Over the last months we have seen a strong trend towards more individual web designs. These designs use realistic motifs from everyday life, such as hand-drawn elements, script fonts, pins, paper clips, organic textures and scrapbooks. That’s not a big surprise as they serve the function that faceless, shiny, glassy 3D-buttons completely fail to deliver: individuality and personality. “Personal” designs appear more familiar and more friendly. Used properly, such elements can give a human touch to design and communicate the content in a truly distinctive manner.
Design patterns were first described in the 1960s by Christopher Alexander, an architect who noticed that many things in our lives happen according to patterns. He adapted his observations to his work and published many findings on the topic. Since then, design patterns have found their place in many areas of our lives, and can be found in the design and development of user interfaces as well.
Since the early days of Twitter users have had the ability to upload their own background images. From photos of cute kittens to jaw-dropping mosaics, the Twitter background has been a key medium for self-expression, personal branding, and personal fulfillment.
Designing a website has never been easier. If you asked a web designer who been long enough in the industry, they could tell you there's actually not much resources, articles nor communication channels regarding web design/develop in the older days, let alone high quality free tutorials.
Designing a beautiful, legible typeface is hard work and takes time and patience. The type family has to convey a message clearly and effectively, regardless of the setting in which it is used. Of course, thousands of freely available fonts are out there, and some free fonts are very impressive. Yet only a few free fonts manage to beat the look and feel of a carefully designed professional typeface, one that has been painstakingly developed over years with a close attention to tiny details. Read more…
We know we can always count on the Internet for free quality icons, but that being said, free icons sometimes might have it's limitation too. Here's few we can quickly think of:
Copyright. Most free icons restricts usage on non-commercial product/website only.
Size. Don't you just hate it when you found your favorite
icon but it's only a 32×32 and you wish they have a bigger version?
Colors. You found the exact
icon you want, but the color is just not right.
Transparency. Some author did not distribute their free
icon in .PNG or original source. That makes it hard to implement their icons on our design.
