The Complete Flat Website Design Guide Flat website design is steadily becoming popular replacing the commonly known intricate designs that are dominated by drop shadows, gradients and brushes. Flat websites is the new trend with a rising design style that incorporates flat shapes and icons. A flat design basically revolves around the use of triangles, circles, rectangles and other shapes without the need to use other design elements like gradients, strokes or shadows as seen on Microsoft’s most-recent computer operating system Windows 8. A flat design is specifically based on two principles- readability and simplicity which guide designers in coming up with flat yet stylish software designs, web layouts, posters and other key applications. Simplicity Flat design refrains from the use of intricacies with the absence of drop shadows, strokes and other design elements. Readability Flat website design is slowly invading apps, computers and our web pages bringing in 5 common elements that we will soon be familiar with. Typography
Responsive Menu Concepts The following is a guest post by Tim Pietrusky. I know Tim from his prolific work on CodePen and from being a helpful community member there. He wrote to me with this guest post about responsive menus which I'm more than happy to share with you below. Not only is it a timely concept, but one of the concepts improves upon a clever CSS trick we've covered here in the past. When it comes to responsive design we are faced with various techniques on how to best handle altering our navigation menus for small screens. Three of them are made with pure CSS and one uses a single line of JavaScript. Before We Start In the code presented in this article, I don’t use any vendor-prefixes to keep the CSS easier to see and understand. All menu concepts in this article are based on this simple HTML structure which I call basic menu. To address small screens I use the same media query on all concepts. @media screen and (max-width: 44em) { } 1. This is what it looks like on a small screen with a custom style.
The 5 Best Front-End Developer Tools - The Mention Blog This is a tech post by Arnaud Breton, full-stack developer here at mention with a specific focus on the front-end side and user experience. Before joining mention, Arnaud was co-founder and CTO of UniShared and VideoNot.es, part of the Imagine K-12 2013 Winter batch. Over the last few years, we’ve seen tremendous growth in an entirely new generation of web applications. These apps have become much richer, leading to a huge increase in complexity on the front-end side. Frameworks like Backbone (the one we use at mention), AngularJS, and EmberJS provide robust solutions to build amazing apps, leveraging all of the web’s power. In order to succeed in these new challenges of complexity, developers have created a lot of tools to streamline the overall development process. At mention, we love the tools which help us to provide the best quality software while at the same time making our life easier. The best tool we have in our hands today. Does testing make you queasy? Very clear, right?
Conditionally load Javascript based on media query > Responsive Web Design This page is unfinished and needs further work Best practice for a long time has been to load your javascript at the end of the document to improve website performance, however in todays world of mobile devices we need an even faster solution. Responsive design has provided us with the ability to change the way the content is displayed to the end user. Most of the time we follow best practices and reorder the content into a linear page layout allowing the most relevant content to float to the top. Sometimes, however, we fall back on display: none; for content that might not be appropriate to load onto a particular breakpoint. There are plenty of bad examples of this, but a good example might be to hide an advanced mapping application on the mobile in favour of linking the user to a built in phone feature. In this case you could look at the width of the device and determine if it is of a certain size you could load in the resources, if (screen.width >= 600 ) { }
The Ultimate Guide - How To Start a Blog That Makes Money In the 1990′s people started creating online diaries. They were given the title of “web logs”. Popular myth has it that it became “we blog” and the “we” got dropped for the sake of language expediency. The word “blog” then emerged from the mist of vernacular evolution. That’s the opening story on the emergence of the blog word! Blogging has changed a lot since those times and with the evolution of the digital ecosystem it has reached new highs. A blogging tipping point The tale doesn’t stop there because the blog hit a tipping point in 2011 when Arianna Huffington sold her “super blog” to AOL for $315 million. So the humble blog is 20 years old and is no longer just about geeks and the web but about online publishing, content marketing and it has become a serious business and source revenue for many e-preneurs around the world. The attraction This includes. Learning: A place to express and structure your thoughts and creations. What’s driven this evolution? This is a heady and powerful mix.
A Three Step Guide to Usability on the Mobile Web Designing mobile sites is a different kind of web design. Much like your first experience of designing for the desktop web, it can be both exhilarating and daunting in equal measures. So many possibilities, yet so many usability restrictions. Don't panic, we've been there too. This paper is our "101" guide to getting your design and usability principles right. We'll start by setting some mobile web design rules to live and die by... Five Rules for Designing Usable Mobile Web Sites 1: The mobile web is mobile2: Context is king3: The devices are (very) different4: Forget your dotcom thinking. Rule 1: The Mobile Web is Mobile Never overlook the obvious. Rule 2: Context is King When it comes to usability, context is everything. This point is critical to the success of your mobile site: your can no longer account for where your users are accessing your site from. Rule 3: The devices are (very) different Mobile devices are, of course, very different to desktop and laptop computers. Limit choices.
classroom 20 tools to help you create responsive web designs Building responsive design has become a huge trend in the web design world. There is a good reason for that: responsive websites are much more relevant than fixed web designs in a time where a lot of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. In this article we take a look at some of the most useful tool to help you with the creation of responsive designs. Sketching / wireframing tools First things first, responsive design need to be well-thought or you’ll get much more work than you would have otherwise. 1. A common problem you’ll run into when planning a responsive web design is to chose which devices and sizes you’ll design for. 2. Simple PDF templates to help you map out how layout sections will change in different resolutions. 3. Quickly get the CSS for creating your fluid grid website with this simple tool. 4. ProtoFluid simplifies the development of fluid layouts and adaptive CSS using Media Queries. Responsive design elements 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Templates and grids 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
What Your Website Needs for 2015 The best way to guarantee a prosperous new year is an up-to-date company website. This article describes a few of the most important features your site needs going into 2015. Responsive Website Design Responsive design allows your website to automatically adjust for optimal viewing on desktops, tablets and smartphones. With so many people using mobile devices for Internet access, responsive design has quickly moved from a luxury item to a must-have feature. The best approach to responsive Web design is to start by designing for the smartphone and working “backwards” to the desktop monitor. Large, Stunning, Static Home Page Header Image Thankfully, image sliders are on the way out as the featured design element on a home page. Stunning Imagery Everywhere Else With the surge in mobile Internet use, strong imagery is becoming more important than ever. Flat Design Anyone who uses an iPhone is quite familiar with flat design. More White Space and Vertical Scrolling Interactive Elements
All about the design – top tips for designing mobile sites and apps from the professionals As mobile devices become increasingly capable and the mobile audience becomes increasingly sophisticated, companies are stretching the bounds of possibility when it comes to mobile sites, native applications and Web apps. It becomes all the more important to consider not just graphical design, but also the physical design of your mobile product. It is essential to know not only who will be using it, but how and where they will be using it. This is the fifth in our series of six app-related articles. See also:• Mobile applications: native v Web apps – what are the pros and cons? The following guide was compiled from the responses of the following mobile design and usability gurus: All these experts spoke at Design for Mobile in Chicago, USA, September, 2010. The anatomy of good mobile design 1) Putting things in context Understand, respect and design for your users' contexts. 2) The mobile context Mobile means ‘on the go’ and ‘away from my desk’.
How to Build a Startup Plan | The Startup Guide - Creating a Better World Through Entrepreneurship A startup has to act quickly, yet not to run out of money as it grows. Here’s how to chart a rapid course for growth… By Ryan Allis, CEO of Connect When you hear the term business plan, you might visualize a 40 page document, full of dense paragraphs, charts, and diagrams. Today, in fact, most business plans are not such in-depth documents. Business plans today often to come in the form of slide decks or shorter 10 page executive summaries. Too many people get stuck in analysis paralysis and will spend 6 months building a business plan before they even get started. You’re better off incorporating, printing up some business cards, getting a website going, and starting to work on creating a prototype for a minimum viable product (or MVP). Business ideas really are a dime a dozen. That said, when you’re ready to scale your idea or raise funding, you’ll need at least a basic pitch deck and financial plan. The Sections of Your Plan 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Startup Plan Checklist Incorporating Your Startup
A Simple Device Diagram for Responsive Design Planning Updated for 2015! Check out Analytics-driven responsive web design planning At Metal Toad we're big fans of responsive design, but a common snag in the responsive planning process comes when choosing what device widths to design to. Just yesterday we had a big internal debate over what the best widths to design to are for 3 layout sites, 4 layout sites, etc. I'll get to our conclusions below, but another important distinction to call out is that for each layout there are two things to consider: what the pixel width range for a specific layout should be, and what pixel width the designer should create the PSDs at. There are an ever-increasing number of devices with different screen resolutions to take into account with a responsive design, so we put together a simple but handy diagram that lists the most common device widths as of the present, along with overlays for potential device width ranges. The Diagram Here's the result! A couple of things to note: Our Suggested Layouts 3 Layouts
How we make RWD sites load fast as heck Posted by Scott on 07/30/2014 There has been a lot of discussion about optimizing responsive layouts for performance lately, and I think that’s great. Speed broadens access and makes users happy, much like responsive design. In the past year I’ve spent a lot of time researching page loading performance, both for our ongoing client work here at FG and for my book Responsible Responsive Design. In the process, I’ve reaffirmed my belief that we don’t need to compromise the well-known benefits of a responsive layout in order to make our sites load as fast as heck. In this post, I’ll outline some recent observations and approaches to delivering sites for speed and broader access, and link out to various tools we are using to facilitate our approach. I’ll start with some high-level observations, then later I’ll dive into the more technical how-to. Page weight isn't the only measure; focus on perceived performance Shortening the critical path Going async <head> ... <head> ... <head> ... <head> ...
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