Resources posts

Adobe has been rolling out some major changes and updates to Creative Cloud. While the new subscription-only model and individual product updates have gotten most of the attention, the new social and networking aspects built directly into CC have the potential to be hugely important to the creative community.

When Adobe purchased Behance a few months ago, there was a lot of speculation that it would somehow be added to Creative Cloud. But no one really seemed to know...

Most sites have too much information; users are overwhelmed as CEOs wax lyrical on everything from their favorite charity to the dimensions of their first office.

In today’s increasingly information-saturated world, what studies find users often prefer is a simple, straight-to-the...

Trends start everyday: an idea is adopted, passed on and before you know it it’s being discussed on design blogs. However, most trends vanish as quickly as they appeared. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everything will be trendy for 15 minutes. Once in a while, an idea is found to have something so fundamental about it that it thrives, even after the initial clamor dies down. Responsive design was one such ‘trend’ and flat-design looks like becoming another.

Flat design...

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...

Almost every business has a web presence these days; from single page ‘business card’ style sites, to million+ product e-commerce hubs, owning a website is as universal as taxes. Of course, there are new startups, but even in those cases entrepreneurs tend to have bought a domain name, or thrown up a template.

It’s no surprise then that the bread and butter for most web designers is not site design, but redesign.

On the surface, redesign looks easy; you have a starting point, with some real world data on what is...

The May edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins and JavaScript resources, educational resources, wireframing kits, image tools, Photoshop extensions, web development tools, coding 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...

Last week, Adobe announced that there will be no further development of their Fireworks application. Security updates will be provided and bug fixes may arrive, but for all intents and purposes Fireworks CS6 is a dead man walking. The petitions for clemency have already begun, but it seems likely that at some point Adobe’s CEO will give the order to flick the switch and like a paper rocket on a rainy fourth of July, Fireworks will be no more.

Whilst many in the web design community bemoan Adobe’s lack of foresight, there are others — myself included — that...

It’s all about presentation. Ideas and concepts are great, but mean nothing if they cannot be properly communicated. To help others understand them, we may create prototypes or sketch out an idea to get to a meeting of the minds. Fortunately, in graphic design, we do that by creating mock-ups.

Most times when we create designs, it’s tempting to send a flat graphic, as is, to our client or out to our intended audience. It can work, but it’s much more effective when we have a way for people to actually visualize a design in its intended environment. It’s easier to understand a mobile app when it’s being presented on an actual mobile phone, rather than just a standard graphic in a simple size.

It’s best to have...

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...

Adobe has just announced that Creative Suite will cease to exist after CS6 (in name at least), and be replaced exclusively by Creative Cloud. On its most basic level, that means there won’t be perpetual licenses for future Adobe products (though, for now, you’ll still be able to buy CS6 in that format) and instead all of their Creative Cloud software will be available by subscription only.

For creatives, this is a huge shift. Adobe has been the leader in graphics and web software for years (especially after their purchase of Macromedia), and designers...

SEO has always been a tricky business, not only do experts have to spend time on researching keywords and following the best practices, they have to be prepared for the changes which search engines inevitably put into place.

Last year saw search giant Google make two major algorithm updates — Panda and Penguin — that saw many a site plummet down the rankings, as they were penalized by the new rules.

This was because the changes were implemented in order to rank poor quality sites, such as content mills and link farms, down and give more weight to sites that produce quality content.

This is carried out by making changes to how Google’s...