seo

Web Design Tools You Wish You Knew About When First Designing Your Website

April 18, 2017 By

pexels-photo-240566

It’s easy to have perfect vision in hindsight, but when designing a website a little planning ahead can give you a perfect vision from the get-go. Many web designers find themselves performing redundant tasks, or creating things with manual effort that could otherwise be automated. Check out these useful web design tools that you’ll be glad you knew about before designing your first website.

1. Affinity Designer

This web design tool serves as an advanced photo editor and workbook all in one. It was built specifically for web design, so you won’t be digging through relevant tools and options while you work. Use Affinity Designer to create your site layout, or just web graphics to add to a premade theme. This application works great on tablet style devices or with the use a stylus. [Read more…]

Best Resources to Use for Web Design Ideas

December 28, 2014 By

Web designers may have their own ideas when creating a layout design for a website but similar to writers, they also experience the so-called mental block syndrome at certain times. Fortunately, the web has a wealth of information available and designers can always turn to it for inspiration.

It may surprise you to know that even the best web designers also get inspiration from various sites particularly the online publications. Depending on their moods, they do a little or extensive research on different topics such as social applications, coding and general design ideas.

Here are some of the sites which expert designers utilize to help them in improving their work. They differ in their preferences as some prefer the simple layout design while the others like the more busy interface. [Read more…]

The “Horrible Web Design Client:” An Infographic Look

November 8, 2014 By

Web design is a new frontier in creative designing. It takes a special set of design skills to make an effective web site. A good web site is not just pretty to look at, or filled with a lot of cool Flash animations, it is also easily navigable, with well laid out elements that are not confusing to a person who will visit the site for the first time. [Read more…]

Pagelines PlatformPro 1.3 – The Upgrade

May 26, 2011 By

PlatformPro 1.3, the latest upgraded version of the successful PlatformPro Theme by PageLines, has finally hit the market. Packed with 20 or so new options and features, it has undergone some major changes; the most important of which are listed here:

The new Web Typography tool provides direct integration with Google’s Font API. This provides users with more than 50 font options, each with selectable weight, style, spacing etc. Custom typefaces can be previewed in live preview panes. Everything is integrated seamlessly for Google fonts, making selectors and inclusion of CSS files redundant.

PlatformPro has always included many meta options for the control of separate pages/ posts. Using the various panels was almost impossible to manage. The new MetaPanel combines all the usual CMS meta options in one panel, providing tabs for different sections worked on, thus making things more manageable.

Two new navigation options have been added. A secondary (sub) nav section allows users to select custom menues for each post/ page for sub navigation. This provides more flexibility within site architecture.

The new graphical BrandNav section, a much requested customisation option, combines the site logo/ branding with site navigation inline.

New child theme features added to the Platform API consist of template overriding (overwriting of section templates including files), custom templates (adding new drag and drop templates with files and functions) and a new hook for additional option types.

These improvements alone will certainly help to make web design a more manageable task.

Get you Platform pro license here

Design tip: use extraordinary imagery

May 18, 2011 By

Drawn.ca has posted 2 interesting sources of atypical imagery which, I realized, can be great design inspiration:

First, Dogfoose uses close-up images of produce in his illustrations. The sample below uses broccoli as treetops for a kids magazine illustration:

What an amusing way to channel the miniature look (achieved through tilt-shift photography) for infographics purposes! Is this is a subliminal technique to get children to eat their veggies? Or just a quirky case of nonsequitur?

It doesn’t matter if these questions get answered or not; what matters it that these questions were asked because of the design.

Next, we have Dark Roasted Blend’s otherworldly microscopic images. This one’s from the Olympus BioScapes competition, a photo of Drosophila larva eye neurons:

We’ve gotten so comfortable with tiled textures, but why not take an asymmetrical, unpredictable image as a cornerstone for your design concept?

Why not make trends like photographic backgrounds your own and experiment in unchartered waters? These unusual sources should be a good starting point.