Carrie is a freelance writer with years of experience in web and graphic design. Sports fanatic. Information junkie. Designer. True-believer in karma.
Online privacy is a hot topic.
There’s a delicate balance between providing personalized user experiences and asking for (or gleaning) too much information. It can be hard to strike just the right chord.
Then there are regulations to think about, depending on where you and your users may live.
What best practices can designers put in place to ensure that they are designing for a safer web?
Have you taken notice? More designers are launching websites with no images (or video) above the scroll.
There are a lot of interesting uses of text elements, animated effects, and other divots that keep the result from being boring.
Here’s a look at this website design trend, examples, and how to make it work for you. You’ll be amazed at just how creative you can get, without a single image in sight!
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
When you don’t know what to use to illustrate a design, the answer might be abstract art.
It’s a growing design trend that – when done well – uses interesting shapes, colors, and combinations to create something that means almost nothing but is visually interesting.
There’s no wonder that designers are using this concept.
For startup websites without photography to designs for companies that aren’t sure how to represent an almost-post-COVID world visually and everything in between, abstract can be a workable choice.
We’ve all run across them – web questionnaires or surveys that were so simple and delightful that they were actually fun to fill out.
Sadly, that’s the exception to the rule. More often than, surveys are clunky and cumbersome.
You can design a captivating web questionnaire with the right thought process. It’s a mix of question planning with visual elements and cues to make the process user-friendly and somewhat seamless.
Here’s how you do it.
This is not another article about how the pandemic has changed the way we work.
The reality is that plenty of creative professionals – especially freelancers – have been working from home and in remote environments for a long time. It’s probably why so many of us were quick to adapt when so many others hopped on Zoom or Slack for the first time.
But there are some skills you need to stay relevant in today’s job market in addition to that adaptability that you likely already have. If you are thinking of advancing your career (and who isn’t) as a freelancer, at your current job, or by changing jobs, keep reading.
Almost every year, we kick off with a list of design trends that we think will dominate projects in the coming year. While we’ve gotten pretty good at identifying hits, there are also some misses.
These trends might fade due to a lot of different factors, but commonly they are just difficult techniques that don’t apply well across different types of projects.
It looks (and works) great in one application but is flat somewhere else.
Here’s a look at some of those trends that are fading fast. (And if you want to see our full list of web design trends for 2021 you can find it here.)