Carrie Cousins

Reviews / 2 Sep 2021

Get All the Design Assets You Need From Creative Fabrica

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.

Trends / 30 Aug 2021

Design Trend: Frosted Glass Effect in Web Design

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!

Graphics / 26 Aug 2021

10 Tips for Working With Bold Colors in Web Design

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.

Layouts / 19 Aug 2021

7 Reasons You Need to Be Using Landing Pages

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.

Trends / 17 Aug 2021

Design Trend: Flat Cards UI

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.

Graphics / 9 Aug 2021

Learn to Color Match and Create a Palette Like a Pro (Tips and Tools)

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.

Trends / 23 Jul 2021

Design Trend: Soft UI

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.

Trends / 15 Jul 2021

7 Tips for a More Gender-Neutral Design

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.

UX Design / 12 Jul 2021

Responsive vs. Adaptive Design: Everything You Need to Know

It’s a no-brainer for most website designers that your finished product needs to look and work on every type and size of device. Gone are the days of creating multiple designs to accomplish the same goal.

It all comes down to choosing a responsive or adaptive design model to achieve a consistent website design at any size.

But what’s the difference between responsive and adaptive? Are they really just the same thing? Let’s take a look and explain everything you need to know.

Trends / 8 Jul 2021

Design Trend: Gaussian Blur

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!

Navigation / 7 Jul 2021

An Introduction to Horizontal Scrolling (+ Pros and Cons)

Horizontal scrolling has come a long way from hero sliders. It’s now simpler to implement, somewhat more acceptable from a UX point of view, and offers plenty of creative opportunity.

A horizontal scrolling technique can be engaging and visually interesting. Conversely, some elements can be missed by users and it can present some accessibility challenges.

Here, we’ll look at everything horizontal scrolling, including pros and cons to help you figure out if this technique is right for your website design projects.

Reviews / 24 Jun 2021

Looka: An AI-Powered Platform to Design Your Own Logo

Using artificial intelligence, Looka is an online design tool that can help you create anything from a logo to a full branding suite.

It’s designed to use keywords and a little machine-learning magic to help jumpstart your creative process when you are ready to launch a business or brand now, but don’t have the materials to get started.

Here, we’ll look at Looka and the set of tools that make it a pretty robust platform for quick brand building.