Welcome, readers. I realize that some of you may have had romantic plans this month, but now that’s out the way, we need to look through a bunch of portfolio sites and rate them without actually assigning a numerical value to them. I assure you, your friends and loved ones will understand. (Who doesn’t love relentless ironic self-awareness?)

Once again, we have a month with no real reoccurring theme, except maybe minimalism, but that hardly counts at this point. There’s a fair variety in the sites featured this time around, so we’ll have a little something for just about everyone. Perhaps people have tired of bandwagons…

…perhaps pigs are even now evolving wings. Let’s get started…

Prolog

Prolog’s website is simple and bold It’s black and white except for the pictures, and it’s very in-your-face about it. If it’s simplicity you’re looking for—and let’s face it, that’s what we all want—then this is a design you’ll want to pay attention too.

It’s hard to pull off a site this simple.

Studio Ultra

Stuidio Ultra takes that simplicity even further by making their portfolio just a list of project names. Oh, and you get to see some images on hover. That’s a thing a lot of people are doing now, and this site does it quite well.

North2

North2 breaks the mold a bit by taking classic corporate style minimalism, and giving it an actual personality. This is made possible with some simple changes to the layout, and a heavy dose of animation.

Plus, there’s this little thing with bubbles (sort of) on the About page… just go play with it. It’s not the most intuitive way to show off your staff, but it’s fun once you figure it out. The message is simple: these are obviously professionals, but they’re not cookie cutter professionals.

Caava Design

Caava Design brings us some of that retro-flavored flat design that was everywhere for a while. By combining illustration with soft colors and that classic coffee-brand typoraphy (they do tend to work with coffee brands, so the messaging is on-point) browsing through this site is a simple, pleasant experience.

Avex

Avex’s website won’t stand out as the most creative site on this list, but it looks good, works well, and gets the point across. It’s almost a stereotype of good design. It’s also one of the few sites I’ve seen recently to take full advantage of newer techniques for vertically aligning text.

I mean, it’s there. Might as well.

Verde

Verde looks like your standard portfolio site at first. Slideshow at the top, fairly standard portfolio layout below. What shakes things up in this case, is that slideshow back at the top. Go look at it again.

Those aren’t images. Those are the lives sites, shrunk down and placed in an iFrame. You can view and navigate them right there in the slideshow. It’s a bold choice, to say the least. But hey, they really stuck with the idea of showing off their work.

Shape

Shape’s portfolio looks a bit like an eCommerce site in terms of overall style and feel. Mind you, this agency specializes in eCommerce sites, so really, what do you expect.

It’s a quality site on its own, but it’s also an excellent example of the way design styles can be translated between different kinds of sites. These people are all about sales, and you can see it right from the first glance. If that’s not good design, I don’t know what is.

Huemor

Huemor’s website states that their work is no joke. That just doesn’t seem right to me. If you’re going to pick that name, I mean… you could at least work for comedians. Their site looks great though. The graphic styles vary from page to page, tied together by consistent, and consistently beautiful, typography.

Gridonic

Gridonic takes us once again into that beautiful world of the overlapping everything. They take it a step further by utilizing 2.5D techniques… by which I mean they added some drop shadows—it disturbs me how easily I came up with a corporate-style way to say that.

Also, browsing through a site in a language I can’t read gives me a new appreciation for good typography. If it’s nice to look at even when I don’t know what they’re saying, that’s good work.

Momento

Gather ’round dear Readers, and check out Momento to see a well-done horizontal layout. On top of that, the layout handles high resolutions really well. With a solid sense of style in every other respect, the creative layout shakes things up just enough to be interesting without getting in the way.

Wokine

Wokine’s website is minimalist, animated, and has great typography. Sure, we’ve seen a lot of that these days, but this is just really pretty too. And as I just mentioned, I love a site that can stretch to high resolutions and look great doing it.

the Workshop

The article “the” in the Workshop is intentionally left with no capital letters, because that’s how they do it. The site clearly adhere’s to the Swiss school of design, from the minimalist layout, to the striking use of imagery blended with the layout, to the vertical navigation on the side, and, of course, the text at the top that says “Geneva – Switzerland”.

You’ll rarely find a better example of this sort of bold minimalism, and it’s a pleasure to scroll through.

Thaddé Méneur

Thaddé Méneur’s website is heavily influenced by the same style as the last one, but it taps in to the visceral human desire to read less text and see more pretty pictures. It’s a bit heavy on the JS frankly, but it looks great. Go, look, bask in the text that overlaps onto other things.

Will Sanders

Will Sanders’ portfolio adopts the now quite popular trend of collage-style photography portfolios. What makes this one stand out is that it doesn’t depend on the photography for all of its color. And that color isn’t solid blue! It’s… well it’s solid red, but it’s definitely eye-catching.

Mind you, I probably would not have gone with the rotated navigation like that. I have a headache as I write this, and the eye strain involved in reading text like that is a bit of a pain. Were I healthy, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue. Nothing like a bad cold to make you see UX issues differently.

Nobody

Nobody’s site depends almost entirely on the strength of its typography, and it works. There’s no imagery at all until you start hovering over project names.

As with all sites of its kind, this is a bit of a gamble, but I think it works.

Glamuzina Architechts

Forget typography-based sites for a moment, because Glamuzina Architect’s stie is practically an abstract work of art with a bit of type thrown in. Okay, that may be a small exaggeration, but these guys have truly embraced the post-modern feel. As a visual experiment, I love it.

I would love it more, except for the highly unintuitive navigation. When you’re forced to hover over every bit of text you can find and hope it might be a link, that’s less than ideal.

Yummygum

Yummygum is one of my personal favorites on this month’s list. And what’s not to love? Diagonal lines, fantastic use of white space, great type, great contrast… I’m definitely biased, but this site just happens to hit all of my personal check boxes.

Diane Martel

Diane Martel’s photography portfolio is something else entirely. It’s a mix of collage, slideshow, presentation… and the images change when you hover over the names of her projects. It’s like they decided to go for everything. You could almost call it tacky, but it doesn’t quite cross that line.

In fact, considering the subject matter of the photos, it seems kind of perfect.

Rival

If Rival’s website looks a bit like a premium Magento theme, that’s because they specialize in Magento-based eCommerce sites. Like Shape, mentioned above, the work that Rival does is clearly reflected in their own site, and it works.

Peter Komierowski

Peter Komierowski’s portfolio shows off his logo and branding work in what is, perhaps, thew best way possible: with no distractions whatsoever. See the logos, click on them to find out more, and that’s it. Minimalism in what is perhaps its purest form.

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The mobile app market is growing faster than a beanstalk. The industry is huge and growing daily, and there is no end in sight. Expectedly, the mobile developer population has boomed, and the number of mobile apps in the market has hit new heights. The revenue generated by the global mobile app industry has skyrocketed.

Hybrid monetization models, such as in-app ads and in-app purchases, are quickly gaining popularity in the business world. Most studies show that in-app advertising is set to be a key driver of mobile growth over the coming years (see Statista’s, IHS Markit’s and Forbes’s reports).

The post Current Trends And Future Prospects Of The Mobile App Market appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

The new Node.js/React solution Matterwiki refurbishes the genre of Wiki software. It’s pretty, it’s easy to use, and it’s modern. On top of that, Matterwiki is open source, so it’s free, too. A dream come true…

You think Wikis are dead? Sure, the hype is over. About ten years ago, Wikis were the best thing since sliced bread. After all, the idea is still tempting.

Take any organization, let’s say the ad agency SmithMeyer Inc. In this agency, a lot of knowledge is circulating the heads of the employees. A lot of said knowledge is needed for the daily work, and some of it is simply nice to have. Now, if there were a central place, outside of the individual heads, that accumulated all the knowledge, this would undoubtedly be precious.

Especially considering the fluctuation in the ad branch, a central knowledge deposit is worth considering. This way, Smith doesn’t have to tutor the third new member this quarter but can save a lot by directing him to the well-taken care of Wiki. The new member would also feel a bit more autonomous and would be able to shine much faster.

As you can see, Wikis are still a very good idea even today. However, if you as an author have already dealt with the Wikipedia, the world’s largest Wiki system, you’ll know that the attractivity of this type of system is about the same as that of strong tooth pain.

Enter Matterwiki

Nishant Arora from the Indian Bangalore thought the same. Started as a school project, Nishant has been developing Matterwiki, a slim version of a Wiki software for teams, intensively since summer 2016. Matterwiki probably provides the prettiest Wiki that I’ve seen up to this point.

Matterwiki simplifies the Wiki concept a lot. While you can set up any desired number of contributors, the entire order, and sorting works via “topics.” Each Wiki entry is assigned to a topic; there are no other criteria.

To write the entries, a visual editor is provided instead of a markdown editor, which is common in other Wikis. I have been writing in Markdown for almost ten years now, but I know how uncommon this markup language is. Outside of the tech bubble, nobody uses it. As a Wiki is not primary made for techies, using a standard WYSIWYG editor surely lowers the inhibition threshold, as well as reservations against the system.

Matterwiki stores a prominent, and fully transparent version history, so it can always be tracked who made which changes, where they were made, as well as when they were made. At the moment, Matterwiki does not have a search function. But Nishant is already working on it and has announced the introduction of the quest for the next version, which is supposed to be released in the course of February 2017.

Matterwiki is based on JavaScript. It uses Node.js for the backend, and React for the frontend. The data storage is done via SQLite. Matterwiki is open source under the MIT license, available on Github, and can be used for free, for any purpose. However, you have to host the software on your own server, although this shouldn’t be a problem for the people that need this type of application.

I found out about Matterwiki due to it being featured on Producthunt.

Brad Frost:

A front-end designer … lives in a sort of purgatory between worlds:

• They understand UX principles and best practices, but may not spend their time conducting research, creating flows, and planning scenarios
• They have a keen eye for aesthetics, but may not spend their time pouring over font pairings, comparing color palettes, or creating illustrations and icons.
• They can write JavaScript, but may not spend their time writing application-level code, wiring up middleware, or debugging.
• They understand the importance of backend development, but may not spend their time writing backend logic, spinning up servers, load testing, etc.

A front-end developer is aware.

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“lives in a sort of purgatory” 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.

Meet HTML5 Bot

Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus

How to Radically Improve your Website Performance

How to Spot a Cheap Logo Design

Curated Collection of 180 Free Web Gradients

Behance 2017 Design Trends Guide

Dataselfie – See How Much Facebook Really Knows About You

Create your own Unique Stress-free Ambience

Stop Trying to “write Code” and Focus on “translating To code”

How Well do You Know the Web’s Most Annoying UI?

Daylight

Scaley – Super Simple Web Image Optimization

Are We Going Back to Gradient Gloss with Flat 2.0?

Why your Form Only Needs One Name Field

Welding, Wanderlust and Web Design

Psychology in Design

10 Mistakes that are Ruining the Success of your Digital Projects

What is Progressive Enhancement and Why Should You Care?

New Logo and Identity for Accenture

40 Free Retro Fonts

Netflix: Abstract: The Art of Design

In-house Designer Vs Freelance Designer Vs Agency

Reactive Maps – Build Awesome Maps with Reusable UI + Data Components

Meet the Boy Behind the Design of HBO’s Girls Titles

Raise your Prices by Thinking like a Consultant, not a Freelancer

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

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Jeremy Keith, on teaching people JavaScript for the first time:

blockquote>

A lot of that boils down to this pattern:

When (some event happens), then (take this action).

We brainstormed some examples of this e.g. “When the user submits a form, then show a modal dialogue with an acknowledgment.” I then encouraged them to write a script …but I don’t mean a script in the JavaScript sense; I mean a script in the screenwriting or theater sense. Line by line, write out each step that you want to accomplish. Once you’ve done that, translate each line of your English (or Portuguese) script into JavaScript.

Pseudo code. I’m a big fan.

Writing a code flow out in plain English works great for beginners, and in my experience remains useful forever. I find myself regularly writing pseudo code in Slack and in bug/idea tickets, although I’ve perhaps graduated from plain English to my own weird non-language:

IF (user_is_pro? AND has_zero_posts)
  OR (signed_up_less_than_three_days_ago) {
    // ajax for stuff
    // show thing
}

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“Write a script” is a post from CSS-Tricks

Ire Aderinokun describes a frustrating problem that we’ve probably all noticed at one point or another:

Recently, I’ve found that some of my articles that are GIF-heavy tend to get incredibly slow. The reason for this is that each frame in a GIF is stored as a GIF image, which uses a lossless compression algorithm. This means that, during compression, no information is lost in the image at all, which of course results in a larger file size.

To solve the performance problem of GIFs on the web, there are a couple of things we can do.

Switching to the element seems to have the biggest impact on file size but there are other optimization tools if you have to stick with the GIF format.

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Optimizing GIFs for the Web is a post from CSS-Tricks

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…

Wrong tools

Smaller is better

Designer brain

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

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I’ve really been enjoying getting acquainted with CSS Grid. The feature is starting to ship in many browsers and it looks like we’ll be able to start using it in production in due time.

One of the things that stands out most to me about CSS Grid is the fact that the syntax is so flexible. To demonstrate this point, we’re going to look at how we can create the same layout in three different ways, all using CSS Grid properties. In particular, we’re going to use the Holy Grail layout as our example:

To get started, we’re going to define a parent elements called, creatively, .grid and set up three columns and three rows set the stage for our different layout methods:

.grid {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: 150px auto 150px;
  grid-template-rows: repeat(3, 100px);
  grid-gap: 1em;
}

This says that our .grid element has three columns (two set to 150px and one that flexibly occupies the remaining space) and three row (all set to 100px for demonstration purposes).

We will also be playing with the following child elements in each example:

,

There’s a tendency within the design community to depict freelancing as a goal to be achieved. Who wouldn’t want to lie in every day, do two hours of work in front of the TV, followed by an afternoon in coffee shops posing for stock photographers, all while getting paid twice your current salary, and having your pick of clients?

It’s obvious to most people that freelancing isn’t a land of milk and honey; the hours are long, the future is uncertain, and in all honesty it can be a very lonely way to work.

Despite this, many thousands of designers still make it their New Year’s resolution to “go freelance this year” and some actually follow through.

As someone who’s been freelance to a greater or lesser extent for nearly 15 years, I can honestly say it’s not as difficult as you might think. You don’t need to be a networking genius, you don’t need a blue-chip portfolio to get started, and it’s rare that I have six months’ salary in the bank unless I’ve forgotten to pay my tax on time.

Making money as a freelancer is simple enough: there are more potential clients out there than you can imagine, and if you’re quitting a job to take the leap then there’s at least one potential client you’ve already auditioned for. The simple truth is that if you’re good enough to be employed as a designer, you’re good enough to be freelance.

Freelancing is basically rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck in. The question of whether you should learn to code is moot, because you will, because you will have no choice, because there is no one else. You will also be the cleaner, the accountant, the receptionist, the salesperson, and your own assistant; and you’ll probably perform all of those roles late at night, after the client work is done, long after your employed-self would have been in the pub, or playing Playstation, or having a life.

Freelancing also requires a great deal more diligence when it comes to research and user testing. When I worked in-house, I’d talk issues through with colleagues. These days I talk things through with my cat; have you ever noticed how many freelancers have cats?

Many new freelancers who come from agencies are also surprised by the drop in the scale of projects they’re able to work on. Even if you land a great gig, your access to stakeholders is often limited. A few years ago I worked on a project for a global technology company; or more accurately, a global technology company hired a Singapore-based design studio, who outsourced the project to a London-based design studio, who outsourced the job to a second London-based design studio, who outsourced the job to me. If you think one client can be awkward, imagine having four, spread over three timezones.

In pursuit of more challenging projects, and collaborative work, many freelancers find themselves returning to agency life. Unable to give up the freedom freelancing brings, many freelancers open their own agency—for some, freelancing was only ever a step on the road to opening an agency. Often, life intervenes, two freelancers fall in love, and a design partnership is born.

Many, many designers have challenging, rewarding careers as freelancers. Others, try it, only to find that the collaboration in an agency is what gets them out of bed in the morning. Some have no interest in freelancing at all. The only really bad choice is wanting to pursue it, and never taking the chance.

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