender-neutral messaging for it to actually resonate with website visitors.
It’s the website design trend that you see everywhere but might not have a name for: gaussian blur.
It’s present in several other named trends that have been popular this year and for some time, including the frosted glass effect, creating image depth, bokeh backgrounds, and even for various other background techniques.
Here, we’ll look at this design trend, explore different reasons for deploying it (carefully!), along with examples to help you make the most of it.
Let’s dive in!