Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.
The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.
These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.
So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.
Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…
Being a business owner, entrepreneur or even just a freelancer can sometimes have its slower moments. When things get a little dry or you want to really increase your business, you’ve got to do some networking.
Networking often leads to creating relationships. Making relationships with the right people almost always guarantees increases in business. See, even if you are just a freelance designer, I’m sure you can attest to the fact that the majority of your business has come from previous relationships or relationships that you cultivated.
Networking can be tough. If you’re anything like me, networking can be a little out of your comfort zone. But meeting someone face to face and explaining to them your benefits is something that cannot be avoided. Quite frankly, no one wants to work with someone they don’t know, let alone someone who they just looked up.
Creating relationships is dependent on first impressions. First impressions in networking often end up trickling down to a very important piece of the puzzle: the business card.
Restaurant websites have become infamous for their outdated designs, and frustrating user experience. How many times have you visited a restaurant website and asked, “What was this web designer thinking?”
We see the same (often laughable) problems again and again: background music as you skip past another Flash website “intro”; PDF food menus (or no menu at all); all of the content is image-based instead of text, causing extremely slow load times. The list goes on and on…
As you would in any website design project, you must start by putting yourself in the visitor’s shoes and pinpointing their most pressing needs. For restaurants, we know that visitors want to easily browse the food menu. They want to know the restaurant’s location and it’s operating hours. They want to see a few photos to get a feel for the interior dining experience. Many of those visitors want to access all of this using their mobile phones.
It amazes me that in 2012, so many restaurant websites still fail to meet the most essential must-haves that visitors have come to expect. So if you manage a restaurant, or if you’re designing a website for a restaurant client, here are some essential pieces of advice.
When I was in art school, before my senior year, I volunteered to help with the senior graduation. As an usher, I just had to smile a lot and wander the halls and back stage rooms at Lincoln Center.
I think I did it more to able to go where regular civilians couldn’t go but eventually we seated all the parents and families of the graduates and the ceremony began.
The guest speaker was some big film reviewer for one of the New York papers or magazines and she came to the podium and started what must have been a Valium-induced rant that was to go on for one hour and forty-five minutes. She went on and on, complaining about Hollywood and the film business and society in general. None of it had to do with art school or students and their upcoming career but she just kept babbling as parents started to escape the auditorium out of sheer boredom.
Eventually, the administrator in charge of the graduation gathered the ushers and told us to get all of the parents back into the auditorium for the graduation ceremony. My guess is that someone used a blow gun and tranquilizer dart on the speaker and they had timed when she would pass out and could be dragged off the stage.
The relationship between text and the rest of a page is one of the key characteristics of any design.
Rhythm, emphasis and tone are all compromised without correctly scaled type. However, selecting text sizes is often both a painstaking and frustrating experience, with no standardized starting point to inform us.
As a result we frequently find web designers falling back on the default options presented by applications — 8pt, 10pt, 12pt, 14pt, 18pt — for want of a better solution.
That better solution is to set type sizes not by individual whim, but according to a predetermined system; a system that is simple to use, practical to implement on the web and most importantly, flexible enough to allow designers a full range of expression. Cue: the Lucas Sequence.
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Jun 26, 2012
The June edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins, grid tools, icons, analytics tools, frameworks, productivity and business tools, responsive design resources, and some really great new fonts.
Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.
As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.
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Jun 25, 2012
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.
To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.
The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.
These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.
So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.
Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…
I was getting ready to quit my job and start a new company. It was one of those moments where you psych yourself up and rack your brain for any good excuse not to go through with it. Sort of like that moment right before you go off the tall diving board for the first time. Naturally, a thousand pin-pricks of doubt tickled the back of my mind, coalesced into a cannon ball, and plunged to the pit of my stomach where it promptly burst into furious butterflies.
I took some time to calm down and remind myself of all the reasons it was a good choice, the right time, and all the other perfectly sane reasons that prompted me to break out on my own in the first place.
What I really needed though, was a pep talk, so I called an old boss of mine who has always been encouraging. After a bit of small talk I asked him what I thought to be a useful but broad question to get the conversation headed in the right direction: “In your experience, what is the best piece of advice for someone trying to get a new business off the ground?”
Without hesitation his answer was this: “Focus on the revenue.”
A former coworker of mine, James Harmon, is a bright and very talented designer with experience in some top corporations. He recently posted on Facebook a quote of his own thinking:
“In life, everyone cuts their own deal. The trick is not cutting one’s own throat in the process.”
I told him that I needed to steal that for an article. It sums up the whole problem designers face when the question of doing free work pops up, as it does, no matter how experienced you may be. After a couple of decades in the creative field, I still get a disturbing number of requests for free work – more now then when I was a young designer entering the field. Why? People want quality but they don’t want to pay for it.
It’s funny that our consumer habits have us shopping daily for bargains – cheap merchandise that lasts a few months as opposed to something of quality that will last years. Money has clouded judgment when it comes arto seeing value — true value.
Every company wants to remembered, every company wants to be recognized. Whether they have a great service or product or excellent customer service, they all want a special place in your heart.
The way you feel about a company and the way you perceive that company are important, not just to you, but to them as well.
The success of a company and their product or service depends not just on the number of sales and profits reaped, but also on brand recognition.
Any company that wants to be successful pays serious attention to branding, because after all, you won’t keep your sales up if your customers, potential or otherwise, are indifferent to you.
A key component to any website design is type. Selecting fonts, sizes and colors can be a big part of how you outline your site. Just as important as the letterforms themselves, is the spacing around those letters and particularly the leading used in blocks of text.
The more type you use, the more important leading becomes. Behind font and size, it is one of the key factors to consider when you are looking at how readable type is.
The leading specs you use for a logo or splash screen may be very different than the leading used for the type in a blog post.
Other design elements also have an impact on how you should use leading. The size of type, width of columns, and even background color can help you make wise leading choices.
How you use leading most notably comes into play for large blocks of text.
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Jun 18, 2012
People actually keep business cards still? I digitize any I actually want and then recycle them. I'd much rather be able to use them (or eat, in the case of the...