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Five inspiring graphic design blogs written by prominent, successful designers.The Web offers plenty of places to draw design inspiration from, but one of my favorite ways to stay current with graphic design trends and the amazing work that other people are doing is to follow the blogs of successful and talented designers. From providing advice, to sharing their design process and recent work, to creating fun content, graphic design blogs are often a creative playground of sorts for their authors. Below are five that I always find inspiring....
Tired of chasing down sizes for images in your financial institution’s social media channels? Here’s everything you need for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin.
Learn how to decide what should be in your website navigation, and where, with a scientific and objective approach.It takes up just a few pixels, but your main navigation is arguably the most essential and ever-present aspect of your website. What to include as part of your main navigation can be a hotly contested topic inside your organization, and it could mean the difference between a website conversion and a bounce.
The good news is, when making navigation decisions, there are a lot of tools at your disposal to help you make the right call. What should be included in it?...
Go to the home page of your business website. Do it. Yes, right now. How long does it take you to locate your phone number? Okay, now, look at an interior page, like a product page or “About” page. How long did it take you to find your phone number then? Last test: find a smartphone or tablet and pull your website up. You guessed it – how long did it take to find your phone number here? If it takes you more than five seconds to locate your phone number in any of these scenarios, your website has a serious problem....
This checklist is intended to assist small business owners. It outlines the must have elements for your website so you can ensure it has the best chance of succeeding online. This is the first in a short series which aims primarily to benefit small businesses with regards to their websites and online success. Consequently it might also help if you’re a web designer building small sites for businesses on a budget. This small business website checklist will be most relevant for small sites or simple ecommerce sites because it’s a general checklist, but it’s amazing how many bigger (and often expensive) websites belonging to large companies fail to adhere to some basic web design fundamentals. The list below will enable you to quickly check the most fundamental elements are in place on your website and it should take you no longer than 30 minutes to carry out the checks....
Many bloggers only set up an About page as an afterthought. Someone said, “Hey! You need an About page” so they create one and add a few lines about their blog, their reason for blogging and what they like to do when they’re not blogging. But if you understand the mindset of the visitor who looks for your About page you’ll see it deserves much more attention. Unless you’re sharing that specific link, very few of your visitors will land on your About page when they come to your blog. Most will either land on an individual post or your homepage. After reading your post, and maybe checking out a few more, your visitor might be so impressed that he decides to check out your About page. So it’s important to understand that visitors who go to your About page are already sold on your blog, otherwise they wouldn’t take the time to try to learn more about you – they’d just leave your blog....
Sometimes the simplest product demos can be effective. Take a new web editor called Barley. To show off the product, co-founder Colin Devroe opened me a regular old web page, then changed the wording of the page with just a few keystrokes. A small editing menu opened as he typed, but didn’t have to access an admin dashboard, open a separate editor, edit any HTML, or anything like that. To be clear, there was more to the demo — but that was the heart of it. The point is to offer a web page editor with absolutely no learning curve....
When it comes to Web design, the tools you use play an integral part in your results. Check out our list of 25 incredibly useful tools and resources for designers and developers in this article
Via Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com
The Online Journalism Review(OJR) has always been a valuable resource for insight into the transition from traditional into digital journalism. It’s ironic their website relaunch suffers some of the same challenges as traditional media moving to digital.... ...I like the new look and several of the new features. What’s baffling is the lack of social media best practices for this “online” journalism review. What’s missing?...
Creating compelling visual imagery for your social media profiles has never been more important for your brand. ... graphic design plays an important role, not only in building brand awareness and recognition, but also attracting the user’s attention. Because of this, marketers and social media managers should have a basic understanding of graphic design, especially design that works where your social audience spends most of their time: online and on mobile devices. When graphics are used consistently over various platforms, customers may view it several times over, in turn generating more brand recognition. Social media imagery is essential to getting people to follow you, so here we will provide you with a few tips on how to create the best imagery for your posts....
Certain colors give a website a really elegant and clean look. Some color combinations are pretty popular in web design, and definitely the black, white & grey (sometimes with a hint of red) is one of those popular combinations. These colors, combined properly, result in beautiful and elegant designs. Today we will show you inspiring examples of websites using these colors. From subtle details to complete backgrounds and images, here you will see several different approaches to the same color palette.
Anyone who’s tried their hand at designing a typeface will know that it’s a wildly difficult process, and to actually come out at the end with something beautiful takes an extreme amount of skill, taste and patience.
Type design isn’t for everyone, but typography is, and nearly every designer works with it every day. This is exactly why Type Release creator Sean Mitchell is here to share with you a list of 38 beautiful typefaces, all of which were released this winter. These are his findings...
Creating a colour scheme is essential to good design. We’ve gathered together 20 fantastic tools to help you perfect your colour choices.
Via Mark Strozier
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If you’re looking for examples of niche, it’s difficult to imagine a slimmer area of focus than one page websites. It sounds obvious, but you’re building a site for an audience — so why wouldn’t you consider their experience and ways to communicate with them?
Hope explained that he personally contacted the teams behind the first 500 sites he found to let them know they’d been featured and ask if they thought their work had been presented in the best way possible.
They then visited his site and shared the fact that they’d been featured with their followers on social media, forming the foundation of One Page Love’s own following. When they asked if he could make an award banner for their own sites so they could show thatthey’d been featured, he did it — now they’re passively sending him traffic.
Hope suggested that you focus on your users’ experience – don’t make them jump through hoops to find the content, enter a gallery, or navigate around. Don’t have unnecessary clutter, ugly ads or, as he puts it a “social Christmas tree of sharing buttons” if they don’t add any value. Make it easy for visitors to follow you and subscribe to your site, and try out new features often to see what works best for them...
Mobile apps and responsive websites are looking - and working - better than ever, as designers come to terms with the parameters involved. Smaller screens, it seems, do not necessarily make for poorer experiences.
For bloggers and web designers nothing can be more important than time saving tools to maintain their creative process. Thankfully there’s a range of free web design tools available that can be extremely useful in some situations.In this article,
I have compiled 33 best web design tools to help you improve your skills and manage your daily tasks much easier and quicker. Whether you are professional web designer or a beginner, hopefully you’ll find something useful here....
Pantone Color Institute kicked things off by naming emerald green as its official 2013 colour. Fashion, interior design, graphic design and other industries followed suit by using the basic colour wheel as inspiration for 2013 colour trends. Here I'll look at five of the biggest colour trends in web design. You don't have to follow them, but it's important to know what they are...
Whoa! A very cool trip down the Internet memory lane... The internet's embarrassing middle school yearbook.
Online analytics can be fascinating. They can provide insight into the quality of your online content, let you know just how engaged your Twitter followers are or simply provide a timely ego boost. However, in amongst all the good news, bad news and insight, there are certain analytics that rarely change. Wherever you go, from B2B service providers to fashion retailers, the most visited web pages are usually the same. The most visited page on almost every website is the “About” page. No matter what you sell, your website visitors, social media followers and online prospects all want to know about you. More than want to know, they actually expect to get information about you. There are common questions every prospect expects to have answered by your online presence....
With PLTTS you can search for colour palettes from ColourLovers. It's easy to search for a palette with any specific colour. Or just bookmark your favorites.
Via Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com
...For some, this is that last page on the site map where you just throw a bunch of information. You can leave it up to the person to decide how they want to contact you and what they want to contact you about. For others, this is the last attempt to get your potential customer to give you their business. The contact page is much more important than many give it credit. Many basic websites just throw some numbers and e-mails up and move along. But in most cases, this is the page your customer sees before they decide they want you on their project. Or before they decide they want to visit you to purchase your product. It’s extremely important to make sure your contact page delivers in the best way possible. It can be a tricky thing to handle, so today, we’ve gathered 20 sites with great contact pages and forms to give you a bit of a creative boost....
It's an age-old debate for marketers: thank-you pages, or thank-you messages? We'll explore three reasons why thank-you pages are the better option. Finally! You've made it through the long and arduous process of developing a new content offer. You’ve chosen a topic, gone through the painstaking process of developing a great piece of content, built the landing page and its calls-to-action, and you know where it’s going to live on your website. That's it! Right? Or, are we missing something? Oh yeah ... the thank-you message. What will users see after they fill out your landing page and click the submit button? Should it be a simple thank-you message that shows up in place of your form, or should it take them somewhere else on your website like, say, a full fledged thank-you page?...
There are two main reasons people utilize the web: to share things and to be informed. Sure, we could pick up a newspaper or switch on the television, but I’d argue that it’s much easier to whip out your phone or laptop to find info. The wonderful thing about the web is that you’re never alone. No matter your interests, there’s probably a group of like-minded individuals who have made your interests available online. The most popular way of doing this is via blogging. With news websites and most blogs, you don’t need a journalism degree, you just need an interest and a passion. Other than specific interests, blogs show their personality in their layouts and designs. Today, we want to showcase some of these wonderful blogs that have amazing and beautiful designs....
...Mike explains how he created a new version of the main British government website, GOV.UK, by turning the usual process on its head. Rather than starting with government policy, then ensuring that the digital process was consistent with the analog paper process, and continuing with procurement, he started with the users and what they were seeking to get done at the web site. I would call these user stories, or jobs to be done. Based on this knowledge of the users’ jobs to be done, he then created a minimum viable product (MVP)of the web site, which he could use to gather feedback. This feedback allowed him to quickly iterate until he had something he could call a beta of the web site. The result was delivery in weeks rather than the usual years....
Everyone who is anyone is talking about responsive design these days — and everyone certainly has a strong opinion about it. But, whether you love it or hate it, responsive design is bound to go mainstream in 2013. Every business from Harvard to AOL are embracing responsive design as the wave of the future, and more websites are popping up on every device with an internet connection with conforming layouts. Take a look at these new, smart and stylish responsive layouts and get inspiration for your next website. Spanning across different kinds of companies, strategies and aesthetics, all of these websites have one thing in common: great responsive design. What’s your favorite responsive design website?
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![Starting a website? Tips on going niche, working smart and growing fast [WCCT] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/4TpVOxjwv_F9OS5pp7yvEDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
A little creative design with your coffee...