Strong graphic design makes transportation systems more attractive. Graphical language can be so iconic that you can even buy all sorts of souvenirs with its elements: t-shirts, umbrellas, shower curtains. This helps cities get rid of privately owned cars. People spend more time outside, interacting with each other. This gives small businesses a boost and makes cities more pleasant to live in. Today, Ilya Birman will show you how map design works by taking a look at a series of maps as an example.
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If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you may never discover something that you love doing, or perhaps even worse, never learn a whole lot about yourself. Even the most talented artists out there practice so much more than you’d ever imagine, and hone their skills by trying out copywork. The most important thing is to be confident and simply give it a try. For more encouragement, Vitaly Friedman has collected a good number of inspirational artwork that is bound to give you that spark you need to get started already!
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How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? As a team leader, Alecsandru Grigoriu was faced with a new challenge: making sure there’s enough recurrence in his team’s communication to facilitate the team’s development. Enter the weekly design meetings. Having a structure and a template to work with is not enough. They’ve settled on a few ground rules in order for the meetings to unfold properly. Looking back at the first 10 meetings, they went through over 100 resources and tackled 2 main design challenges.
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As an educator, Alma Hoffmann has learned that one of the most challenging aspects for an aspiring left-hand letterer is to apply everything that a right-handed person is teaching. It is almost like doing mental gymnastics. In this article, she will help you get started with the fundamentals of lettering with the left hand: the position and placement of the arm and wrist, the position of the paper, and holding the tool (brush pens). Alma will share theoretical as well as practical advice, demonstrating some points using her student Talondra Keeton, who is left-handed, to create lettering. She started back in January, and throughout the semester she has been consistently improving. Let’s get started.
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Humor is an important aspect of life. It has many positive benefits, like reducing stress, increasing psychological well being and increasing tolerance for pain. Humor is integral and inherent to human relationships. You can use humor in your design to create a positive user experience. We want to develop positive relationships with our users — humor can help make that happen. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you that you can incorporate humor in your design, maintain your brand identity and not look like you are trying too hard in the process.
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Vision is perhaps the strongest human sense, a hero image is one of the fastest ways to grab the user’s attention. As long as it is high quality, interesting to look at and works well with the content, a hero image is a great option and a powerful communication tool. Design with sufficient contrast and a clear call to action to make the most of this technique. In this article, give you a few tips on using hero images. Also, if you’d like to get started and take a go at prototyping and wireframing your own designs a bit more differently, you can download and test Adobe XD for free.
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Oh yes, it’s Summer alright! Nature is where Vitaly Friedman finds most of his inspiration as it sets his mind free. Hopefully, you’re enjoying some sunny days, too. Give yourself a moment of repose. Sit back, relax, have a refreshing drink and let the stream of inspiration come in.
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It used to be enough for user interface elements to “look professional” or simply to “add polish” to a website. But in the past few years we’ve come to expect more personal interactions and stronger relationships with the apps we use. Our relationship with the web has evolved dramatically over the past few years. It is a much more intimate relationship than it was before we had smartphones and tablets. Physically, the web is in our pockets. It’s on the couch. Custom images are a powerful design tool. They can tell a story and convey a distinct personality. Custom illustrations can be especially impactful. They can make our audience feel personally connected to an app or website, while being an integral part of the design.
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As the number of chart types and approaches keeps growing, the things are getting worse, and sometimes even top experts get confused with identifying the goals of one chart type or another. Stacked bar charts are often worthwhile and should be considered when the occasion demands. In this article, Vitaly Radionov explains why you should be careful when and where you use them.
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By using colour, typography, hierarchy, contrast, and all the other tools at their disposal, designers can take an unordered jumble of information and turn it into something that’s easy to use and pleasurable to behold. Like life itself, design can win a small victory against the entropy of the universe, creating pockets of order from the raw materials of chaos. For years, web design was dictated by the designer. The user had no choice but to accommodate the site’s demand for a screen of a certain size or a network connection of a certain speed. Now, web design can be a conversation between the designer and the user. Now, web design can reflect the underlying principles of the web itself.
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