We hear lots about how brutalism is becoming a trend. Well, the alarmists among us can probably let this one go. All evidence points to people liking good typography and shiny graphics, all wrapped up in a healthy bit of white space, more than they like… the other thing.

While we certainly can learn a lot from the success of brutalist design in certain spaces, it’s doubtful that everyone’s going to jump on that bandwagon. It’s more likely that everyone will continue to embrace, an attractive and semi-flat aesthetic, and finally start to focus on UX principles.

Yes, everyone’s going to realize that the success of (some) brutalist websites just means that they can probably tone down the animations, and the use of video. Designers will remember that making their site usable for as many people — on as many platforms — as possible is far more important than flashiness.

And then I’m going to wake up and be sad. Ah well. Let’s look at some pretty websites, shall we?

Buero Huegel

Buero Hegel is a German agency that focuses on brand management and web design. Their site embraces that brutalist-yet-not-ugly aesthetic known as minimalism, which is still a thing. They combine it with a healthy bit of asymmetry and a thin layout to make a site that, while simple, looks unique amongst the more trendy sites.

Surinder Thakur

Surinder Thakur cheated (not really) by using diagonal lines, classy and understated drop shadows (They’re back, baby!), and minimal yet informative case-study style presentation.

FLOW4

FLOW4 gives us that now-classic full-width sections portfolio look. They spiced things up by adding subtle, playful interactive elements to each of the portfolio pieces on the home page. You can play around with them there, or click through to a much more detailed case study.

You’ll need to be able to read German, though.

Simone Viola

Simone Viola is a product designer with a distinct focus on simplicity. His website keeps the same tone, with the fantastic use of literal white space, a full-screen layout, and our classic thin sans-serif.

It’s a simple site, for a designer of simple products, and it looks good.

Creative Monarchy

Creative Monarchy is another of those sites that’s not overly-original, but it looks good. It’s worth a look, if you appreciate the classics.

Teo Yu Sheng

Teo Yu Sheng is a UX designer and coder in Singapore. His portfolio keeps things simple with a single column of text, and no images until you open up a portfolio piece. It is basically the definition of minimalism, and it works.

The only thing I can’t agree with is the jarring change of brightness when you roll over his “business card” at the top of the page.

eTecc/Interactive

eTecc/Interactive is what every techy half-orange business site in the ’90s aspired to be, but didn’t know how to achieve. It’s a simple, modern, minimalist design spiced up by subtle throwbacks to older tech-related sites.

Usability and nostalgia. It’s a winning combination for nerds like me.

Flow

Lukasz Radwan’s one-pager is one of the more beautiful dark websites I’ve seen in a long time. The contrast is good, the typography is properly spaced for a dark site, and it all just fits together well.

I do take some exception to his calling the portfolio section his “Flowcase”, but only because I didn’t come up with that pun first.

Umeed Emad

Umeed Emad’s portfolio is the second site on this list to drop in a couple of design elements that take me back to the ’90s. I mean, the brackets around “Front-End Developer” do fit the theme, here, but remember when everyone used to do that? Nowadays, though, it looks more retro-cool, especially because the rest of the site looks good.

It’s a bit of a risk, showing only your client’s logos to start with, and another to link straight to their sites, but otherwise, it’s a pretty — and pretty bright — design.

Andrea Pedrina

Andrea Pedrina’s portfolio is one of the few I’d say actually kind of needs a preloader, because there’s a fair amount of video and animated content here along with everything else. Once you get past it, though, you get one of the most lovely monochromatic designs I’ve seen in a while.

Oh, interact with it for a bit, and you’ll see colors, sure… but I do love that black and white style, when it’s executed right.

High Contrast

High Contrast combines a fairly conventional layout with some judiciously applied asymmetry. Everything else about the design is largely par for the course.

HTML Boutique

HTML Boutique is a lot like the High Contrast site above, mixing conventional layout styles with asymmetry, but it definitely;y has its own distinct personality. Plus, they’re making brown look good, and not at all drab, which is certainly not the easiest thing.

Alaa Mendili

Alaa Mendili uses great typography, tons of subtle and not-so-subtle animation, and bold colors to go all out with his portfolio. The thing that really gets me, though, is the use of those spinning line optical illusion things as section backgrounds.

Now, that’s only on the home page, which is good, otherwise it would get way too distracting. As they are, they definitely make the site stand out.

Underscore

Underscore is a branding and design agency. They use a masonry layout to showcase both their work, and articles they’ve written, and it works quite well. I’ve seen this a few times now. I haven’t seen it nearly often enough to make it a trend, but it is catching on.

As long as people clearly differentiate which bits take you to their portfolio, and which take you to an article, I think it’s a cool way to show off both of those things together.

Daniel Hopwood

Websites for interior design studios tend to be minimalist, with interactive elements. Daniel Hopwood isn’t bucking the trend, but rather exemplifying it. If you just have to have a site that is more like a PowerPoint, this is the way to do it.

Anna Rosa Krau

Browsing through the website for Anna Rosa Krau, you might get the impression that you’re just supposed to explore her site, and never actually contact her, the way the contact info is hidden.

That aside, this site showcase some fantastic minimalist layout possibilities for other sites of its kind. Just maybe make the navigation more obvious when you design your own.

Annie

Here’s something we don’t have on these list every day: shoes! The portfolio site for shoe designer Anni M is all at once modern, artistic, fashionable, and generally just good at showing off shoes. What it lacks in usability, it makes up for in making looking at shoes actually kind of fun.

(It normally isn’t, for me.)

Contemple

Contemple is a Parisian digital agency, that brings us more of that post-modern asymmetrical style that was almost everywhere a couple of months ago. It’s no less creative — and really no more usable — than any other site of its kind. However, it’s bright, it’s bold, and you’re not likely to forget it soon.

Reda Ibrahim

Reda Ibrahim’s photography portfolio gives us more of that sweet monochromatic goodness, with a side order of horizontal scrolling, and elegant little flourishes. I don’t know how many of you have played ever Fable, but grey really is the prettiest color ¹.

Nightshift

Nightshift is a content creation company specializing in video. This is another one for the somewhat-typical-but-still-well-made list. Have at it!

¹ Comment if you got that reference.

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No thorough conversation about the front end today can end without mention of pattern libraries. Sometimes a pattern library appears in the form of a living style guide, or as a design system, or as the outcome of an atomic design process, or as an all-knowing user interface framework. In all of these cases, designers and developers seek the right strategy to approach the complexity of the web with a modular, components-based approach.

However, finding the right way to architect a lasting pattern library and to integrate it into an existing workflow seems to be a challenging task and one that most design and development teams eventually give up on. In this article, I’d love to highlight some practical techniques and strategies to establish a lasting pattern library that will be actively and consistently used by the entire team. These tips might help you get on the right track when you set out to build your next style guide, assets library or design language.

The post Taking Pattern Libraries To The Next Level appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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The wireframing stage is one of the most inspiring and delightful. It is here where the idea that has excited your mind for quite some time begins to take actual shape. It becomes real and pretty weighty. With a basic skeleton that underlies the future concept emerge new features and details that give an overall image of the future product. While some may consider it just a first model that roughly describes the upcoming web or mobile application, in point of fact, in a lot of situations the carefully-assembled well-thought-out wireframe is a decisive factor in achieving success. It is a firm foundation that assists you in building the functionality and exterior of the product without dealing with unnecessary changes that can shatter the whole work. It has lots of benefits, and there are numerous ways to derive them.

As is often the case, you can find some helpful tools, especially those that belong to the premium category. Balsamiq, Axure, Visio, and some other professional programs never fall off the radar. Offering an impressive range of possibilities and built-in features that almost literally do all the heavy lifting for you, they are popular choices among artists. However, there is a dozen of good free alternatives that may be not so powerful, yet in the right hands, they can do wonders and be as profitable and life-saving as their commercial heavyweight counterparts. They do not provide you with a drag-and-drop interface, since they are just packs of UI components made in sketch style, but they are sufficient to turn your idea into a digital template quickly and efficiently.

In today’s article, you will find free bundles of wireframe elements and flowcharts. We have even included paper-based instruments for prototyping, considering those of you who are sick and tired of everything digital and artificial and prefer to stick to the old-school ways of forming your idea that implies banal but pretty enjoyable doodling on a piece of paper. Proceed to the list and replenish your arsenal with instruments that fit your needs.

After you enjoyed this article, please visit our previous collection of wireframe mockups and templates that feature even more free tools created for such tasks.

PSD Wireframes for Phones Reviews – Material Design

Creator: Abdulhameid Grandoka
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Wirebase

Creator: Patryk Zabielski
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Wireframe Landing Page Free PSD file

Creator: Dorin007
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

UX Flow Screens

Creator: Mark Wilson
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Material Design Wireframe Kit v_02

Creator: Dan Shipley
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Moon Wireframe Kit

Creator: George Frigo
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

iPhone Wireframes

Creator: Phil Goodwin
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Flowchart Kit for Sketch

Creator: Arthur Guillermin Hazan
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

UX Wireframe Set

Creator: Michal Koczor
License: Feel free to use that however you want to.

Flat Wireframe Elements

Creator: Marek Dlugos
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Wireframe for Apps

Creator: madefordesigners
License: Free for both personal & commercial use.

Sketch Wireframe

Creator: The Gentlemans Mustache
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

38 Psd Cards for Flowcharts

Creator: Volodymyr Kurbatov
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Wireframer Icon Pack

Creator: Eugene Dobrik
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

15 eCommerce screens

Creator: Material Mockups
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Wireup the Web

Creator: Bala
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Free Mockup Of Web Design Sketch For Demo (PSD)

Creator: UIUX Lab
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

Hand Drawn iPhone 6s Ui Kit

Creator: Vladimir Carrer
License: Free for personal or commercial use.

Apple Watch Wireframe for SketchApp

Creator: Rémi Fayolle
License: Free for commercial use.

Free Wireframe Asset EPS

Creator: Ashley Porciuncula
License: Declared as Free, no proper license given.

We had a question come up the other day on ShopTalk about regular ol’ anchor links on iOS, and some weird situation where you couldn’t just tap them once to go to the link, it required tapping the link twice. I’ve experienced this myself and have been pretty confounded.

My first thought was there was some kind of bizarre unexpected JavaScript happening. Perhaps a click handler with preventDefault() on that first click and then getting removed. I couldn’t find anything like that happening though. I’m sure I tried a few more things, but ultimately gave up and used FastClick to make sure those link clicks worked. FastClick wasn’t meant to solve this problem, it’s more to solve the 300ms delay for tapping links that some mobile browsers impart so they can wait to see if you’re doing a double tap (note: not as much of a problem as it once was). Not quite the right tool for the job, but it worked.

The thing is, it wasn’t a JavaScript problem at all, it was a CSS issue.

Nicholas C. Zakas documented this ages ago:

This is where the people at Apple might have been a bit too smart. They realized that there was a lot of functionality on the web relying on hover states and so they figured out a way to deal with that in Safari for iOS. When you touch an item on a webpage, it first triggers a hover state and then triggers the “click”. The end result is that you end up seeing styles applied using :hover for a second before the click interaction happens. It’s a little startling, but it does work. So Safari on iOS very much cares about your styles that have :hover in the selector. They aren’t simply ignored.

(Thanks to Pete Droll for pointing this out to me.)

Here’s two lines of CSS that will cause the problem

a::after {
  display: none;
  content: "pseudo block!";
}
a:hover::after {
  display: inline;
}

On a browser with a cursor pointer, you’ll see the pseudo element reveal itself on :hover

But clicking that link will not prevent the link from being visited. On iOS though, tapping the link will just reveal the pseudo element. It requires a second tap to actually go to the link.

Android doesn’t seem to do this. It will quickly reveal the pseudo element, but also just go to the link as normal.

This business of adding a pseudo element to a link though… not very common right? I’d say that’s true, it’s not super common. Which I suppose is why this isn’t as well known as we might think and only bites people once in a while.

I’ve seen people use pseudo elements to do aesthetic things though, like adding a more-controlled underline to text. So if that happened on :hover only, blammo, trouble has arrived. It does appear to be on hover only by the way, not focus or active.

It’s not just pseudo elements

This is true for any child element. Remember the thinking behind this was situations in which additional content is shown only on hover. It’s probably more common that an actual element is in use.

For example:

...
<li>
  
  <a href="#">I'm a thing in a list</a>

  <span class="controls">
    <button>Do Something</button>
  </span>

</li>
...

li .controls {
  visibility: hidden;
}
li:hover .controls {
  visibility: visible; 
}

Hovering over the list item reveals some controls. Because a parent element how has a hover state that reveals content, it will block the anchor link from working with a single tap.

It doesn’t have to be a parent, it could be the link itself:

<a href="http://link.com">
  Link
  <span>Extra Stuff</span>
</a>

a span {
  display: none;
}
a:hover span {
  display: inline-block;
}

Media query help

It’s tempting to be like… OK I’ll just apply these hovers on “desktop” sites and pick a media query like

@media (min-width: 500px) {
  a span {
    display: none;
  }
  a:hover span {
    display: inline-block;
  }
}

Which works in simple tests, but browser window width isn’t the perfect way to test if you have a cursor and “normal” hovers available.

Fortunately, there is a media query for pointers that could be useful to us:

@media (pointer: fine) {
  a span {
    display: none;
  }
  a:hover span {
    display: inline-block;
  }
}

Cool.

There is also a spec for a straight-up hover media query:

@media (hover) {

}

Both of these styles of media queries worked in Chrome and Safari for me, but not Firefox (support level chart), which makes it a litttttle to risky to use, perhaps. Even JavaScript methods to detect touch are questionable, I hear, and will always be weirdly wrong on devices that support both.

It’s probably best to just not rely on hover to reveal anything

The tech to work around it isn’t quite there yet.

If anything, design your site such that clicks or taps are required to reveal other things, but make that as obvious as you can and don’t trap normal unwilling links inside of those elements.

Trent Walton was probably right six years ago:

Ultimately, I think seeing hover states fade away will make the web a better place. There never has been any substitute for concise content, clear interaction, and simple design. If we focus on core elements that make browsing the web great, our sites will function properly no matter how people use them.

Demo

Here’s one you can play with.

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The Annoying Mobile Double-Tap Link Issue is a post from CSS-Tricks

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

The 22 Most Innovative Web Platforms of 2016

Slick – The Last Carousel You’ll Ever Need

Responsive Table Layout

Hero Patterns – A Collection of Repeatable SVG Background Patterns

How it Feels to Learn Javascript in 2016

20 Websites with Remarkable Home Pages

Is it Time to Stop Bad-Mouthing CSS in Developer Talks?

This Hillary Clinton Photo is a Snapshot of the Selfie Generation

Map of the Internet

Affinity Designer 1.5 has New Features for UI Designers

Beautiful Free Modern Fonts

What Makes Great Design so Disruptive?

Sharing my Entire Web App Development Process…

How to Build Side Projects and not Fail

Tips for Presenting Designs

Save the Princess in 8 Programming Languages

MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make it as a Start-Up

The Keyword

Designing the Next Steve Jobs

‘Security Fatigue’ Causes Computer Users to Feel Hopeless, Act Recklessly

Nick Bilton on Twitter as an Acquisition

Google Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the Trans-Siberian Railway with a New Doodle

Pacemaker 2.0: Create and Share Mixtapes with Friends

Why this Funky 80s Graphic Generator is Taking Over Twitter

Let’s all Obsess Over this Intricate Map of Alt Music History

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

LAST DAY: Lifetime Access to ALL WP & HTML Themes from TeslaThemes – only $59!

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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…

Unconventional strategy

In the eye of the bill holder

Thank you!

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

50 Premium T-Shirt Designs with Extended License – only $27!

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In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to create 3D shapes using the 3D Revolve Tool in Adobe Illustrator.

Download Adobe Illustrator.

Read More at 3D Revolve Tool Illustrator Tutorial

The web is mostly text, so typography basically is web design. It’s not the whole of it, but it is by far one of the most important disciplines, if you want your users to actually read what you have to say. It can be difficult, though, to find a typeface that accurately reflects the exact tone you want to set.

Sure, you could just pick something that’s free, but the selection of free web fonts is a bit limited. Meanwhile, our sister site, MightyDeals.com, is currently offering access to all of the fonts from Creative Fabrica, which has over 1,300 Premium fonts. And right now, they’re 75% off.

The personal license is going for $27 USD (usually $108 USD) right now, with a commercial license at $47 USD (usually $228 USD).

Keep in mind that the commercial license is the one you’ll need to use these as web fonts, and also gives you license to sell items, convert the fonts for embroidering software, use them in advertising (print and video), and anything else you might be into.

If you’d like a year’s access to 1300+ typefaces, head on over to MightyDeals.com to grab it.

Flowers Bundle: 500+ Floral Compositions and 34 Patterns – only $19!

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Jose Aguinaga pinched a community nerve:

The JavaScript community is insane if it thinks anyone can keep up with this.

I heard a lot of Hilarious! So true! reactions. I heard a lot of Nope. This isn’t what it’s like. reactions, sprinkled with You don’t have to use/start with every tool. and Both of these people (in this fake conversation) are kinda jerks.

Some Mama Bear reactions include Tim Kadlec and Addy Osmani.

Missed title opportunity: “How it feels to read ‘How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016′”

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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How It Feels Reactions is a post from CSS-Tricks