Recent months have brought a lot of great stuff for designers at every skill level.

We’ve got tools for designing websites. Some of them try to create a sort of hybrid visual/code workflow, while others hide the code away altogether for the beginners.

We’ve also got prototyping tools for both apps and sites, and a couple of testing tools besides. Some are brand new. Others have been around for a little while, but have recently been updated with awesome new stuff.

Dig in! Discovery is half the fun.

Design tools

Macaw Scarlet

First on the list is Macaw Scarlet, a tool so fresh, it’s not out yet! But then, it’s from the guys who brought us the original Macaw, so lots of people are excited anyway.

Billing itself as a “live design environment”, Macaw Scarlet will be geared toward making responsive web design easier for everyone.

Wagtail

Wagtail is not a design tool, it’s a CMS. And yet, it could easily be included in the design work-flow, especially where content design is concerned.

You see, it has a fantastic feature called Streamfield, which works a lot like Medium’s post editor. The difference is that it’s customizable, and thus more powerful. This makes it a lot easier for the user to design content on each page.

Magic Mirror for Sketch 3

Here’s one for the Sketch users. Basically, it makes a sort of smart object designed to help you put mockups into stock photos.

Wire-framing tools

Wire Flow

This one gets my personal stamp of approval. It runs fast on my normally not-drawing-friendly tablet, and comes with just about everything you could ever want from a wire-framing app.

It’s also designed to work with phone-sized devices, which could be a great way to properly visualize a phone app interface.

Apple Watch wire-frame kit

Wire-frame UI elements for the Apple Watch! What more do you need to know?

PowerMockup

There has been more than one wireframe toolkit for Apple’s Keynote software. It was only a matter of time before someone made it happen for Powerpoint. And they have. Here it is.

Prototyping tools

Origami

Coming all the way from Facebook itself: “Origami is a free tool for designing modern user interfaces. Quickly put together a prototype, run it on your iPhone or iPad, iterate on it, and export code snippets your engineers can use.”

No word yet on how useful those code snippets actually are. But it’s Facebook. They have good engineers.

Marvel

With simple tools, and a solid free plan, Marvel makes a great prototyping app. It integrates with Dropbox and Google Drive, importing any images you specify, and allowing you to link them together in a quick mock-up of an app.

It keeps your imported images synced, too. If you save new versions to Dropbox or Google Drive, your prototype app automatically gets updated.

Protosketch

Protosketch is a prototyping app (kind of) designed for the iPad. It comes with a UI kit (including tons of components), basic vector tools, alignment tools, and a lot more.

It’s currently in beta, and it’s only for the iPad, but if that’s your platform, this could be perfect for you. It plays nice with other apps, too: it can export your files in raster formats, SVG, and PDF.

Frontify

Like many other tools on this list, Frontify does prototyping. It also offers tools to make working on branding and style guides as a group easier. Create your color palette, define your style, and create a library of UI elements, and share it with the rest of your team.

Atomic

Use Atomic to pull in your files from Photoshop or Sketch and make prototypes from them. Version control, collaboration features, and more make this an excellent tool for slick, fast, iterative design.

Form

Form is an advanced prototype creator that works in tandem with your iPhone. Create the prototype in your desktop or laptop, and see the results immediately on your phone. Plus, it uses Google’s Material Design principles to make your prototype look great.

Pixate

Pixate specializes in high-fidelity “native” prototypes that are displayed on your phone and work a lot like the real thing.

Web builders

Sandvox

Sandvox is a Mac app for the non-coders among us. It’s largely template-based (as is an ever-increasing portion of the Internet), but does make provisons for more advanced users to add stuff in manually.

It doubles as a sort of CMS for some kinds of sites, like blogs, and though the software isn’t “new”, recent versions have introduced Sandvox Hosting. The hand-coders among us might recoil at the idea, but for newbies, the package deal is actually pretty great.

It does work with any host, though, so if you want to handle that yourself, you can.

XPRS

A site builder for beginners, XPRS offers free sites for personal use, for artists and students. There are pro plans for business and e-commerce.

WordPress builders

Themify Flow

WordPress may have its detractors, but others are taking it in surprising new directions. The guys over at Themify, for example, decided that it was time to create a design tool on top of the publishing platform.

The result is Themify Flow which allows you to create custom, responsive WordPress themes from a drag-n-drop interface. Best of all, it’s free and open source.

Cornerstone

Cornerstone is sort of competing with Themify Flow, in that it offers a visual way to create WordPress themes, right on top of WordPress itself.

It operates differenly, however. For example, it features a live code editor, and other features design to give developer-level access to the front-end design. Also, it’s not free, unless you buy the X Theme.

Qards

Quards is another page builder plugin for WordPress. Most of the design work is done for you, but instead of choosing a single template, you build each page with “cards”.

These are basically pre-made layout sections which can be mixed and matched to build a whole page. It’s good for landing pages, arranging individual articles in new and original ways, promo sites, and those sorts of things.

Collaboration & productivity tools

Relay

A quick and easy tool for Slack users who need to share their design work a lot. With extensions/apps for Adobe CC, Sketch, Chrome, and OSX, it simplifies sharing whatever you’re working on.

Skala Preview

Want to see previews of whatever you’re working on in Photoshop or Android? Just install Skala Preview, and you’ll be able to send lossless, color-perfect previews to just about any mobile device.

It comes with the option to plug the device into your computer via USB instead of using wi-fi.

RightFont

RightFont is a fast, pretty font manager for Mac that integrates with Adobe CC and Sketch.

Fresh code

jQuery 3

The jQuery 3 alpha has been released. There aren’t any new features to speak of, but there have been extensive re-writes of old features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.

Simpler Sidebar

Speaking of jQuery, there are a number of new plugins out that could make a designer’s job a lot easier, especially if you’re a designer who also codes a bit.

We start with Simpler Sidebar, which makes sidebars. It’s small, it’s fast, it’s pretty. Just don’t use a hamburger menu to trigger it, I guess.

Labelauty

Label your radio buttons and check boxes in style. Great for the designer who just can’t let browsers do things their own way.

smart-placeholder

When filling out forms, I occasionally click on a field, get distracted by something, and then come back to it. If that field was labeled with a placeholder attribute, I sometimes have to un-select it to remember what I’m supposed to be typing.

Silly, but human.

smart-placeholder solves that design issue by keeping the placeholder visible below the text being typed. Neat, right?

Refreshed tools

We’d be remiss if we didn’t call attention to the great work being done on already well-known apps. Here are the ones that have had some noteworthy updates recently:

Webflow

Webflow has been integrating third-party services into its functionality (much like the rest of the Internet) in some new ways. As of now, you can add functionality to your web forms right from Webflow.

You can add e-mails to Mailchimp lists, send out tweets, add data to Google spreadsheets, or make a new note with Evernote. You can also, incidentally, have your form send an e-mail.

InVision

InVision has been introducing new features steadily, including free, unlimited mobile user testing, a workflow manager, Dribbble integration, and emoji. Yes, emoji.

Strikingly

In recent months, Strikingly has introduced a new page editor, collaboration, and it even added an RSS feed for its blog functionality… Better late than never.

Adobe Muse

Lastly, Adobe Muse is still a thing — hey, not everyone needs the power of DreamWeaver. Like its more powerful older sibling, Muse can now use any font from TypeKit.

It can also now create blogs, e-commerce sites, and improved contact forms. Plus, like some other apps in the CC suite of apps, it can now access the massive Adobe Stock library.

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When Thomas Heatherwick’s 2012 Olympic cauldron unfolded its 204 petals on a warm summer’s evening in London during the opening ceremony, many gasped in awe. It captured brilliantly, in a moment, the optimism and human achievement that’s the core of the Olympic spirit. It was something that no-one had seen before, nor expected; unique in its boldness, arguably setting a new standard.

Yet this spirit of unadulterated optimism seems to be short supply. I was surprised to read in WebDesignerDepot that some of design’s great and good have felt it necessary to publish a list of Designer Oaths. Modelled on the Hippocratic Oath every modern doctor and physician swears by to protect their patients, these designerly ones set out to ensure that design — in all its forms, practices, glory — doesn’t get too big for its boots and, ominously, that the end result ‘does good’.

The oaths are built around many fundamentals of the daily routine of a designer including judgement, empathy, human-centeredness, and creativity.

Yet underlying them all is a sense, a belief — a deeply false one in my opinion — that the designer needs to be reined in, that, if left unchecked, design is harmful and must be treated with more responsibility. This sentiment reflects a much wider social ambivalence about human beings, both designers and users alike.

For example, one principle says design must be: “ecocentric and holistic [but] avoiding those twin traps of behavioral manipulation and pure profitability.” Another contradicts this, accepting the possibility of behaviour change, saying that: “it may also be within my power [as a designer] to adapt a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.” It ends with much pomposity (as many of these statements do), stating: “Above all, I must not play at god.”

Let’s get some perspective. Show me design that does not involve refashioning resources (that is, making something out of nothing), that does not change behaviour, or does not contribute to the profitability of a clients’ business! Surely all of this is essential to the impact and success of design.

Elsewhere, the oaths can only result in the curtailing of creativity, imagination, and ambition — all in the name of the end-user. While no-one would argue ‘users’ should be ignored, it’s a sad state of affairs if the potential for intelligence and sensitivity from the designer must be so denigrated: “the best design sprouts from the user’s understanding of their own needs, not the designer’s dreams, assumptions, or aesthetic preferences.”

In the same vein, another continues: “I must aim to understand the consequences of my practice, with great humbleness and awareness of my own biases.” This can only weigh the designer down with an even heavier sense of moral and ethical responsibility, including: “to relieve systemic suffering; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own limitations.” It ends with the familiar catechism: “Above all I must not play god.” While all this may or may not have some effect on the quality of design, it will certainly make the day-to-day of design work dreary and burdensome for designers.

What is striking about all the statements is not their pomposity, but that they have put on a pedestal the kind of design that believes it can solve all manner of social, political and economic woes.

The oaths are noticably evasive about the creativity of making material things. These days, for a designer to admit to being involved in making ‘stuff’ is a bit like admitting to liking burning coal or killing lions. Instead, it is more fashionable to aspire to design that is concerned with paradoxically (even though the authors would not admit it) designing for behaviour change.

Many of the most noticable, cutting-edge designers are actively engaged in working out how to change how we live. Arguably, they are helping fill the gap where politicians and policy makers no longer feel willing to take a lead over, or prefer to defer to other experts other than themselves.

Take healthcare. Globally the debate is about how to use design to encourage a preventative agenda that reduces the number of people who are admitted to hospital for lifestyle illnesses, such as smoking or overeating.

While there is a genuine challenge in cutting healthcare expenditure, these designer interventions (along with many other social policy initiatives) are part of a wider concern about who should decide whether or not it is morally correct to use it to change lifestyles.

Designers have every right to decide who to work for, who to not get paid by, and to imbue their work with all the best intentions possible. But it must be recognised that in areas such as healthcare and behavioural design, they very quickly end up involved in decisions that are arguably beyond their skill set and remit, that is, ‘playing god’.

Ethics and design rarely sit well together. Asking designers to judge whether or not their work is good – morally or otherwise – is like asking chefs to judge their own cooking. The only arbiters of whether something is good can only be the clients, the end-users, the people who have ultimately paid for it, commissioned it or bought it.

The wider problem is that these debates tend to end up curtailing innovation and creativity at a time when we need it most. We live in a world of underdeveloped promise, of how to make more use of materials, techniques, processes, when many are reluctant to take risks and think about problems in new ways. The future of driverless cars and transportation; the imagination needed to find new uses for materials like graphene; of how help a growing developing world who are hungry for resources, growth and higher living standards — these can and should excite designers.

Yet if designers trade in an unfettered, questioning spirit for a set of ethical and moral responsibilities, we will all suffer. It is not that designers can do no wrong, but surely me, you and the rest of the public are the best arbiters for what is good for us, useful and otherwise should be ignored. Is it not enough of a problem to make design that fulfils the brief, without worrying about all this other stuff? God knows there is enough bad design around.

We can only have that privilege if designers have the space to get on with what they are good at. That means letting them produce brilliant work like Heatherwick’s Olympic cauldron. It equally means being critical, cutting things down to size, like the dreadful, unreadable 2012 Olympics typeface.

Designers need only one rule: to be ambitious. Do that, and let the world decide if you answered the brief, or even better, if you went way beyond it.

Featured image, ambition image via Shutterstock.

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The responsive design revolution is truly upon us (if it hasn’t already happened!), and even though e-commerce websites haven’t picked up responsive design quite as aggressively as in other industries, it’s becoming increasingly popular.

So far, most of the responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop. Yet little attention has been paid to the opportunities for expanding that range beyond the standard desktop screen, to create an experience optimized for modern large-scale displays.

The post Responsive Upscaling: Large-Screen E-Commerce Design appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

For years, the “home” button has provided a compass rose, the north star, a navigator’s ability to regroup to the familiar comfort of the homepage no matter how deep into a website we’ve gone. As users become more fluent in navigating the intricacies of the Web however, having a prominent home button is becoming an unnecessary navigation crutch — a visual obstacle that web designers increasingly eschew.

Because primary navigation represents a series of choices that we’re asking users to make, it’s important to only offer the most important content categories as options. By culling the home button from this list, the decision-making process is simplified and we are able to provide an improved user experience.

In an increasingly tech-savvy population, the home button is irrelevant to users who easily navigate the average website without it. Reserving it a space in your sites’ primary navigation when the same functionality exists elsewhere is a waste of valuable real estate.

There’s no place like the home button

When designing a website, a primary consideration is the user experience within the site’s hierarchy. If they can’t easily navigate your website, your customers may lose their place, feel frustrated and leave entirely. If you’re selling products online, this means lowering your conversion rate and possibly revenue. Not only does it take up room that could be used for more important information, but it often adds an unwelcome amount of choice.

Customers have a varying level of experience, can be easily distracted, and may need a number of contextual cues to help them keep their place when navigating your site; no matter how small or organized. Therefore, before making changes to your site, you must thoroughly consider the demographics of your user base and their level of understanding toward the web. For example, if your users are predominantly baby boomers, they may need extra guidance where younger users will have no trouble. Despite the advantages of removing the home button, you must be confident that doing so will ease their user experience, not hinder it.

So how do you make the leap away from the comforts of a home button? How do we create enough convenience that a visitor doesn’t need to return home, while still providing the sense of security offered by the Home button? There are a few web design strategies that can be easily employed to provide accommodation to all:

Clickable Logos

It has become a standardized web design pattern to make the company’s logo clickable, since that is perhaps the most familiar alternative to a home button for users.

Because most sites feature the logo prominently in the header already (typically in the top left or center), this makes a convenient shortcut to return home. The design pattern is even more helpful when a company’s logo is always present on the page, acting as a permanent “home” button.

Breadcrumbs

If your site is larger or has a complex hierarchy, you may consider a “breadcrumb trail” to provide users with an indication of where they are within the site’s organization. Breadcrumbs can be used to show your location in a multi-step form, deeply layered navigation, or even when browsing through store items organized or filtered by various categories. The breadcrumbs are links, usually at the top of the webpage, that describe your position in the site’s hierarchy in an unobtrusive fashion. They reveal exactly where you are in the site as you go from page to page, and provide a way to move the amount of steps you wish — even home, if needed.

A good example of very traditional breadcrumb navigation is the gov.uk site. Their breadcrumbs also appear at the top of the page as you navigate deeper into their site, making for an easy trip back home. This is a great consideration if your site has a dense organizational structure as theirs does.

But it’s not just complex sites that make use of breadcrumbs: luciacuba.com uses its logo and section headings as breadcrumbs to provide a path back up the document tree.

Footers

The website footer is another trusty standby; the bottom the the page is a place users of all levels of web familiarity know to go to for valuable information. A complete view of the website’s hierarchy can be placed in the footer, or simply a larger subset of the site’s navigation than is offered by the primary navigation — typically including a home button. This approach provides a fallback: even if your users are looking for something not offered in the clear and simple choices of primary navigation, there’s an offering of the website’s structure at the bottom of the page.

The mini-site for AIGA’s design conference 2015 includes a home button, not to the mini-site’s front page, but to AIGA’s main homepage. Wilson Quarterly and The Onion both use logo marks to link from their footer to their home page, but Redesignd mixes it in with other useful links.

Focus on user experience

Good user experience design focuses on creating a successful user journey in order to create engaged and returning visitors, and in the case of an eCommerce site, shoppers. Although there are many tools to help make conversions more frequent, eliminating unnecessary navigation options such as the home button is an important way to streamline visitors’ journey through your website.

Giant organizations such as Amazon, Apple, Twitter, and Wikipedia have done away with their home button because home is not where the primary source of interaction is taking place, but merely a location for featured offers, promotions or a table of contents.

Visitors are most likely to return home when they’ve lost their way. Eliminating the home button from your navigation should be just one step along the way towards making the user journey through your site intuitive and frustration-free. Reducing decision-making and cognitive load for your users will help encourage more conversions, purchases, videos watched, articles read, or whatever tasks your site helps visitors complete.

Featured image, AIGA design conference 2015

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Last year I read Jan Constantin’s post “Typographic Design Patterns and Current Practices” and straightaway wanted to do something similar with email. At the time I was studying responsive typography on the web, trying to break down the websites I liked in order to understand what made the typography work so well, then attempting to apply those findings to email design.

After seeing Constantin’s work, I also wanted to explore how other email designers were handling responsive typography. So, I amassed 50 emails across various industries that I think do a good job with typography to see if any patterns emerged. You can skip straight to the Google Doc showing the raw data and results.

The post Typographic Patterns In HTML Email Newsletter Design appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

In a month, I’ll be attempting to hound my share of glory at MeasureUP with a talk on using Docker for people who may not think it impacts them. In it, I’ll demonstrate some uses of Docker today in a .NET application. As I prepare for this talk, there’s one thing we Western Devs have forgotten to talk about. Namely, some of us are already using Docker regularly just to post on the site.

Western Devs uses Jekyll. Someone suggested it, I tried it, it worked well, decision was done. Except that it doesn’t work well on Windows. It’s not officially supported on the platform and while there’s a good guide on getting it running, we haven’t been able to do so ourselves. Some issue with a gem we’re using and Nokogiri and lib2xml and some such nonsense.

So in an effort to streamline things, Amir Barylko create a Docker image. It’s based on the Ruby base image (version 2.2). After grabbing the base image, it will:

• Install some packages for building Ruby
• Install the bundler gem
• Clone the source code into the /root/jekyll folder
• Run bundle install
• Expose port 4000, the default port for running Jekyll

With this in place, Windows users can run the website locally without having to install Ruby, Python, or Jekyll. The command to launch the container is:

docker run -t -p 4000:4000 -v //c/path/to/code:/root/jekyll abarylko/western-devs:v1 sh -c 'bundle install && rake serve'

This will:

• create a container based on the abarylko/western-devs:v1 image
• export port 4000 to the host VM
• map the path to the source code on your machine to /root/jekyll in the container
• run bundle install && rake serve to update gems and launch Jekyll in the container

To make this work 100%, you also need to expose port 4000 in VirtualBox so that it’s visible from the VM to the host. Also, I’ve had trouble getting a container working with my local source located anywhere except C:Usersmysuername. There’s a permission issue somewhere in there where the container appears to successfully map the drive but can’t actually see the contents of the folder. This manifests itself in an error message that says Gemfile not found.

Now, Windows users can navigate to localhost:4000 and see the site running locally. Furthermore, they can add and make changes to their posts, save them, and the changes will get reflected in the browser. Eventually, that is. I’ve noticed a 10-15 second delay between the time you press Save to the time when the changes actually get reflected. Haven’t determined a root cause for this yet. Maybe we just need to soup up the VM.

So far, this has been working reasonably well for us. To the point, where fellow Western Dev, Dylan Smith has automated the deployment of the image to Azure via a Powershell script. That will be the subject of a separate post. Which will give me time to figure out how the thing works.

WordPress is becoming ever more popular. More and more designers are working with this content management system. At the moment, there is simply no way around it. The result is thousands of WordPress themes in the official WordPress Directory and a good framework, where specialized designers should help make the work easier. Also, novel approaches like page and site builder are increasingly coming onto the market. I want to present one of these site builders to you today. Layers for WordPress is an entirely new type; you can create a theme of your choice, or an extension simply by pointing and clicking. An intuitive interface with a lot of options gives wings to the imagination. Layers is a brand new site builder for WordPress users. It offers a simple interface that works with point and click. And yet Layers isn’t just for interested WordPress novices but also for old hands in the business. Layers is an open-source project that can be customized to your personal requirements. It is also free and can be used without constraints. Layers will incidentally be installed as a theme. Download Layers from the Layers Homepage What can you do with Layers? A lot, actually a […]

What’s happening in the industry? What important techniques have emerged recently? What about new case studies, insights, techniques and tools? Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you. Starting from today, we are happy and honored to feature a bi-monthly web development reading list here on Smashing Magazine. Now it should be a bit easier to stay up to date. — Ed.

Welcome to the one hundredth edition of the Web Development Reading List and the first one to appear on Smashing Magazine. I am very happy to extend my audience and keep you up to date with the web development industry. If you have any feedback, please let me know in the comments or write me an email.

The post Web Development Reading List #100 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

If fresh templates, GUI packs and freebies are what you were looking for, your search should come to a halt. The following resources collection picking comes full of free resources like themes and templates, user interface kits, and editable icons. Take the ones you like and go nuts! One important information before you read on: All the following elements are freely usable, though some will require a registration to download and not all are suitable for commercial use. More detailed license information is provided individually, but keep in mind that it’s always best to double-check licensing before you actually use a resource, at least commercially. Kuntitled: HTML Workspace Portfolio Theme Creator: PanKogut Features: Full responsiveness, one page template, smooth transitions, night-like dark minimal design, workspace header License: Free for personal use only Eventually: HTML5 Coming-up Website Template Creator: HTML5 UP Features: All screen size-friendly, constantly smooth-transitional background, clean and neat design, subscription form, social icons and credits upfront. License: Free for personal and commercial use, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License Highlights: Free HTML5 Freelancer Web Template Creator: HTML5 UP Features: Full responsiveness, transitional effects for single-page scrolling and stationery background, appealing minimal and neat design License: Free for personal and commercial […]

1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store and another 1.5 million in Google’s Play store. That’s a lot of apps, and for a growing number of mobile users. An average user in the US will download only three new apps per month (at best), according to comScore’s “US Mobile App Report.”

Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough.

The post What A/B Testing Taught Us About App Store Optimization appeared first on Smashing Magazine.