Small time-savers are useful. Be it a handy checklist, batch installer, image generator or converter from Excel spreadsheet to HTML — all these things can save us a couple of minutes every day, making our work easier and more efficient.
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Too many designers work alone. Even though the Web allows us to work from home, the downside of the digital revolution is isolation. Humans, by nature work best in groups, and you are no exception.
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As a photographer and UX designer, I pay particular attention to the effectiveness of photography when I’m testing with users. Regardless of the context, users rarely fail to comment on or be influenced by photography when shopping online.
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In Part II I started a list of some personal process-oriented thoughts on illustration—more specifically about some ways to help broaden the creative process and make its execution more effective. In this Part III, I’ll wrap up the list in the same vein as Part II’s, with a few more of my thoughts on the subject.
Once again, while I hope these tips strike the right chord with readers from all creative fields and levels, I share them partially because many of them are still so freshly new in my head, and I can recall vividly their having planted themselves there during my time as a student. That said, there’s plenty more learning to be done on my end as well, and I invite you to share your responses and your own additions to the list in the comments, no matter what corner of the creative world you are from.
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A/B testing isn’t a buzz term. A lot of savvy marketers and designs are using it right now to gain insight into visitor behavior and to increase conversion rate. And yet A/B testing is still not as common as such Internet marketing subjects as SEO, Web analytics and usability.
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When was the last time you made a decision? A big one. What was the outcome? Was it good, and how did you get to that outcome? Every day we all make plenty of decisions without a thought to how we structure them or the basis on which we make them. We simply make them. We’re lucky that we work in an industry in which erroneous decisions may have serious financial consequences but rarely, if ever, costs lives.
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Members of military and intelligence forces around the world risk their lives daily to defend their countries and assist in peacekeeping and aid missions both at home and abroad. The men and women who make up the world’s defense forces make sacrifices that most civilians wouldn’t consider to serve their countries.
So, with everything they do for us, shouldn’t they be represented online by website designs that reflect the honor and responsibility they undertake every day? Unfortunately, that’s not the case in many countries out there. Many military websites out there are some of the worst designs in any industry. Whether they’re outdated, broken or designed by amateurs, some of the websites showcased below are bad enough to make you cringe.
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The beauty of writing systems is that each has something unique from which to draw inspiration. Two weeks ago, in the first part of this article, we covered Arabic and East-Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) and a few Indic scripts (Devanagari, Thai and Tibetan).
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Web, industrial, interior… You name it and there are designers for it. We’re all trained in our particular areas (as we should be), but it would do us some good sometimes to look beyond our borders for new approaches to design problems. For a fresh perspective, here we’ll apply several principles of interior design to Web design and see what ideas would help change some of our stuck-in-a-rut design practices.
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In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn’t very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.
In this second part of the article, I’d like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones that I will carry with me for a long time to come.
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