As graphic designers, you’ll often have to work with off-the-shelf material created by others. Also, you’ll often have to follow the branding already developed by someone else, and that’s ok because it’s part of the job. But the part of a project that almost every graphic designer likes and is proud of the most is something that you can do from scratch. That’s why Anna Shuvalova loves illustration projects so much.
Read more…
A “workaholic” is someone who is addicted to work. Soon, they neglect their family, friends, health, sometimes damaging them all irrevocably. Some people who work on the Web seem not only to disregard the dangers of workaholism, but to actively promote it. They see it as a badge of honor—but it’s a serious issue that can damage Web teams. In contrast, people who simply “work hard” do not expose themselves to such dangers.
Read more…
Adobe is feature-freezing Fireworks, and it is not offering a replacement tool for Fireworks users. What does this mean for you if you use Fireworks to design user interfaces and screens? In this article Michel Bozgounov will take a close look at Adobe Fireworks, explaining why it is a unique and powerful design tool, how we can continue to use it effectively, and what our alternatives are for the future.
Read more…
Adobe is feature-freezing Fireworks. And it is not offering a replacement tool for Fireworks users. What does this mean for you if you use Fireworks to design user interfaces and screens? In this article, Michel Bozgounov will take a close look at Adobe Fireworks, explaining why it is a unique and powerful design tool, how we can continue to use it effectively, and what our alternatives are for the future.
Read more…
We usually export images for the Web from our favorite graphics software. Our eyes fixate on an image’s preview, adjusting the quality settings until we’ve found that sweet spot, where the file size and quality are both the best they can be. After having gone to all that care and effort, we would be forgiven for thinking that our image is in the best shape possible, but that’s not always the case. In fact, much more data is usually left in such files, data that keeps our users waiting just a bit longer than necessary. Thankfully, a number of popular tools can help us optimize images even further!
Read more…
Many large businesses had a chief electricity officer when electricity first started to power the industrial economy. Companies just couldn’t operate without power, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade after introducing electricity, many business leaders were still building factories by water, despite no longer needing it to power their machinery. They needed help integrating the new technology into their thinking and that is where the chief electricity officer came in.
Read more…
Veterans in this industry should mentor new team members and share with them the knowledge that they know they will need to succeed. This article is a follow-up “Lessons Learned in Leading New Web Professionals.” This one looks at the other side of the team leader-new employee dynamic. We’ll cover the practices that Jeremy Girard has found are consistently followed by employees who excel in their new role and grow in this industry.
Read more…
This article is the third part of an article series about improving your design workflow in Adobe Fireworks with some of the best extensions currently available. You may want to check out the first and second parts if you’re not already familiar with them.
Read more…
As Web designers, developing websites that work well on mobile devices is an important aspect of the work we do. And selling a responsive design is no different than selling anything else. It all starts with solving problems. For this project, we highlighted the benefits of a responsive approach beyond the familiar benefit of support for mobile devices that we normally mention to prospective clients. Here are some of the key points we made in discussing the value of a responsive approach for a website without an obvious need for mobile support.
Read more…
Today, Mike Cunsolo will show us how to use Grunt in a project to speed up and change the way you develop websites, looking briefly at what Grunt can do, before jumping into how to set up and use its various plugins. Then he will explain how to build a simple input validator, using Sass as a preprocessor, how to use grunt-cssc and CssMin to combine and minify our CSS, how to build our compressed assets on the fly, and much more!
Read more…
