Carrie Cousins

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.

Web Standards / 5 Aug 2021

User Privacy and Design: Things You Can Do for a Safer Web

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?

Trends / 2 Aug 2021

Design Trend: No Images Above the Scroll

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!

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.

Uncategorized / 19 Jul 2021

7 Tips to Design and Sell Merchandise Online

Have you ever started looking for a new shirt or gift and thought, “I could design something so much better than what I see here?”

With a little planning and some good ideas, you can design and sell merchandise online featuring your artwork. It’s gotten easier over time with so many marketplaces available as well as options that don’t require you to order and house a lot of inventory in advance.

If you’ve ever thought about designing and selling merchandise online, keep reading. (Note: The images in this article are from Envato Elements, which has a ton of graphic design assets to help you in the creation of one merchandise.)

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.

Trends / 21 Jun 2021

Design Trend: Abstract Art Compositions

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.

Layouts / 17 Jun 2021

How to Design a Captivating Web Questionnaire

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.