Webmasters Gallery

The logo is a representation of what a company stands for, it’s the backbone of the brand and it portrays its self as a global presence in the marketplace. A well-designed logo is a crucial part of any company’s marketing strategy and it needs to be done right. So I took the liberty of gathering a few examples of some poorly designed logos that should never have made the cut. Take some notes and tel!

I bring my kids here regularly, they have really good prices!

I heard Johnny’s got the best loafs in town!

This one is pretty self-explanatory…

What kind of work are we talking about here?

Not sure, if that’s what I would call winning…

It’s not the same if you don’t take it laying down…

Just keep walking and don’t make eye contact with anyone in the windows…

This one ruined it for everyone…

Is this some sort of clue as to where the food comes from?

Do you think they did it on purpose?

This has to be an online website where librarians get together…

I’d say this one is spot on…

Which one was your favorite and why? If you have any good ones I missed feel free to leave links/comments below so I can check them out! Thanks!

Read More at 12 Poorly Designed Logos

If you are wanting to create a professional logo design for 2016 – have a think about what’s already out there. Your business logo is part of your brand’s personality, let it speak for you! Make 2016 the year for your logo rebrand. It doesn’t matter if you get it right the first time, look

Design-driven companies have outperformed the S&P Index by 219% over 10 years. However, many business leaders fail to prioritize strategic design thinking and are left scratching their heads when website visitors don’t convert or users abandon their products after just a short amount of time.

Luckily, it’s so much easier to find a high-quality designer these days – at least, if you know where and how to look. If you’re looking to take a concrete step to improve your bottom line by hiring a designer to work on your app, website, or product, you can get started in a matter of minutes thanks to the abundance of designers who are available online. Most designers, especially those at a high level, have a strong online presence, and many software developers and designers especially are abandoning typical office careers in favor or online freelance work.

Whether you’re running an e-commerce site that wants revamp its micro interactions, an established company that wants to develop an app, or almost any other kind of business, the following 5 sites are great places to find designers of a high caliber:

1. Toptal Designers

Toptal is best known as an elite network of freelance software developers, but the company also began screening designers in October 2015. This is great news for companies that are looking to hire the best but might not have the time or design know-how to sift through an endless stack of seemingly qualified resumes. Toptal screens each designer in its network with a thorough application process that ensures that each candidate is in the top 3% of design talent. The network includes designers with a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets, so you can be sure there will be a good fit for your business’s needs.

When clients come to Toptal with a project, Toptal’s personal matchmakers get on the phone with the client to discuss their aims and needs before hand-matching them with a senior designer from the network that is perfect for that project specifically. The designer is available to start work immediately, and Toptal clients interview an average of only 1.7 candidates before making a hire since the matchers are so skilled at what they do. In addition to many small to medium sized businesses and startups, large companies from J.P. Morgan to Airbnb have had demonstrated success using Toptal’s services. To learn more and to start your 2-week no risk trial, you can visit Toptal here.

2. Dribbble

Dribbble describes itself as a “show and tell for designers,” and the site is a platform for designers to share their work online to an audience of designers and employers. Founded in 2009, Dribbble has built a loyal designer network that is both talented and proactive in the industry. For businesses, Dribbble is effectively a watering hole for some of the best talent in the industry, and more importantly, a place where that talent is actively creating every day on their own initiative.

Businesses in need of designers can browse designer portfolios to find the aesthetic they like and then privately message the designer in question to see if they’re interested in a job. For added search capability, you can search for designers by location and skill set as well as post a job listing directly to Dribbble’s site. The breadth of Dribbble’s search engine and its well-earned reputation for talented designers make Dribbble a must for any talent search in design.

3. Smashing Magazine Jobs Board

Smashing Magazine is one of the most lauded resources in the design world, providing online articles, books, and ebooks. Its online resources include information on Coding, Design, Mobile, Graphics, UX Design, and WordPress. In addition to these trusted resources, the online site also offers a job board where companies can post jobs for full-time or freelance positions in design, programming, or other related fields.

Since 2008, Smashing Jobs has been “helping great companies as well as gifted job seekers to find their way to each other.” Smashing Jobs has been trusted by companies of all sizes, including Amazon, Lonely Planet, and Tesla Motors.

4. LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search

If you’re not already aware, the professional networking site LinkedIn has over 400 million members and is a huge marketplace for businesses looking to hire talent. While every option on this list has a search function, LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search is easily the most robust search tool for talent of any kind.

Not only can you search your own professional network by looking through your connections, but you’re able to search for designers by skill, company, interests, where they studied, and more. With so many filters, it’s much easier to find a designer who has the skills you need and is the right cultural fit for your company. Even if LinkedIn isn’t exclusively for designers, a lot of design talent is still on the network, and LinkedIn makes sure you can find it.

5. Krop

If you’re not sure what kind of designer you’re looking for, Krop is a great site to make up your mind. Krop is an online portfolio service exclusively for designers, and its goal is not to “show and tell” like Dribbble, but to get designers hired. All the portfolios use the same layout, so it’s easy to navigate the site and quickly look through different designs to find the work you like.

The service has been connecting businesses with designers since 2000, and in the past sixteen years, Krop has made a name for itself, working with companies like Apple, The New York Times, Tesla, Nike, and more. Krop has as much experience supporting enterprises as it does startups, and the site does a great job of catering to different company needs. However, Krop isn’t public, so if you want to browse portfolios and get in touch with Krop’s designers, you have to be a paying subscriber.

6. Referrals

In short, you want to find a designer with a proven track record of success, whether that track record comes from guarantees through screening processes like Toptal’s, a solid portfolio and references, or personal referrals. Personal referrals can be especially reliable if you can find someone you know personally or professionally who has had a great experience with a specific designer, freelance service, or design agency. But no matter what, you want to start thinking about good design as early as possible.
According to Dieter Rams, a legendary designer from Braun, “Design has to be insulated at a high level. Otherwise, you can forget it.” In order to boost your bottom line, your company must treat good design with the utmost importance from as early of a stage as possible. It’s never too soon to start prioritizing design, and it’s never too late to bring on a quality designer or team of designers to bring your business to the next level.

Read More at The Best Places to Find Designers to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Are you tired of integrating third-party services into your website? Yeah, we were too. That’s why we made Segment.

From advertising to personalization and support, our extensive partner network includes the industry’s leading marketing technology solutions, data warehousing and analytics tools. Segment’s developer-friendly APIs set the standard for customer data platforms and is trusted by thousands of awesome companies like New Relic, Crate & Barrel, Intuit, Product Hunt, Instacart, InVision, and Bonobos.

With Segment you can reclaim hours of tedious integration work and get back to building your core product. We even offer a free tier. Try Segment today.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Sponsor: Segment, the last integration you’ll ever need. is a post from CSS-Tricks

Beginning Graphic Designers often wonder if it is okay to use design templates. I hear a lot of Graphic Designers with experience give some of the worst advice about this, overplaying the “value of originality” with no accounting for the context of the situation.

As a graphic designer, you should NEVER depend on templates. But using them, making your own and understanding when to use them is part of the Business of Graphic Design.

Romanticizing certain ideas instead of a focus on practicality dooms many designers in their career.

Here are some helpful templates for different graphic design needs you might have:

Mutli-Purpose HTML Theme:

Avad-WordPress Responsive Theme:

Bootstrap Landing Page Template:

Stationary and Branding Mockup:

Broadcast Motion Graphics Package:

Digital Magazine Template:

Trifold Brochure Template:

Read More at When Are Graphic Design Templates Okay to Use?

Dave and I started the latest ShopTalk Show with an audio clip from Tim Brown responding to some of our previous chatter regarding vertical rhythm (and such). Transcription here. It sparked another interesting conversation about these things.

A small part of that was about Tim’s coined phrase “molten leading”, which is essentially line-height that depends on line length.

It’s actually a “triadic” relationship, as Tim puts it:

What interests me most here is a fundamental triadic relationship in typesetting — that of a text’s font size, line height, and line length. Adjusting any one of these elements without also adjusting the others is a recipe for uncomfortable reading, which is one reason designers have such a difficult time with fluid web layout.

There is no simple obvious way to connect an element’s width and its line-height in CSS (although you can with JavaScript). I’d call this yet-another use-case for container queries! You can adjust line-height with media queries (as Andy Clarke suggested). Basic example:

main {
  line-height: 1.4;
}
@media (max-width: 600px) {
  main {
    line-height: 1.3; 
  }
}

But, the browser window width isn’t necessarily indicative of the current element width.

Also, any kind of fixed breakpoint solution isn’t the perfect solution here anyway. A more fluid connection between these three properties would be better. Something that gets us a little closer here (since Tim-and-friends original explorations in 2012) is calc() and combining it with viewport units.

We’ve talked about viewport units around here before. By setting font-size with vw, we can make type that sizes based on the browser window width.

Here’s an example where we have some base values that we just sprinkle with viewport units:

body {
  font-size: calc(1em + 1vw);
  line-height: calc(1.2em + 1vw);
}

See the Pen Molten Leading by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

That’s pretty simplistic. Tim originally suggested a more complex formula:

Turns out Mike Riethmuller has played with this already. Which plays out like this, for example:

body {
  font-size: 1em;
  line-height: 1.4em;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 20em) {
  body {
    font-size: calc(1em + (1.3125 - 1) * ((100vw - 20em) / (80 - 20)));
    line-height: calc(1.4em + (1.8 - 1.4) * ((100vw - 20em) / (80 - 20)));
  }
}

@media (min-width: 80em) {
  body {
    font-size: 1.3125em;
    line-height: 1.8em;
  }
}

Mike even Sass’d that up:

$min_width: 400;
$max_width: 800;

$min_font: 12;
$max_font: 24; 

:root { font-size: #{$min_font}px; }

@media (min-width: #{$min_width}px) and (max-width: #{$max_width}px) {
  :root { 
    font-size: calc(#{$min_font}px + (#{$max_font} - #{$min_font}) * ( (100vw - #{$min_width}px) / ( #{$max_width} - #{$min_width})));
  }
}
@media (min-width: #{$max_width}px) {
  :root { 
    font-size: #{$max_font}px;
  }
}

See the Pen Precision responsive typography by Mike (@MadeByMike) on CodePen.

So yeah: it’s a thing you can do.

Molten Leading in CSS is a post from CSS-Tricks

There was a lot of great talks from Google’s I/O event this year, and Jake Archibald’s talk on building offline-first is certainly one of them. The DevTools in 2016 talk is great too.

Or, decide for yourself! There is a playlist of all of them and Robert Nyman rounded up everything as well.

Also, if you’re interested in hearing more about this “Progressive Web Apps” stuff and the debate around it…

• Alex Russel: Progressive Web Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul and followup
• Jeremy Keith: Regressive Web Apps and followup
• Remy Sharp: State of the Gap
• Christian Heilmann: Progressive Web Apps and our Regressive Approach

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Instant Loading: Building Offline-First Progressive Web Apps is a post from CSS-Tricks

Adobe is introducing a new feature for Photoshop that designers using this software should find useful. That’s because the new feature addresses an old problem that many users have come across, but could never before deal with this easily.

According to a recent blog post by Adobe, they will be introducing the new Content-Aware Crop tool. One of the most common types of feedback for the company has been the request to apply its Content-Aware technology to cropping; users will be pleased to know that they won’t have to wait too much longer.

The Content-Aware Crop tool is smart technology. It takes into consideration all of the pixels around your image’s edges and fills in the blank space automatically with content, as you either rotate or expand said image.

Even though this tool is still being fine-tuned, Adobe has unveiled all the different ways that designers will be able to use it:

• you can move the horizon either by adding more ground or sky;
• you can fill in your corners as you rotate an image, so you’re able to keep all of the pixels that you have;
• you can alter the aspect ratio by adding content around your image’s edges.

Since this new tool is still in the works, there are likely to be additional applications that designers will discover as they play around. For example you can also utilize the new cropping feature to expand your canvas. This can be very useful if you take a picture with the subject too tightly framed.

This is another case of the company listening to its vast audience of designers and creatives and implementing feedback to improve the use of the software.

Until now, designers had to contend with simply cropping the image in order to cut out the borders entirely. Or they could try and make do with Photoshop’s Content-Aware tool, which didn’t provide anywhere near the convenience and efficiency of the new cropping feature.

Cropping and aligning images are fairly routine tasks in Photoshop, so it makes sense to finally have a feature that addresses this.

Source

It’s well known that, in the ’80s, Microsoft and Apple made the graphical user interface (GUI), the dominant interface on desktop computers. What’s less known is that the GUI, whose navigation is based on pages and links, is not the only possible interface. And we know that finding our way in a modern GUI, whether for a website or application, is not always easy.

One problem is of design, meaning that an interface could simply be poorly designed. But a different problem may very well be the way our brains are wired; even well-designed interfaces can be difficult to navigate and use.

The post Retrofitting Zooming UI To Legacy Websites: An Impossible Task? appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

It’s well known that, in the ’80s, Microsoft and Apple made the graphical user interface (GUI), the dominant interface on desktop computers. What’s less known is that the GUI, whose navigation is based on pages and links, is not the only possible interface. And we know that finding our way in a modern GUI, whether for a website or application, is not always easy.

One problem is of design, meaning that an interface could simply be poorly designed. But a different problem may very well be the way our brains are wired; even well-designed interfaces can be difficult to navigate and use.

The post Retrofitting ZUIs To Legacy Websites: An Impossible Task? appeared first on Smashing Magazine.