50+ incredible freebies for web designers, May 2015 We’re constantly amazed at the generosity of designers and developers who release exciting, inspiring products out to the web design community on a daily basis. Not only do these impressive designers speed up our work with more free resources than we can use, but they drive us on to more and more ambitious work of our own. Every month we collect together the best free resources for web designers and developers, and this month there truly is something for everyone; we’ve got great icons, UI kits, and mockups; as well as scripts, tools, and extensions. So free up some hard drive space, then browse through these downloads, enjoy! Flat Color Icons More than 300 icons with a beautiful color palette, useful for all type of situations and projects. iOS 8 Construction Icons A collection of 50 icons related to construction. Multisize Material Design Icons A collection with multiple icons following the Material Design Trend. Brand Guidelines InDesign and Illustrator Template Uber iOS Wireframe Kit
A Graphic Design Primer, Part 3: Basics of Composition Jun 27 2011 In the first two sections of this primer, we covered the basic elements of design, and the basic principles of design. In this section, we’ll cover the basic principles of composition. There are a variety of different composition theories you should familiarize yourself with. Since this is just a primer, there’s a brief overview of the most common and important theories. Single Visual The single visual method of composition is where a single, generally striking, visual image is used as the basis of the design. The single visual pattern is the easiest composition to successfully achieve. Sites like those created on About.me are a great example of the single-visual composition pattern. Jamie Brown’s website has a similar single visual design: The Divine Proportion The Divine Proportion (also known as the Golden Ratio, Golden Spiral, Fibonacci Spiral, Golden Rectangle, or Phi) is approximately 1:1.618. The Rule of Thirds Resources: Focal Point Grid Theory Resources Gestalt Principles (rb)
Infographic: A Gargantuan Map Of The Internet What does the Internet look like? Is it computers or sub aquatic cabling? Is it satellites or code? Is it discrete websites and files, or is it just one branching, undulating cat meme evolving over time? Click to enlarge. To Ruslan Enikeev, the Internet is “nature, sky, space, science, and fractals”--an image he shares on his website, The Internet Map, which uses an association algorithm and a Google Maps front end to show 350,000 sites as their own universe. “For other people data and math is just numbers and tables, maximum graphs, but I can see more--its inner beauty. It took him over a year, with the help of Russian creative agency Positive Communications. When you couple this association with the country-specific color-coding, you see that China (yellow) and the US (blue) are in a clash of control of the Internet, with Russia (red) and Japan (purple) hanging around the periphery. “It was not my aim to make the site useful, but still you can use it,” Enikeev explains.
50 CSS and JavaScript Tools, Frameworks and Libraries Keeping up with the new releases in web design is not easy. There are new tools, libraries and frameworks seemingly released every other day. The good news is we’re here to summarize everything up for you. In total, we have trimmed this CSS and JavaScript resource collection down to our 50 favorites, just to make things easier for you. All of the tools, libraries and frameworks have been categorized into the following categories: CSS Libraries & Toolkits, Flexbox Tools, Responsive Web Frameworks, Material Design Frameworks, Random CSS Stuff, JavaScript Libraries & Frameworks and finally a bunch of Web-Based Apps. CSS Libraries & Toolkits Fileicon, a collection of pure CSS file icons. Marx, the stylish CSS reset with no Javacript or Classes. Transformicons – Animated icons, symbols and buttons using SVG and CSS. sanitize.css makes browsers render elements consistently and allows you to style with today’s best practices out-of-the-box. Primer, the CSS toolkit and guidelines that power GitHub.
Holiday Consumer Intentions 2012 Today, people no longer see a line between online and offline shopping, and neither do smart retailers. This year online and offline shopping experiences are more seamless than ever before - across pricing, functionality, and promotions - making this the first "Nonline" holiday season. We partnered with Ipsos to uncover consumer shopping behaviors that advertisers can expect for holiday 2012: Online and offline shopping is blurring: 80% of shoppers will research online before making a purchase this season, and they switch devices to suit their needs. For example, 51% of shoppers will research online and then visit the store to purchase, while 17% will visit a store first and then purchase online. Another 32% will research online, visit store to view a product, then return online to purchase.
100 Websites You Should Know and Use In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the “100 websites you should know and use.” Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. Below, the 2013 edition of the 100 websites to put on your radar and in your browser. To see the original list, click here. And now, the original list from 2007, created by Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH.
Home - Pencil Project 10 Useful Web Apps for Designers DesignWoop welcomes this guest post by Tomas Laurinavicius. Since the iPhone and iPad entered the market you can hear lots of news about apps for these devices. Tons of apps available today and you can find everything you want. But today I would like to share 10 handy web-based apps for designers. To use these apps you don’t need to buy an iPhone or iPad, you can use them without any additional software or device, you just need a web browser. In this collection I’ve picked 10 useful and time-saving web apps for designers. Invoice Bubble Invoice Bubble is free invoice software that lets you create an invoice and send to your client in seconds. Gridulator Tell Gridulator your layout width and the number of columns you want, and it’ll spit back all the possible grids that have nice, round integers. Browize Useful tool for resizing current browser window size to set or custom resolutions. Screenr Screenr is a web-based tool that lets you create screencasts without installing any software. Kuler
Unheap - A tidy repository of jQuery plugins wwwhere moklick/frontend-stuff Website speed test Nobody Likes a Slow Website We built this Website Speed Test to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. It lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. We have tried to make it useful both to experts and novices alike. In short, we wanted it to be a easy-to-use tool to help webmasters and web developers everywhere optimize the performance of their websites. Feature Overview Examine all parts of a web page – View file sizes, load times, and other details about every single element of a web page (HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, images, etc.). How it works All tests are done with real web browsers, so the results match the end-user experience exactly.
HTML5 Reset :: A simple set of templates for any project March, 2013: The files have been updated — this web site has not! Head over to GitHub for the very latest. Like a lot of developers, we start every HTML project with the same set of HTML and CSS files. Now that modern browsers are starting to support some of the really useful parts of HTML5 and CSS3, it's time for our best practices to catch up, and we thought we'd put our files out there for everyone to use. About Version 2 The biggest change is to our stylesheets. In the same spirit, we've also moved our print styles into the main stylesheet and added a mobile/small display style block (including blocks for orientation). Also in the sprirt of simplifiction, we've eliminated the "Bare Bones" version and are now only offering one set of fully-commented files. Finally, and sigificantly, we're hosting the files on GitHub (yay!) The WordPress Theme Semantic HTML5 markup Starter CSS declarations for the basic WordPress elements A widget-ready sidebar jQuery, Modernizr and Analytics built in
Initializr - Start an HTML5 Boilerplate project in 15 seconds!