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.
Creating Horizontal Scrolling Containers the Right Way
Experts Reveal the Web Design Trends of 2018
The Future of Web Design is Less, not More
The Tofu Method: A Flexible Design System
Site Design: Mawla.io
Web Design: From Meh to Pretty Good in an Hour
Your CSS Layout Toolkit for 2019
Weak Passwords Banned in California from 2020
Total Number of Websites
Jrnal – Netflix for the Next Generation of News
My Web Design Checklist
Pitch
Some Great SaaS Visualizations
Static Site Generators Need Less Rigid Content APIs
Designing Design Systems
What to do When a Client Tries your Patience
7 Ways Web Graphics Can Make or Break your “Look”
The FAQ as Advice Column
Icon Design Considerations for iPhone X
Color Harmony Generator
The 3 Elements of Great UX Writing
14 HTML Resume Templates
The Psychology of Design
IRL Glasses Block all the Screens Around You
Wireframe: A High-quality Storytelling Podcast About Design
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Just as the seasons come and go, popular fonts do, too. That’s not to say that these fonts won’t ever be popular again, or that they won’t simply remain popular, but the right font says a lot about your project, depending on what season we’re in. I can already hear those sleigh bells ringing, so now is the perfect time to get a step ahead of everyone else and start preparing for your new look.
Winter is the favorite season for many people around the world for many reasons. It could be the holidays, weather, or even just the smell of wood burning and pies being baked. Regardless of what your reasoning is, there are plenty of fonts out there to reflect your seasonal spirit. We’ve compiled a short list of fonts that would go great with any project this winter. Pour yourself a cup of hot cocoa, this is coming to get wintery!
As the name suggests, White Garden gives off a very winter-like, snow wonderland feel. It’s both big and elegant, and is sure to get the job done for any winter project in branding, packaging, clothing design, or even seasonal cards.
Fierce is perfect for pulling off the snowy look. The hand-painted lettering looking like old tracks through the snow and the inconsistent density of each letter look like melting ice.
White Oleander reminds me of a hand-written greeting card, written under the orange glow of a fire, and fueled by warm ginger bread and eggnog. Okay, maybe I’m a little excited about the coming seasons, too.
I guess I don’t really need to explain why this one has Christmas vibes. It’s very traditional, and looks like Santa himself would chose this as the font for the elves workshop.
The exaggerated swirls remind me of falling snowflakes, or the movement of an ice skater, or even a warm and comfy scarf.
Which one is your favorite? Are you as excited for the winter season as we are? Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below, and don’t forget to tune in to Webdesignledger daily to stay up-to-date on design and fun!
And, for whatever reason, you make that checkbox indeterminate:
let veg = document.querySelector(".veg");
veg.indeterminate = true;
If you serialize that form and take a look at what will POST, you’ll get "name=Chris". No value for the checkbox. Conversely, had you checked the checkbox in the HTML and didn’t touch it in JavaScript, you’d get "name=Chris&vegetarian=on".
Apparently, this is by design. Checkboxes are meant to be boolean, and the indeterminate value is just an aesthetic thing meant to indicate that visual “child” checkboxes are in a mixed state (some checked, some not). That’s fine. Can’t change it now without serious breakage of websites.
But say you really need to know on the server if a checkbox is in that indeterminate state. The only way I can think of is to have a buddy hidden input that you keep in sync.
let veg = document.querySelector(".veg");
let veg_value = document.querySelector(".veg-value");
veg.indeterminate = true;
veg_value.value = "indeterminate";
I’ve set the indeterminate value of one input and I’ve set another hidden input value to "indeterminate", which I can POST. Serialized means it looks like "name=Chris&vegetarian-value=indeterminate". Good enough.
There’s a ton of very quotable stuff from Rachel Andrew’s latest post all about CSS and how we talk about it in the community:
CSS has been seen as this fragile language that we stumble around, trying things out and seeing what works. In particular for layout, rather than using the system as specified, we have so often exploited things about the language in order to achieve far more complex layouts than it was ever designed for. We had to, or resign ourselves to very simple looking web pages.
Rachel goes on to argue that we probably shouldn’t disparage CSS for being so weird when there are very good reasons for why and how it works — not to mention that it’s getting exponentially more predictable and powerful as time goes by:
There is frequently talk about how developers whose main area of expertise is CSS feel that their skills are underrated. I do not think we help our cause by talking about CSS as this whacky, quirky language. CSS is unlike anything else, because it exists to serve an environment that is unlike anything else. However we can start to understand it as a designed language, with much consistency. It has codified rules and we can develop ways to explain and teach it, just as we can teach our teams to use Bootstrap, or the latest JavaScript framework.
I tend to feel the same way and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how best to reply to folks that argue that “CSS is dumb and weird.” It can sometimes be a demoralizing challenge, attempting to explain why your career and area of expertise is a useful one.
I guess the best way to start doing that is to stand up and say, “No, CSS is not dumb and weird. CSS is awesome!”
WordPress 5.0 is quickly approaching, and the new Gutenberg editor is coming with it. There’s been a lot of discussion in the WordPress community over what exactly that means for users, designers, and developers. And while Gutenberg is sure to improve the writing experience, it can cause a bit of a headache for developers who now need to ensure their plugins and themes are updated and compatible.
One of the clearest ways you can make sure your theme is compatible with WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg is to add some basic styles for the new blocks Gutenberg introduces. Aside from the basic HTML blocks (like paragraphs, headings, lists, and images) that likely already have styles, you’ll now have some complex blocks that you probably haven’t accounted for, like pull quotes, cover images, buttons, and columns. In this article, we’re going to take a look at some styling conventions for Gutenberg blocks, and then add our own styles for Gutenberg’s Columns block.
Block naming conventions
First things first: how are Gutenberg blocks named? If you’re familiar with the code inspector, you can open that up on a page using the block you want to style, and check it for yourself:
The Gutenberg Pull Quote block has a class of wp-block-pullquote.
Now, it could get cumbersome to do that for each and every block you want to style, and luckily, there is a method to the madness. Gutenberg blocks use a form of the Block, Element, Modifier (BEM) naming convention. The main difference is that the top level for each of the blocks is wp . So, for our pull quote, the name is wp-block-pullquote. Columns would be wp-block-columns, and so on. You can read more about it in the WordPress Development Handbook.
Class name caveat
There is a small caveat here in that the block name may not be the only class name you’re dealing with. In the example above, we see that the class alignright is also applied. And Gutenberg comes with two new classes: alignfull and alignwide. You’ll see in our columns that there’s also a class to tell us how many there are. But we’ll get to that soon.
Applying your own class names
Gutenberg blocks also give us a way to apply our own classes:
The class added to the options panel in the Gutenberg editor (left). It gets applied to the element, as seen in DevTools (right).
This is great if you want to have a common set of classes for blocks across different themes, want to apply previously existing classes to blocks where it makes sense, or want to have variations on blocks.
Much like the current (or “Classic”) WordPress post editor, Gutenberg makes as few choices as possible for the front end, leaving most of the heavy lifting to us. This includes the columns, which basically only include enough styles to make them form columns. So we need to add the padding, margins, and responsive styles.
Styling columns
Time to get to the crux of the matter: let’s style some columns! The first thing we’ll need to do is find a theme that we can use. There aren’t too many that have extensive Gutenberg support yet, but that’s actually good in our case. Instead, we’re going to use a theme that’s flexible enough to give us a good starting point: Astra.
Astra is available for free in the WordPress Theme Directory. (Source)
Astra is a free, fast, and flexible theme that has been designed to work with page builders. That means that it can give us a really good starting template for our columns. Speaking of which, we need some content. Here’s what we’ll be working with:
Our columns inside the Gutenberg editor.
We have a three-column layout with images, headings, and text. The image above is what the columns look like inside the Gutenberg editor. Here’s what they look like on the front end:
Our columns on the front end.
You can see there are a few differences between what we see in the editor and what we see on the front end. Most notably, there is no spacing in between the columns on the front end. The left end of the heading on the front end is also lined up with the left edge of the first column. In the editor, it is not because we’re using the alignfull class.
Note: For the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to treat .alignfull, .alignwide, and no alignment the same, since the Astra theme does not support the new classes yet.
How Gutenberg columns work
Now that we have a theme, we to answer the question: “how do columns in Gutenberg work?”
Until recently, they were actually using CSS grid, but then switched to flexbox. (The reasoning was that flexbox offers wider browser support.) That said, the styles are super light:
We’ve got a pen with the final styles if you want to see the result we are aiming for. You can see in it that Gutenberg is only defining the flexbox and then stating each column should be the same length. But you’ll also notice a couple of other things:
The parent container is wp-block-columns.
There’s also the class has-3-columns, noting the number of columns for us. Gutenberg supports anywhere from two to six columns.
The individual columns have the class wp-block-column.
This information is enough for us to get started.
Styling the parents
Since we have flexbox applied by default, the best action to take is to make sure these columns look good on the front end in a larger screen context like we saw earlier.
First and foremost, let’s add some margins to these so they aren’t running into each other, or other elements:
/* Add vertical breathing room to the full row of columns. */
.wp-block-columns {
margin: 20px 0;
}
/* Add horiztonal breathing room between individual columns. */
.wp-block-column {
margin: 0 20px;
}
Since it’s reasonable to assume the columns won’t be the only blocks on the page, we added top and bottom margins to the whole parent container so there’s some separation between the columns and other blocks on the page. Then, so the columns don’t run up against each other, we apply left and right margins to each individual column.
Columns with some margins added.
These are starting to look better already! If you want them to look more uniform, you can always throw text-align: justify; on the columns, too.
Making the columns responsive
The layout starts to fall apart when we move to smaller screen widths. Astra does a nice job with reducing font sizes as we shrink down, but when we start to get around 764px, things start to get a little cramped:
Our columns at 764px wide.
At this point, since we have three columns, we can explicitly style the columns using the .has-3-columns class. The simplest solution would be to remove flexbox altogether:
This would automatically convert our columns into blocks. All we’d need to do now is adjust the padding and we’re good to go — it’s not the prettiest solution, but it’s readable. I’d like to get a little more creative, though. Instead, we’ll make the first column the widest, and then the other two will remain columns under the first one.
This will only work depending on the content. I think here it’s forgivable to give Yoda priority as the most notable Jedi Master.
In the first few lines after the media query, we’re targeting .has-3-columns to change the flex-flow to row wrap. This will tell the browser to allow the columns to fill the container but wrap when needed.
Then, we target the first column with .wp-block-column:first-child and we tell the browser to make the flex-basis 100%. This says, “make the first column fill all available space.” And since we’re wrapping columns, the other two will automatically move to the next line. Our result is this:
Our newly responsive columns.
The nice part about this layout is that with row wrap, the columns all become full-width on the smallest screens. Still, as they start to get hard to read before that, we should find a good breakpoint and set the styles ourselves. Around 478px should do nicely:
This removes the flex layout, and reverses the margins on the individual columns, maintaining the spacing between them as they move to a stacked layout.
Our small screen layout.
Again, you can see all these concepts come together in the following demo:
So, there you have it! In this tutorial, we examined how Gutenberg’s Columns block works, it’s class naming conventions, and then applied basic styles to make the columns look good at every screen size on the front end. From here, you can take this code and run with it — we’ve barely scratched the surface and you can do tons more with the CSS alone. For example, I recently made this pricing table using only Gutenberg Columns:
And, of course, there are the other blocks. Gutenberg puts a lot of power into the hands of content editors, but even more into the hands of theme developers. We no longer need to build the infrastructure for doing more complex layouts in the WordPress editor, and we no longer need to instruct users to insert shortcodes or HTML to get what need on a page. We can add a little CSS to our themes and let content creators do the rest.
If you want to get more in-depth into preparing your theme for Gutenberg, you can check out my course, Theming with Gutenberg. We go over how to style lots of different blocks, set custom color palettes, block templates, and more.
Did you know that a simple search for “depression” on the iPhone App Store brings up 198 results? In the Android Play Store, it brings up 239. The categories range from “Medical” to “Health & Fitness” to “Lifestyle.” The apps themselves offer everything from “depressing wallpaper” to “mood tracker” to “life coach.” We are approaching a golden age of digital therapeutics and design for mental health — if we as UX practitioners do our jobs well.
Given the plethora of apps available, you might assume that there are already dozens of wonderful digital therapies available for people struggling with mental health disorders. But — according to initial studies by clinical psychologists — you would be wrong. Most apps are useless at best, and harmful at worst, due primarily to a disconnect between the designers building the apps and the patients and providers in the field of mental health.
As of July 2017, 28% of digital health apps on the App Store were focused on mental health and behavioral disorders. (Large preview)
Some apps (mostly within the Lifestyle category) are harmless but useless. Emo Wallpaper, for example, is appropriately named and makes no claims to treat mental illness. It is intended as entertainment for people who are having a tough day. But there are more dangerous examples. One of the worst (since removed from the App Store) was iBipolar, which recommended that people in the middle of a manic episode drink hard liquor to help them sleep. Not only is this bad advice — alcohol does not lead to healthy sleep — but alcoholism is a problem for many people with bipolar disorder. The app was actively harmful.
Prescription drugs are regulated by the FDA, while mobile apps are not. How can we as UX designers create better apps to improve mental health treatment?
Are Apps The Answer?
Approximately one in five American adults experience mental illness each year. For some people, this can refer to a temporary depressive episode brought on by grief, such as the death of a loved one, or severe anxiety caused by external factors like a stressful job. For nearly 1 in 25 Americans (about 10 million people) it’s a chronic condition, such as bipolar disorder, chronic depression, or schizophrenia. Yet only about 40% of people experiencing mental illness are receiving treatment.
The reasons vary. For some, they are undiagnosed or may refuse treatment. They may struggle with the stigma attached to mental illness. But for many, there is a lack of access. The association Mental Health America has studied and reported on what “limited access” means, and identified four systemic barriers:
Lack of insurance or inadequate insurance;
Lack of available treatment providers:
Lack of available treatment types (inpatient treatment, individual therapy, intensive community services);
Insufficient finances to cover costs — including, copays, uncovered treatment types, or when providers do not take insurance.
With that in mind, it would appear that a mobile-based solution is the obvious answer. And yet there are plenty of inherent challenges. Key among them is the gap between the clinicians treating patients and the UX practitioners working on mental health design.
Bridge The Gap Between Clinicians And Designers
About two years ago, I began research in the mental health design space. As a UX practitioner who focuses in health care, I wanted to learn how people struggling with mental health issues differed from people struggling with other chronic illnesses. I thought the work would entail an audit of the App Store and Play Store, a few weeks of interviewing clinicians to learn about the space, and then perhaps building an app with my team.
Instead, the work has continued ever since. At the time I interviewed ten clinicians, four behavior change designers, and five UX designers who had designed apps in the mental health space. But from these interviews I learned that there are two reasons why the design for mental health is lagging behind design for other healthcare needs. Those two reasons have changed my entire perspective on what we need to do to improve design in the space. It resulted in the creation of a few guidelines which I now hope to popularize.
Here is an overview of the research I conducted, and the two themes that emerged.
The Research
I initially assumed there were no apps available. And yet my audit of the App Store and Play Store uncovered hundreds of existing apps. Obviously, building an app was not the problem. But I began to wonder: why aren’t these apps used? (Few were downloaded, and I had never heard of any of them — for all that I work in the healthcare space!) And why are those that are used unsuccessful? To find that out, I needed more research.
Over the course of a few months, I interviewed therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. On the design side, I interviewed behavior change analysts, UX designers, and anyone I could find who had been involved in designing an app to improve mental health.
Some questions I asked the designers included:
What do you feel is missing from the field of mental health, if anything?
What are some of the top challenges you face when designing for people with mental health challenges?
What examples exist of poorly designed interventions for mental health? What examples exist of well-designed interventions?
If they had designed an app: What was the goal of the intervention you designed?
How did you test it?
Who did you test it with?
Was it successful? Why/why not?
Meanwhile, some of the questions I asked clinicians were:
How do you diagnose a patient’s mental health?
What barriers exist to patients’ improving their mental health?
What technology currently helps patients improve or deal with their mental health/illness?
How can technology benefit your patients?
What are one or two important pieces of advice you wish more people knew when creating applications/tools to help improve mental health from afar?
After the interviews, I came away with two new understandings:
Problem #1: Designers Don’t Know What Clinicians Know
Many designers told me they were starting from scratch. They did research with patients and learned what patients thought they needed from an app. But very few spoke with healthcare providers. As a result, the designers were missing the clinical expertise.
For example, a clinician shared with me that:
“What people say they want is not often what they want.”
Broadly, patients want to feel better. In a user interview, they might say they want to take their medication, or follow a meal plan, or meet some other goal. So the designer builds an app that allows them to set goals and deadlines. But as the clinician explained it:
“Change is scary, so when [patients] find out that feeling better requires change, that is a barrier.”
The app was designed to meet what patients said they needed, not what clinical expertise shows they will respond to.
When I asked one psychiatrist what apps she might recommend to her patients, she said:
“I wish I knew what I could recommend. Nothing is clearly safe, evidence-based, and tested.”
She explained to me that she once recommended a suicide hotline, but that it made people wait on hold for 20 minutes. After that experience, she said, “never again.”
When it comes to mobile apps, the risk is even greater — she worries that an app may have good intentions, but it might not be right for a particular patient. Or it may have the right elements, but the language could be inadvertently guilt-inducing or triggering.
I already knew that designers move fast. It’s part of the tech world’s MO — just think of Facebook’s motto, “move fast and break things.” The catch is that second part: when we move fast, we break things. This is great when we’re breaking through assumptions, or breaking features that would otherwise cause issues post-launch. But it’s very bad when the things we might break are people.
“[I]t’s one thing to move fast and break things with a consumer internet app. It’s another thing when tech is used to improve human life.”
Designers are often up against deadlines. Some work for large healthcare companies that want to launch in time for a specific trade show, or before a competitor gets to market. This is very different from the world of health care, which tends to move very slowly, waiting for compliance or FDA approval, clinical trials, and multiple rounds of validation.
The challenge is adding the clinical expertise and knowledge to the design process, without hampering designers’ ability to move quickly.
Mental Health Design Guidelines
To that end, my team determined that we did not need to build a new app. After all, the mental health field is broad, and there is no one app that will reach everyone. What we need is to popularize the guidelines and communication methodologies that health providers know and use. We need to share that knowledge with designers.
During our clinical interviews, I noticed patterns. For example, though not every therapist said it the same way, they all mentioned how important friends, family, or community are for someone struggling with mental health issues. From this, we created a guideline called “Human.”
Thus, we created a set of six guidelines. Clinicians, researchers, behavior change analysts, and health writers have weighed in on the guidelines, and continue to refine them. They draw attention to six steps that any designer needs to follow in order to create an app that will live up to any provider’s standards.
Are you building a mental health app? Focus on HEALTH. (Large preview)
1. Human
As I noted above, there are systemic barriers to mental health care. For the many people who can’t afford or can’t find a therapist, mobile apps seem like a magical solution. 95% of Americans now own a cell phone! That means mobile apps could ostensibly make mental health care accessible to 95% of the population.
But technology is not the same as a human therapist, family member, or friend. As one behavior change specialist I interviewed shared, “The human-to-human connection is very important. In mental health, it is important to have a person who you can talk to and understand the other person is there for you.” Social support increases motivation, and people are vital for crises — although algorithms are working to identify a risk of suicide, the device alone is not enough to overcome the urge.
With that in mind, our first guideline is to be human. Encourage connection to external supports in addition to providing value in the app. And provide the ability to connect to a therapist or 9-1-1, as MY3 does.
The MY3 app encourages human connections. Having a therapist, friend, family member, or other human support correlates to lower rates of suicide and depression. (Large preview)
2. Evidence-Based
Mental health professionals spend years training to treat mental health illnesses. Many professionals specialize in one or two specific types of treatment, such as talk therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), or other treatment frameworks.
These therapies have specific activities associated with them; they encourage patients to develop certain skills, and they even make specific language choices. Any designer building a mental health app needs to begin by choosing one of these evidence-based therapy styles to follow. What’s more, other designers and users can help evaluate UI and short-term efficacy, but make sure to also bring in clinicians to ensure the app is properly representing the therapy.
Our second guideline is: to be evidence-based. Keep problem #1 in mind: the clinicians know how to treat their patients. We as designers can’t simply replace clinical knowledge with effective UI. The two need to work hand in hand, as Pear Therapeutics THRIVETM app does.
Pear Therapeutics app is undergoing extensive research, including clinical trials with mental health professionals, and applying for FDA clearance. (Large preview)
3. Accepting
I frequently hear people talk about a favorite coach or friend who gave them “tough love.” Many people seem to see tough love as a way of accusing someone of failure, and thus prompting them to do better. (Perhaps our fictional film coaches are to blame.)
In reality, fear of failure is exactly what stops many people from trying something new. This includes seeking mental health treatment. To make matters worse, low motivation is a core symptom of many mental health illnesses. Thus, angry or accusatory language can truly harm people. Instead, our third guideline is to be accepting. Reinforce how capable a person is, and show empathy in how you communicate.
Sanofi’s RA Digital Companion is designed for people with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). The app understands that many people with RA suffer from depression, and focuses on acceptance.
Sanofi’s RA Digital Companion app focuses on helpful resources and uses encouraging language. (Large preview)
4. Lasting
When Pokémon Go launched, it became a nationwide craze just seven days later with an estimate of more than 65 million users. Yet the craze passed in only two months. The problem? Pokémon Go focused on short-term motivators, such as badges and gamification (as many apps do). To create a successful app that people use consistently, the motivation needs to become internal.
What does that mean? External motivators come from outside sources. Internal motivators connect to core values, such as “I want to succeed in my career” or “I care about my children.” These motivators can’t be taken away by another person, but they are not always clear. Our fourth guideline is to be lasting. This means that you should connect to an individual’s internal motivations, and help them feel responsible and in control, as Truth Initiative’s BecomeAnEX program does.
The BecomeAnEX app helps people quitting smoking to focus on their goals and internal motivators. It looks at the lasting benefits as well as how someone is feeling today, so that quitting becomes more than an impulse. (Large preview)
5. Tested
This should come as no surprise to any UX practitioner: testing is key! Clinicians and patients can and should be a part of the design process. Usability testing will help identify things you may not have considered, for example, someone having an anxiety attack may have trouble pressing small buttons. Or someone with schizophrenia having an auditory hallucination may struggle to focus on a busy page of text.
Obviously, our fifth guideline is: Be Tested. Ideally, clinical testing can become a part of more mental health apps, but even if it’s not an option usability testing should be. As noted above, design moves fast. Don’t let design move so fast that you make poor assumptions.
Lastly, we found that many apps are isolated to accomplishing a single task. And that’s fine for something like Instagram — you post photos, or you look at photos. But mental health is intrinsically linked to how people see themselves. With that in mind, a successful intervention has to fit into a person’s daily life.
This is our sixth and final guideline: be holistic. One example of this is the app Happify. While it’s far from perfect, it does an excellent job of offering options. A gratitude journal may help for one time, and the community is helpful at other times.
For any designer working on an app, it’s important to note how an app becomes holistic: the key is to learn about the target audience. Be specific: gender, age, culture, and diagnoses all impact the way a person deals with a mental illness. That’s why researchers like Dr. Michael Addis focus on specific segments of the population, as he does in his book Invisible Men: Men’s Inner Lives and Consequences of Silence.
Happify learns a lot about you as an individual before recommending anything. They ask about things that may not seem important, because they understand the holistic nature of mental health. (Large preview)
Moving Forward
There is an overarching theme to these guidelines: what works for you as a designer may not work for your end-user. Of course, that’s the tenant of UX! Yet somehow, when it comes to health care, we as UX professionals tend to forget this. We are not healthcare providers. And even those of us who have experience as patients have only our own experiences to draw on.
These guidelines are not perfect, but they are a start. Over time I hope to finesse them with additional insight from providers, as well as from the designers beginning to use them. We are on the cusp of a new world of digital health care, where designers and providers and patients must work hand-in-hand to create seamless experiences to promote health and well being.
For anyone interested in getting involved, I am continuing to work on new initiatives to continually improve design for mental health. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments, or learn more at Mad*Pow.
When was the last time you visited a website with no images?
As web designers, we love adding images to our designs because images are memorable and give us a direct channel of communication to the audience’s brain. Also, images are universal and processed by our brains faster than text. That’s partly why the “story” medium (short-form videos with effects and overlays) and emojis attract engagement.
But something else has also been happening since “web 2.0” came along. The high usage of images all over the web, some fueled by user-generated content, is creating a problem for web designers who now must deliver rich experiences in the face of an ever-increasing number of images.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss in detail five things to keep in mind when designing smart, image-rich websites in the modern era.
1. Enhance Performance
Whenever someone thinks about images on the web, their content, resolution, and style immediately come to mind. But the most important factor for delivering superior UX of images is actually performance, which is even more important than the image itself. That’s because most visitors to your site won’t bother to wait for your images to load.
a slow-loading ecommerce website that clocks $1,000 in revenue per day loses $250,000 in sales every year
In short, image-rich websites can’t afford to be slow. For every second of increase in load time, there’s a 7-percent reduction in conversions. That means that a slow-loading ecommerce website that clocks $1,000 in revenue per day loses $250,000 in sales every year.
Big companies like Ryanair and Marks & Spencer had massive website redesigns that failed abominably because of critical performance issues. So be sure to keep in mind that a user-centered website is, first and foremost, performance based. You can enhance performance in many ways, here’s a good place to start.
Use optimized and responsive images. Show the users the image only when and exactly how they need it. Below are three essential tips.
Tip 1: Use Sprite Sheets
One of the oldest tricks for speeding up load times on the web. Loading multiple images takes time and resources. However, loading a single image and displaying its components is much faster because doing so reduces the number of server requests and optimizes bandwidth.
With Cascading Image Style Sheet (CSS) sprites, the browser loads just one image, say, a row of social-media icons, displaying only portions of it in the relevant places.
A good recent example of such a technique is The Guardian’sWorld Cup 2018 infographic. At the outset, the page ran into a problem with the large amount of images to show: 32 competing teams, each with over 20 players. As a solution, the website leverages CSS sprites to show the players for each of the teams. See the page below that displays all 23 players of the Spanish team, the page source being only one single image, which loads superfast.
Tip 2: Lazy-Load Images
Another critical issue, especially in the case of a multitude of images, is lazy loading. The principle is simple: Load an image only when it is visible in the viewport of the browser instead of having the visitor wait by loading the entire collection of images.
Images never show up in advance, which is why you must account for perceived performance.
Loading a basic skeleton version of a website before its images creates a better experience for visitors. They are then aware of what to expect and, in some cases, can even start to interact with the site (before images load).
Consider the loading sequence of Klook:
Here, for each image, the browser first loads a light version of the site (with a white backdrop) and then the actual background image. Such an approach might seem fast or trivial to some, but keep in mind that performance varies across connections and devices.
(If you are working with React or Vue, you can use this cool tool to create skeleton components.)
2. Treat Images as Part of the Design
This rule might seem obvious but is frequently overlooked. Images are an integral part of the design and, as such, must be taken into account. Because designs serve a goal, the related images and composition of the page must support that goal.
Design Images to Complement
Remember to identify and prioritize the goals of the page. Whether your objective is to solicit newsletter signups or offer a catalog for browsing, your images must complement the intended purpose.
As an example, Essential Phone’s landing page displays a single, eye-catching image of the product. The yellow Buy Now button prominently stands out, steering the visitor’s attention to the intended action. Because the image shows the product itself, it’s never cut off, nor does it serve as a background to the text.
Have Images Take the Back Seat
Even though image-focused designs often deliver better results, be sure to follow the basic usability principles because those designs do not guarantee success. For example, you might overlook the visual hierarchy by assigning equal weightage to both the primary and secondary elements.
MetaLab is a design agency that specializes in designing interfaces. When first displayed, its single-fold landing page shows only a solid-color background with minimal text, mainly the names of its clientele. However, as soon as you mouse over a company name, the background subtly changes, displaying a contextual image. That means no more suffering through context switching each time. Such a home-page design ably conveys the message that MetaLab’s clientele is impressively extensive.
3. Let Text and Images Be Friends
Displaying both text and images on the same page can be a tricky business. The challenge is to find that perfect balance of text and imagery for your website.
Place Text on a Soft Background Overlay
Placing text on a soft background overlay is one of the simplest techniques for presenting contrasting images and text. Indiegogo’s landing page is a vintage example, on which the title and description are displayed atop a soft, dark overlay on an image of each of the products offered on the site. The text is easy to read with no sacrifice in visual appeal.
Blend Text and Images
Airbnb adopts a fantastic visual blend of text and images for their home-listing page.
The images for the home categories contain the wording inside the images themselves, enabling the designer to play with hiding the text between overlay objects in the photographs. (See “Family”) Such an approach works seamlessly, demonstrating that text and image need not be separate entities.
(A side note on accessibility: Keep in mind that using text in images also means no keywords for search engines except for those specified in the images’ alt tags, causing problems in accessibility unless you use the aria-label tags. Your final choice depends on the design context and your page’s objective.)
Combine Text and Images as a Single Interactive Unit
The landing page of the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You shows the image of each member of the cast only on a mouseover of the member’s name, simultaneously lazy-loading the image. Although the text is composed of live text (list element), it uses a styled font and color along with the images’ drop shadow to make the presentation look like one piece of art (or movie). The line between image and text is blurry.
Showing the right image at the right time embodies a playful and engaging user experience.
4. Apply the Right Layout
As we’re aware, user experience largely hinges on the layout of the website. For media-rich websites, the common layout choice is usually the grid. That’s because the grid’s pattern immaculately shows a list of images, also each one of them side by side.
The sections below describe the three main grid types with an example for each of them.
Apply a Classic Grid
A classic grid is one that contains square image-thumbs in equal sizes. It brings forth a sense of balance and harmony and is suitable for pages in which images are not the lead items for scanning. A list of cards is an option for a classic grid. Think of common use cases like YouTube and Dribbble.
Apply a Brutalist Grid
Below is an example of a portfolio site that does not adhere to the all-too-familiar grid layout while still focusing on content. Marcus Eriksson is a sought-after photographer whose clientele includes top brands like Nike and ESPN. His website features an unconventional grid layout that draws the viewer’s attention to the content without sacrificing usability. The site also lazy-loads pretty nicely.
Use this pattern if you want your visitors to focus on several individual images. The chaotic layout is very engaging and has an element of surprise. Beware, however, that some images might “get lost on the way” from all the racket.
Apply a Masonry Grid
The Art Palette experiment from Google Art & Culture breaks down popular artwork into their fundamental color palettes. Inversely, it can also display artforms based on a color palette of your choice.
For our purpose, the Art Palette site is inspiring. It’s a good example of a masonry grid, showing different sizes of images while keeping them “in order.” That’s an optimal way of displaying numerous images while keeping their original aspect ratio.
A side note on performance: Remember the skeleton technique mentioned earlier? The Art Palette site takes it up a notch by initially loading a lazily-loaded, dominant color block and then progressively loading low quality image placeholders (LQIP). A highly recommended move!
5. Add Motion for a Purpose
The element of motion adds to a website’s visual flair. However, just like with text, when tackling a large quantity of images, ensure that both motion and images work together.
Some best practices of motion design principles are noted in Google’s Material Design. Below are some examples of how to employ animation to support UX in websites.
Announce Layout Changes
In many cases, layout changes are unsettling for visitors, as if the ground was shifting as everything on the page changes location. Animation can help soften the changes for your visitors.
Consider this example, which displays images in a classic grid. On a mouseover of an image, a subtle motion gently nudges the visitor’s attention to that element. In other words, the animation deftly steers the visitor from the grid layout to a single-image one. Simple, yet brilliantly effective.
Load With Ease
Another interesting example is Uber’s design website. Because the main user action is simply scrolling down the page, which triggers image loading, the website enriches the browsing experience with smooth transitions and subtle animations, concurrently presenting the related information in a clear, easily-accessible manner.
Switch Images
Fubiz softens switches between images in an image gallery with animation techniques, displaying a peek inside each and every image on the post.
Incorporate Animation to Tell a Story
A final example: Avocode’s 2017 design report, in which each page has a story to share along with illustrations created by some of the world’s top design talent. The report acts as a comic strip, with each illustration built and animated to reinforce the key findings of the report.
Don’t Forget the Advantages of Video
Here is a good rule of thumb: If you can post videos instead of images, do it. See this example of a Nike product gallery, in which one of the items, disguised as an image, is, in fact, a video. An image is shown until the video is loaded so the shopper’s experience is not abstracted.
Conclusion
Having to tackle the display of a massive amount of images or visual media doesn’t mean that you should ignore design principles. Designing a trendy website without taking into account user experience invariably fails. Planning images as part of your website’s goal, enforcing performance, and incorporating animation can make all the difference between a spectacular experience and a boring one.
[Special thanks to Sourav Kundu and Mickey Aharony for helping with this article.]
Years ago, I was waiting in line at a paddle sports shop.
People were renting kayaks and canoes and getting fitted for life jackets. It was a brilliant, sunny day and the air buzzed with excitement.
On the back wall, I noticed a framed print that read:
“We don’t sell boats. We sell time on the water.”
Clever — and true. People don’t desire products, they desire feelings that products give them.
Back at the rental shop, very few people care about hull design or reinforced resin paddles.
They want to soak up a summer afternoon. Spend time with people they love. Feel the warm breeze and stretch their desk-bound muscles.
Those two framed sentences stayed with me, and they reflect how I think about my company, JotForm:
We don’t provide online forms. We make organizations more productive.
It’s a deceptively small difference. After all, who cares about forms? I started the company 12 years ago, and even I’m not passionate about forms.
What I do care about, though, is helping our 4.1 million customers to run smarter, more productive businesses.
We operate in a crowded industry, where even Google is gunning for our market share.
And our competitors are always pushing to “elevate” forms. They write edgy web copy about AI and conversations. Some even claim that forms are dead, while others try coining one fancy term after another.
That’s fine. They can focus on the cool factor.
But our customers just want to do business, and do it well.
How do we know? By asking — and listening closely.
Across every industry, almost nothing will have a bigger impact on your business than listening to the people you serve.
When you listen to your customers, you can create new opportunities on your own terms, instead of fighting for space in a crowded ring.
And it starts with what you’re really offering:
Define your true value
In a 2013 memo, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield outlined his vision for the product just two weeks before its preview release.
He reminded the team that they were selling organizational transformation, not software:
What we are selling is not the software product?—?the set of all the features, in their specific implementation?—?because there are just not many buyers for this software product.
We’re selling a reduction in informational overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives. We’re selling better organizations, better teams.
That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation.
Five years later, Slack, the fastest growing business app of all time, has 8 million daily active users. Staying laser-focused on their true value has helped the company to achieve rapid growth and adoption.
And while Butterfield’s memo makes sense in hindsight, it can be surprisingly tough to uncover your distinctive value; your version of “time on the water.”
That’s because you’re too close to the product or service. You and your team are probably worried about micro-interactions and how the branding looks online.
Here’s where listening comes in.
User research is your biggest weapon
Even when you know what your product offers and what you’re truly selling, your customers might have a completely different idea. Let me explain.
Six months ago, our User Experience Research (UXR) team presented some interesting research. They had just completed a series of customer interviews with organizations from California to Singapore.
It was no surprise to see that users create forms for surveys, event registrations, online payments or email signups.
But our UXR team saw an unusual pattern. We used to think about forms as a way to collect data, but we discovered many customers were using the product to act on the data — to analyze and make sense of what it meant in their businesses.
These interviews reinforced that JotForm was a productivity tool; not just a way to make sign-up forms or payment sheets.
We could have high-fived each other and stopped there, but that’s not how we roll. And customers wanted more. They talked about using the data to make contracts and project proposals. Signed agreements and branded invitations.
If you listen, they’ll tell you. User research is your biggest weapon and it can easily amplify your business.
So, we decided it was time to revamp a feature that probably won’t land us on the top of TechCrunch, but it will save our customers time, money and frustration. We’ll reveal this feature next Monday, on October 15th.
Go deeper, not wider
And don’t let success become a catalyst for failure
Once you understand how your product functions in the market, it’s easy to get stuck. After all, you’ve found a fit. People want and need what you’re creating.
That’s when you have to listen even closer. You have to hear what people want, sometimes even before they’ve figured it out for themselves, and then deliver by going deeper — not reinventing your whole product.
Essentialism author Greg McKeown has spent nearly two decades studying what prevents capable people and organizations from reaching the next level. The surprising answer? Success.
When your product is doing well, that success naturally reveals fresh opportunities and directions that can diffuse your original focus. As McKeown explains in a short video,
“Success becomes a catalyst for failure, because it leads to what Jim Collins called ‘the undisciplined pursuit of more.’ The antidote to that problem is the disciplined pursuit of less, but better.”
Now it’s time to narrow in on what matters most. If you’re struggling to find that focus, McKeown says you probably need more space and time.
Tune out the noise. Listen to yourself, and the people you’re working so hard to serve.
“When people have the chance to think,” McKeown says, “they can easily discern between what’s essential and what’s not… We need to develop a routine that enables that space to think. In a world where we have so much information, we need more time to think and process it, not less.”
This smart advice applies to customer research as well.
As more people request features, offer (sometimes contradictory) feedback, and contact support teams, you need to set aside additional time to listen to your users — to thoroughly understand how they use your product and what they’re trying to accomplish.
The more success you achieve, the more you need to formalize your listening with dedicated user research and interviewing processes.
I’ll write more soon about our user research approach, but here are some initial questions to help you get started.
Five questions that can uncover new opportunities
Talk to your customers as often as possible. Listen closely. If you’re not sure how to probe beyond basic use cases and find hidden needs, ask people:
1. What do you often struggle to do or accomplish?
2. Where in your workflow do you or your team often hit roadblocks or frustrations?
3. Where in your processes do you stop using our product and switch to a different platform or service?
4. What would make your work life easier?—?on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis?
5. What would you like to spend less time doing, or what do you wish someone would do for you?
Start by establishing your true value proposition. What needs and desires do you actually help people to fulfill?
That’s where you have the opportunity to become not just helpful, but truly essential.
Then, keep listening. Watch for even the “small” opportunities that keep popping up, and go deeper to help your customers experience, accomplish or learn even more.
Just like Slack, being customer-centric will help you to define a new market instead of battling it out in a large, well-defined space with clear incumbents.
Take JotForm. We could stay in the well-defined data collection market and compete with dozens of other online form builders. But we don’t.
Because, we don’t provide online forms. We make organizations more productive.
If you listen, they will tell you: focus on the customer, not the competition.
Back in the days, building a new website used to be quite a long and complicated process. You had to have a complete understanding of HTML and CSS. You also needed to up a lot of time and effort into designing every single page.
Luckily, it is not the case anymore.
If you are an artist or a designer, you need the best way possible to show off your work. And what is the better place to do that than the Internet?
However, most artists don’t really know much about coding. Same goes for building a portfolio website from scratch. The good news is – there is no need for you to do that anymore.
All you need to present your work through an online portfolio is a good website builder. A site like that will allow you to put your best work on display for potential clients just with a few simple clicks.
Elementor Page Builder is the #1 WordPress page builder for creating stunning websites without any coding. Not only will you be able to build everything, but you will also get to do it free of charge!
Elementor is the first completely free and open source frontend page builder. In addition to that, it is also very simple and easy to use.
One of the first things you’ll notice with Elementor is how fast it is! If the instant reaction is what you are looking for, you will not find a better website builder than this one. From the instant live edit to the instant page load, Elementor’s speed is what makes it truly stand out from the competition.
In addition to that, it works with any template (including the 130 designer-made templates it comes with), and it also works with any theme.
And even though there is no coding involved while you build your portfolio website, the page code is compact and optimized for every screen and every device.
Mobirise Website Builder is a free offline app perfect for non-techies who are not familiar with the coding process.
What makes this website builder stand out from the competition is how user-friendly and easy to use it is. It is also mobile-friendly while not being tied to any platform.
You will get over 1,200 cool templates and website blocks (some of them free, some premium), as well as over 7,000 icons, 850 Google fonts, and 500,000 free images.
Creating a website has never been easier and here is how it works with Mobirise:
Step 1 – Drag blocks to a page
Step 2 – Edit and style inline
Step 3 – Set block parameters
Step 4 – Preview and Publish
Mobirise is also free for the commercial use so you can use it both for your clients as well as for yourself.
Portfoliobox is an online portfolio tool designed specifically for artists, photographers, designers, and other creative professionals who want to put their best work on display.
This website builder is not theme-based, there is no coding knowledge required, and it is very user-friendly and simple.
Here are some of the most important features:
Create and edit any type of content
Build it all in your web browser
No coding
Included web hosting
Included free domain
Design/templates/layout
Mobile-friendly
With Portfoliobox, you can also easily set up your e-commerce store that is seamlessly integrated into your site.
There are 2 types of plans available – free and pro. Check out the features of each to determine which one best fits your needs. If you are a student, make sure to get the advantages of a student account.
Pixpa is a simple yet powerful, drag-and-drop website builder for creating portfolio websites with no required coding knowledge.
You can choose from a wide variety of beautiful themes and templates, connect your domain name, and create a mobile-friendly website in a matter of moments.
You can also start your e-commerce store and manage products and inventory as well as discounts and shipping.
Another good news is that you can get a 15-day free trial period before choosing your subscription plan.
Why Do I Need an Online Portfolio?
You have probably asked yourself this question a number of times before. The truth is, every professional can benefit from having an online portfolio.
Check out the reasons why having a portfolio website is important.
Increased visibility
Having an online portfolio is all about getting your name out there. When it comes to marketing, there is no such thing as “too much” of it.
Are you looking for potential clients? Then things like your resume, cover letter, networking, and online portfolio are crucial. They can help you to grab the clients’ attention.
Keep in mind that the competition on the job market is vicious. So, you should use every possible tool to your advantage if you want to stand out.
Organization
Have your professional documents and information well organized. It can be really helpful during your job search. If all that information is stored in one place, it will be much easier to get the client’s attention.
Also, think of it as a safe copy of your work in case something happens to the originals.
Professional job applications
Your best work is the best way to market yourself. Having a professional portfolio goes way beyond just sending out simple resumes.
Conclusion
Every creative professional can benefit from having an online portfolio website. Luckily, building such a website is no longer a long, hard, and expensive process.
With the right website builder, you can design your own portfolio website to be exactly as you want it. You can do it in a matter of moments!
We all know that there are tons and tons of different fonts out there. They all have particularities that either make you want to reuse them and that way you remember them forever, or that make you never want to go back to them. There are eligible ones, and there are negligible ones. Ones that are suitable for any project, and others that no one will ever use. Sans Forgetica is different from all of the above. It is both useful and limited in usages, easy to remember, yet hard to read, it has a funny name, but a serious purpose. How’s all that possible? Let’s find out!
Researchers at RMIT University Behavioral business lab in Melbourne has recently uncovered a strange way for us to remember what we’ve read. The idea is simple in theory, but more complex once played out. Each letter in this font is tilted exactly seven degrees to the left, and has various gaps drawn right through the middle. The name comes from a pun by combining Comic Sans and Helvetica. The result literally translates to “without forgetting.”
This is the first time ever that specific principles from psychological theory have been combined with specific principles from design theory in order to create a font. – Jo Peryman, chair of RMIT Behavioral Business Lab
How does it work?
Sans Forgetica works by making your brain work. As you read each word, your brain has to function harder to decipher what it’s seeing. Your brain works hard so that your eyes can fill in the gaps and tilt the letters right-side-up again. Your brain has to slow down in order to fill in these gaps and holes. Once it slows down, it has more time to really understand what you’re reading, and engage in deeper and more direct thought.
Sans Forgetica works by a learning principle called desirable difficulty, which is where an obstruction is added to the learning process in order to promote deeper cognitive processing which results in better memory retention. – Jo Peryman
Very often, our minds aren’t actually comprehending what we’re reading. As we read faster and faster, it becomes more of a reflex rather than a memorization exercise.
Researchers had to work very precisely in order to get this new font to do what it’s designed for. You have to engage the brain just the right amount or else nothing but frustration and exhaustion will come of it.
On the other hand if a font is too different, our brains can’t process it and no memory trace is created either. Sans Forgetica lies at that sweet spot, where just enough perceptual rules have been broken to create that memory trace – Janneke Blijlevens, a founding member of the lab
What do you think of this crazy looking font? Is it something that could actually work, or a giant waste of time? Let us know in the comments below! If you want more interesting, design related stories like this, and want to stay up to date in the design world, make sure you follow Webdesignledger.
