The essential property of a pattern is repetition. Because they are continuous, they read like a story. The periodic migration of herds, the transit of constellations across the sky and the distinct features of different terrains are all examples of patterns that create expectations upon which we depend. Designers use patterns based on nature because they are reliable. This three-part series explores fundamental creative strategies for designing effective logos. The first part showed how to use symbols, metaphors and the power of intuition. In this part, Maggie Macnab shows you how to use nature’s patterns in logo design.
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Animation on the web has the potential to revolutionize our small bright box. We can go even further than traditional animation because we can accept user feedback and input. With these tools we can throw away the soul-destroying, bleak, dark engagements that govern things like airline ticket purchases. We can bake animation into the core of our user experience process to create dazzling, exciting, and engaging work that pushes boundaries and collectively elevates the medium of the web. We can help people by unfolding scenes like a choose-your-own-adventure that can feel fluid, interesting, and intuitive!
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Designing a good logo is the utmost in creative problem-solving. The process makes you really think succinctly about how relationships work. The practice of logo design develops your skills of intuition to recognize obscure but effective solutions and teaches you to discover connections that aren’t apparent on the surface. Adding a universal quality to a logo provides the broadest communicative reach, what almost all identities are intended to accomplish. This three-part series explores fundamental creative strategies for designing effective logos. The first part shows how to use symbols, metaphors and the power of intuition.
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Have usability conventions and the web’s universality steered us away from proper art direction? Have we forgotten about art direction altogether? Marko Dugonjić believes so. As designers, we can achieve much more with type, and with just a little more thought and creativity, we can finally start to take full advantage of the type systems available. Let’s look at ways we can push typographic design on the web further, beyond the status quo of today.
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In this article, Colleen Roller will show us that defaults are powerful because they provide a way for users to passively decide, thereby easing the difficulty and effort associated with decision-making. Also, that providing a default option is not always appropriate. Sometimes, it’s better for users to make an explicit choice — especially when they are more likely to follow through with a decision and be more committed to taking action on it. It’s imperative to understand that the design matters. UX design professionals have a responsibility to understand how design itself influences — and sometimes even drives — user perception and behavior and, therefore, decision outcomes. The decisions we make as designers matter.
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Jeremy Girard loves being a web designer and he’s incredibly thankful that he decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, there have been a number of times during his career when his passion has waned. This scenario is called burnout. Do you find passion for your work an important part of your career? If so, what have you found to be helpful in keeping that passion for your job intact? In this article, Jeremy shares his moments of burnout in his career and what you can do to avoid them.
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Are you designing at “Retina” resolution in Photoshop? In this article, Murdoch Carpenter will walk you through the problems he faced in creating Retina mockups to be displayed on a tablet device. He will then explain a way to work that is easier and gives you better performance. This is about Murdoch’s experience with Photoshop, but it could be applied to Illustrator and other software. Throughout this article, he will use the @2x and @3x notation. These represent the Retina buckets for iOS. A great example is the app’s icons.
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Compositional flow determines how the eye is led through a design: where it looks first, where it looks next, where the eye pauses, and how long it stays. You have a lot of control over where people look when they’re viewing a webpage you’ve designed. On a text-heavy and graphic-light page, a visitor’s eye likely follows something like a Z-pattern or F-pattern across and down the page. However, as soon as you design page elements and add graphics, those patterns no longer apply. Your visitor’s eye will follow the flow, movement and rhythm you create.
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The success of your app definitely does not depend solely on its looks: it has to be functional and solve someone’s problem, or enhance a current experience. But, given the human attraction to looks and visual cues, giving app screenshots a good amount of focus cannot be wrong. App store optimization (ASO) has become a handy addition to an app developer’s marketing plan, and promises to help increase visibility and, as a consequence, downloads. In this article, Melanie Haselmayr will take a closer look at app screenshots, one of the two key decision-making helpers for anyone who downloads an app.
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Emphasis is relative. For one element to stand out, another has to serve as the background from which the first is to stand out. Some elements need to dominate others in order for your design to display any sort of visual hierarchy. By varying the visual weight of some elements and the visual direction of others, you can establish different levels of dominance. Three levels is ideal; they’re all that most people can discern. Designing different levels of emphasis or dominance will create a visual hierarchy in your design, with more important information being more visually prominent. It will help you communicate with visitors quickly and efficiently.
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