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Archives for 2014
Design Focus: Minty Fresh
The shades of green in this week’s feature are bright, peppy, and almost too harsh on the eyes, but it seems to be all the rage these days. How does it come into play with these designs? Let’s find out:
Designs of the Week
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Most likely inspired by the iPhone 5c’s color options, perhaps?
The background is animated in a familiar illustration style, and you can see the recurring choice to use black text and more rounded, geometric typefaces for a modern feel.
A similar typeface with thinner weights and a lighter touch produces this elegant, almost feathery look.
Less subtle is this color combo and retro robot motif, but still lands on that fresh look.
This shade almost blends into the whites and grays that bound the blocks of content. Another recent trend at play here are those rotated navigation elements on the sides.
Small logo, large intro text and button. There’s less green on this page save for the accents and calls to action.
Similarly, the green-tinted video background hides as you scroll down and you only see it resurface as link hover colors and other brand elements on the site.
Social Media Weekly
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Programming – Evolving Code: From the Crust to the Core
“In the world of Object-Oriented Programming, there is a saying: “Make it work, make it small, make it fast.” This is an approach that we’re trying on for size and will hopefully create the right balance of code quality.”
Typography – On Legibility – In Typography And Type Design
“To keep it simple, while reading, factors like grammar, word expectancy, word form and so on, are not to be excluded when we think about the reading experience.”
Design Focus: By Hand
These websites feature prominent use of the human hand in their designs, and it’s an interesting study in paying tribute to what we really create with, while using it to convey information.
Designs of the Week
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The site is a dictionary of technology terms alphabetized, and the hand morphs into each hand sign per letter. It’s a smart connection between the mobile device and how it’s our hands that interact with it.
Bright colors with a dash of pastel gradients, navigation links in the corners, and a page-wide border. It’s a familiar look for sure, and it’s the imagery and projects that will leave an impression on you.
The page is essentially a very long poster held up by the artist. The logos could stand to be arranged more neatly, and the content typography would benefit from a bit more refinement.
It’s not as obvious as the other designs, but the photographs on these pages are almost always that of hands. Whether this is intentional or not, it’s a good motif.
Social Media Weekly
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Design – Website Style Guide Resources
“A collaborative collection of resources for creating Front-End Style Guides and Pattern Libraries”
CSS, JavaScript – Let the Browser Handle Your UI Logic for You
“The next time you set out to build something new, look at its core behaviors and ask yourself if there is some pre-written, standardized part of the web browser that can handle some of the work for you.”
Design – Explained Visually
“An experiment in making hard ideas intuitive.”
Design Focus: Halloween Special
Time to break out the costumes and candy ’cause it’s All Hallows Eve again. Will these websites do a good job of spooking the daylights out of you? Step inside and find out!
Designs of the Week
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This microsite is available in two forms: 2d and 3d, which is pretty cool. The effects are good and the copy is on point even with the Halloween theme. This is how interactive infographics should be done.
A simple party invite that puts kinetic typography to good use. It’s very flat and clean compared to what you’d expect out of “spooky” designs, which is a nice change.
Most sites look similar to this one, you got all the quirky fonts and figures representative of the holiday, but not as thoughtfully designed. The more fonts and colors you throw onto a page, the more chaotic and less accessible it feels, but this knows how to tread carefully and have fun.
This mobile app game about candy put on a slightly darker look for the occasion and put typica Halloween treats front end center, but still has that light personality. Unfortunately the inner pages feel disconnected to the homepage.
Besides the funky, zombified illustrations, I like that there’s a blur effect on the modal background when it shows up. I think one nice takeaway from this design is to embrace not just orange, but also the yellows, purples, and greens for Halloween. The typefaces are classic and not particularly eerie, but it’s the illustrations that bring the look and feel home.
Not exactly the most brilliant design out there, but it’s fun and campy enough.
There’s a disconnect between the theme park logo and the rest of the fonts used on the site, but if you don’t think about that bit too much the pages are actually neatly executed – calendars, packages, social icons and all. Plus, the animated horror attractions in the slider are an excellent feature.
Social Media Weekly
Want your site to be as good-looking and inspirational as these? Start by choosing a well-designed theme from ThemeForest.
Design, Business – Halloween’s 13 Scariest Clients
“Halloween is time for the undead to rise up and bombard us with woeful website requests. Fortunately, we can recognize the warning signs and exorcise the demons!”
Design – Monsters and Thieves
“Amateurs tend to be poor at imitation. When they see an idea, they clone the whole thing and offer it as their own work. The pro knows to chop these things into pieces and find new uses for them.”
Design Focus: Shapely
Here’s a collection of website designs that display excellent use of shapes to style and present content, ranging from the quirky to the stunning.
Designs of the Week
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The mix of drawn portraits, bright colors, and shapes is a very interesting combination (parallaxed, of course), although in some places the text (which are all italics) is difficult to read on top of all of that.
This color-changing site is dedicated to the very same topic of exploring shapes. No text except for the about modal and tooltips.
Like the previous site, it’s an array of icons which happen to be features in the product. Clicking on each reveals an animated verison on the watch and the description in the opposite column, hiding the icons found in that location. The concept seems so simple for a site design, but perhaps the best way too.
This design shows scattered icons which look to be deconstructed logos of the companies they represent (and similar icons for those who use wordmarks) and has a lot of subtle animation effects, moving both text and icons as you hover and scroll.
Love the intricacy of these patterns, which also connect to other designs as you scroll down and they draw themselves along the way.
Social Media Weekly
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User Experience – UX Thought of the Day
“Five UX thoughts a week to inspire you to do something differently in your design work.”
Design – Stop asking design candidates to redesign your product. It’s unfair and (even worse) it’s ineffective.
“You’re not hiring a designer who goes off into a corner to magically create perfect solutions like she can read your mind. You are hiring someone who can work with a team to identify the right problems, create the best solutions, and test the real-world effectiveness of those choices.”