Read More at Banking & Financial Company Website Designs

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

A matter of perspective

That’s why I’m here

No lightweight

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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Source

Read More at ELI5 Amazon Web Services: A Handy Online Reference Guide

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A resource site by the name of Creative Tim put together a brief Dribbble Meetup in early September. It seems to have been such a success that the organizer decided to write a blog post on the impressions.

Initial expectations were about 15-20 people but just over 40 people showed! Quite a turnout fo an American portfolio site meetup located in Romania. The event even managed to reel in sponsors including Designmodo, UXeria, and HotJar.

The event had lots of food, drinks, and games. There was even a drawing competition where guests had to draw their partners. The winner walked away with a brand-spankin’ new yo-yo!

And just like any great event, there were plenty of speeches. Talk about startups, managing clients, the business-side of design, and even nitty-gritty ideas like how to build icons from scratch(shared by Tea Tomescu).

It seems this Dribbble meetup was a smashing success with lots of interesting! So much so that there’s another design-related meetup in Romania.

While few of us may live in Romania or close enough to attend, this is still a wonderful surprise to see Dribbble designers passionate enough to organize these kinds of events. I certainly hope we see a lot more of these meetups springing across the United States & other western countries.

Read More at Insight from the Bucharest Dribbble Meetup

Those who follow the rapidly growing(or decaying?) culture of dating in the western world should know about Tinder. It’s a “dating” app that allows you to pair up with people in your area.

After entering some info Tinder will do its best to pair you up with other nearby people on Tinder. You swipe left to reject, or swipe right to accept. Pretty simple concept.

Well all designers know that it’s tough(but necessary) to find a balanced composition. This often relies on many factors like color theory and white space. But typography matching also plays a large role.

Enter Font Flame, the online webapp for checking out combinations of fonts.

It’s hard to say whether the site’s algorithm is meant to produce naturally-extravagant fonts, or just 2 random typefaces thrown together. But either way it’s an interesting concept that has recently gained notoriety among web & graphic designers.

You don’t actually need to know much about typography or styles to play with Font Flame. In fact, a newbie designer could learn a thing or two by working with this app! Granted you won’t get the same knowledge compared to spending your time reading “Thinking with Type”… but I supposed a Tinder knock-off can teach many of the same vital design lessons.

Read More at Font Flame Marries Tinder Matching with Typography

Some of us have likely seen the Apple signs and logos in storefront windows indicating the acceptance of Apple Pay. This is Apple’s method of breaking into the payment industry for competing against larger financially-focused platforms like Square.

An official blog post was published on the Android blog detailing the official public release of Android Pay. It can be used to handle secure payments in many store along with managing gift cards and store credits.

Android Pay works with all NFC-enabled Android devices (running KitKat 4.4+), on any mobile carrier, at every tap and pay ready location across the US. Android Pay will support credit and debit cards from the four major payment networks: American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa. These cards are issued by many of the most popular US banks and credit unions, including American Express, Bank of America, Discover, Navy Federal Credit Union, PNC, Regions Bank, USAA, and U.S. Bank. Wells Fargo will be available in the next few days, Capital One and Citi are coming soon, and we’re adding new banks all the time.

Since this is still so new there’s bound to be many further advances in due time. It’s hard to know what to expect at this point, but I will say it seems Google is going all-out to compete against Apple’s similar alternative.

You’ll find a whole lot more information on the Android Pay homepage. From there you can also find out which device support Android Pay & how you can get it setup on your Android-powered mobile machine.

At the moment it seems this may also tie into Google Wallet, although details are still in the works.

One thing for sure is that Google’s pulling out all the stops to get this idea in motion & into people’s hands as fast as possible.

Read More at Google’s Android Pay Tussles against Apple Pay

The Mac OS X app Sketch is wonderful for designing user interfaces. Its artboard system only adds to the experience, letting users demonstrate how a single dynamic screen might vary depending how people interact with it.

But one thing we cannot communicate is how an element might animate while the user interacts with it. What happens between the two states?

And similarly, have you tried Atomic?

Atomic, the Interaction Prototyping Tool

Atomic.io is surprisingly similar to Sketch despite them accomplishing two different things. It’s structured with Pages and Artboards just like Sketch, and you can either copy layers from Sketch or create them yourself in Atomic.

It’s true beauty is apparent when you begin designing the interactions and transitioning the screens together.

It’s fair to say anyone who does UI/UX design in Sketch will fall head-over-heels for Atomic.

What Makes the Perfect Duo?

Atomic corresponds to many of Sketch App’s keyboard shortcuts despite it being a web application.

Here’s one that you won’t find in Sketch though: “H” for Hotspot.

If you’re creating objects, shapes, and text directly in Atomic, you’ll notice the “Style Panel”(on the right) isn’t much different from Sketch’s “Inspector”.

In fact, you can right-click in Sketch and select “Copy CSS Attributes…” and paste them into the “Custom CSS” field in Atomic.io. Talk about a time saver.

If this isn’t enough to convince you, let’s consider snap-to intuition. This may make you wonder if Atomic.io was really built by Bohemian Coding.

Overall Atomic works best as a general prototyping tool but it doesn’t need to go solo. Give it a shot in conjunction with Sketch and see what you think!

Read More at Why Sketch and Atomic.io are the Best Prototyping Duo

The recently bridged Generate Conference has grown to a tremendous amount of popularity. In 2015 it will be hosted in London, England in the Grand Connaught Rooms.

It’s a 2-day event spanning the 17th and 18th of September. Many guests will be speaking about various topics from design, development, and everything in-between.

It appears the schedule of events is jam-packed with talks and keynotes from various speakers. Generate is more of a conference/keynote event where speakers dominate the schedule.

You won’t find any workshops but there are plenty of breaks for food and chatting with other conference-goers.

The list of speakers includes Dan Goodwin, John Setzen, Eric Meyer, and Phil Hawksworth among many other talented people.

As of this writing tickets are still available with plenty to choose from. If you’re anywhere near London or might want to take the trip, this 2-day conference is sure to offer a lot of insight and some great presentations.

Read More at Generate Conference opens September 17th in London

Recently a Senior Web UI Engineer by the name of Ashley Nolan published a wonderful blog post detailinig the results of a survey she conferred with various web developers. The results were meant to measure which tools, languages, libraries, and dev resources are currently the most popular among coders in 2015.

Some results feel more than obvious while others are rather shocking. Here’s a rundown of the data charts but if you want to read more details please visit Nolan’s original blog post.

Preprocessors

Modern CSS preprocessors save a lot of time on more than just one or two tasks. Interestingly we all can expect either Sass or LESS to make it onto this list. But the results show a few other interesting points as well.

Post-Processing

The next question wasn’t geared towards the popularity of tools, but rather the number of developers who were familiar with the idea of post-processing. The most popular choices are Post CSS and Rework CSS, both of which were the limiting options in this survey.

Task Runners

These tools follow automation to the max. You can write scripts or apply pre-built scripts to a wide variety of files to achieve results like minification, merging, and simplification of redundant elements.

JS Frameworks

The fourth question deals with JavaScript frameworks, and more specifically developer’s current knowledge base of dev frameworks. I’m not surprised to see jQuery so high up on the list. I am a little surprised to see Ember.js is “heard of”, but very rarely used.

JS Frameworks(Most Used)

Similar question but more about usage. This graph depicts the most popular JavaScript libraries & frameworks that frontend developers use on the vast majority of their projects. Yet again jQuery leads the way, but Angular is a close second which I’m very happy about.

JS Module Bundlers

It seems very few devs have even heard of these bundlers, let along use them in their workflow.

A bundler is meant to save time by combining all modules together into a single file. This can also work with something like ES6 or variants of JavaScript like CoffeeScript.

Interestingly enough, frontend developers on average do not use module bundlers at all in their workflow. I’m curious to see if this trend might change over the next 5-10 years.

JS Testing

Another less-popular chore among frontend developers is testing. This can be accomplished through a variety of frameworks that work on page dynamics/DOM elements, as well as asynchronous results like Ajax requests. Again it seems very few developers have latched onto custom testing but maybe this will catch as the years pass by.

Misc Frontend Tools

Lastly we come to a general question about miscellaneous tools for developers. This isn’t just about usage, but also considers if developers have even heard of these tools. The results are quick interesting and overall I find this quiz to paint a magnificent picture of the microcosm of frontend development.

I’d again like to thank Ashley Nolan for granting permission for us to republish her findings here on Web Design Ledger. I’ve just glossed over many of these topics presenting the raw results of Ashley’s survey. But if you’re interested to read more please check out her wonderful post covering many facets of the surveying process itself.

Read More at A Poll of Modern Frontend Web Developer’s Preferred Tools