Free themes for Twitter Bootstrap

We'll start this trends report—LogoLounge's 10th annual missive—with an admonishment that is repeated each year: If you're searching for how-to information, please stop reading now.

In addition, if you anticipate your reaction to reviewing these trends is to dismiss every one of them as yesterday's news, you also may as well walk away right now.

There's plenty to be learned here, but you need to be looking for the right thing. After a decade of studying logos from around the world—32,000 alone for this report—I can say with absolute confidence that the true benefit of studying logo design trends is that they invariably identify trajectories. Once you can see the path a trend starts to take, once you can see its arc and velocity, it's very possible for you to know where to take it next. You get to steer. You can find your own forward direction.

Flat Icons & Icon Fonts

There are many such roundups. This one is mine.

Icon Fonts... are awesome. They typically come with standard vectors as well if you prefer working with them that way, but these icon projects go the extra mile in offering an @font-face compatible font for web use.

What’s a Scout Book?
The Scout Book is a pocket sized notebook just waiting to be customized with your artwork. Ready? Great! Simply select your quantity of notebooks, choose your ink color(s) and interior paper style, upload your design, and make your own. It’s that easy!

The Photoshop CS6 beta is now available. It includes a ton of big and small improvements over previous versions. Here are the ones that matter to me, as an interface designer.

SO WHAT IS IT?
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside.

Welcome on Brush King : Free Photoshop Brushes

Sir Jonathan Ive, Jony to his friends, is arguably one of the world’s most influential Londoners. The 45-year-old was born in Chingford — and went to the same school as David Beckham. He met his wife, Heather Pegg, while in secondary school. They married in 1987, have twin sons and now live in San Francisco.

As Apple’s senior vice-president of industrial design, he is the driving force behind the firm’s products, from the Mac computer to the iPod, iPhone and, most recently, the iPad. He spoke exclusively to the Evening Standard from the firm’s headquarters.

Normalize vs Reset
It’s worth understanding in greater detail how normalize.css differs from traditional CSS resets.

Normalize.css preserves useful defaults

Resets impose a homogenous visual style by flattening the default styles for almost all elements. In contrast, normalize.css retains many useful default browser styles. This means that you don’t have to redeclare styles for all the common typographic elements.

When an element has different default styles in different browsers, normalize.css aims to make those styles consistent and in line with modern standards when possible.

Normalize.css corrects common bugs

It fixes common desktop and mobile browser bugs that are out of scope for resets. This includes display settings for HTML5 elements, correcting font-size for preformatted text, SVG overflow in IE9, and many form-related bugs across browsers and operating systems.

In the real world, responsive design is nothing new. Products adapt to our needs. Technology monitors local environments to adjust lighting, temperature and even physical spaces. But what about web? In designing with words, the desire to bind content to a device has been around as long as there have been books. Mark will take you from desire to implementation, from theory to practice. How can we build upon what we know from literally hundreds of years of responsive design practice to define a new era of online publishing? An era where we strive for the same level of human / technology connection that started with the monks.

On iOS and almost every other operating system, user interfaces tend to use gradients to give a sense of contour to interface elements. The trouble is, gradients alone can look artificial due to their unrealistically perfect visual smoothness. In the real world, almost nothing is completely flat and smooth - and that’s a good thing, because we rely on friction for grip.

We can add a touch of realism to our interface designs by combining gradients with subtle textures. My own favourite type of texture is noise, which gives an understated but effective sense of tactility. I used noise for texture extensively in my UI design for the Favorites 2 iPhone app.

This brief article explains one possible way to combine gradients with subtle noise in Photoshop (as with any effect, there are many other approaches to achieving the same thing; this is just how I usually do it). I used Photoshop CS5, and this tutorial should be suitable for Photoshop beginners. It’s aimed primarily at app developers, rather than experienced designers.

Typically the people who complain are somewhere below the top tier, but above entry level. The more established, high-end designers don’t worry about something like 99designs, because it focuses on things like logos and T-shirts. And many entry level designers love it because it gives them an easier way to get into the market and start making money.

It’s the people in the middle who haven’t yet made a name for themselves, but feel they are above designing logos and tshirts on spec who balk. And, speaking as someone who was in the same boat when journalism was ripped apart by the Web, I can relate. Here’s my advice: Embrace it. You can’t fight the Web’s power to compress service fees in the name of customer efficiency. The game has changed, but if you embrace the volatility first, you usually win. I jumped from old media in 2006, when it didn’t look possible to pay a mortgage off of blogging. And since then, I’ve made more money (and had way more fun) than I would have staying at a magazine.

Grab this awesome bundle of essential Ui design resources and speed up your design workflow for just $8. The toolkit is packed with well over 300 premium quality royalty free design elements created specifically with Ui developers and designers in mind.

I haven’t done serious web work — HTML web work, that is — since I last worked on Manila 10 years ago.

I’ve done some small things — the system that generates this blog, for instance — but I haven’t had the chance to use almost any of the newer web technology. I’ve never written a Rails app, used JQuery, or deployed to a virtual server.

So when I had the chance to re-do the websites for our company and main product, I was excited — because it meant I could try some of the new technologies and learn some things.

FontShop's Best Typefaces of 2011
Another year has whizzed by! While last year saw the real breakthrough for webfonts, this year we witnessed the introduction of mobile fonts and the promise of more diversity and typographic refinement in mobile apps. Yet the news in type was not dominated only by technology. Our beloved type designers cooked up delicious new digital faces for FontShop’s menu of typographic treats.

To celebrate the end of another exciting year in type, our type experts put their heads together to compile our annual “Best Of” list, highlighting the typefaces that surprised, impressed, and delighted us. (And if the “Best Of“ list whets your appetite for fonts, check our Newsletter Archive for more morsels. All this year’s new typefaces are in there.)

As mobile devices have continued to evolve and spread, so has the process of designing and developing Web sites and services that work across a diverse range of devices. From responsive Web design to future friendly thinking, here's how I've seen things evolve over the past year and a half.

Drop caps have been around for years in the print industry, but they are still pretty rare in the web world despite the :first-letter selector having been around for a fair few years. Let’s take a look at how we can create a cool drop cap for our web designs and spice it up with some stylish CSS3 text-shadow effects.

Welcome to the home of the 978 and counterpart grid systems.

The genius of Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the rest of the Mac team was recognizing a huge untapped market for home computing among artists, musicians, writers, and other creative weirdos who might never have cared enough to master the arcane complexities of a command-line UI or blow a fortune on hulking digital workstations.

The challenge of designing a personal computer that “the rest of us” would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

After extensively testing both of the primary scrolling options for jQuery Mobile I feel like the jQuery Mobile Scrollview is the best solution. It was very easy to install and configure, offered great support on iPhone and Android devices, and has more options and configurations available to customize your application. In addition, it may at some point be integrated into jQuery mobile as default functionality to serve as a bridge until position:fixed and overflow are full supported by the majority of active smartphones.

There are those points in every interactive designer’s career when he becomes fed up with producing the same set of graphics all over again for every website he designs. It could be the social network icons, gallery arrows or any number of his «signature» butterflies for the footer of each of his projects. Similar for interactive developers that have to slice the same GIFs and PNGs each time art-director asks them to.

Until now. We want creative people to spend time on creative things. So we came up with the typeface that includes all frequently used iconographics and symbols. Although, the idea is not hot-baked — Webdings and Windings have been around for quite a time — all of them have a lot of unnecessary and sometimes actually scary symbols.

Web Symbols is a set of vector html-compliant typefaces, so it might be used in any size, color and browser (okey, mostly — but IE7 for sure).

thirteen movie poster trends that are here to stay and what they say about their movies

I used to carefully craft a bunch of buddy lists in my instant messenger. Friends From Home, College Friends, Bay Area Friends, Work, Previous Work, Current Work… it kept growing and growing until I suddenly realized how fruitless it was for me. Then I merged everyone into one big group called “Humans”.

Simplify. Don’t give your users the shit work.

Most “deep” apps require some amount of navigation, moving the user deeper into child views and then back out to the parent view. That navigational backtracking is typically done with a “Back” button, positioned in the top-left corner, and denoted by a pointed left side. You’ve all seen it:



The title of the entire bar is the title of this view; the Back button shows the previous, parent view’s title. Here, then, is a piece of advice for app designers: The Back button should never show the text “Back”. 

This is a widespread issue, present in many extremely popular apps.

A Pinboard redesign built off of the styles started by Josh Pigford, I’m providing a bare stylesheet which works with StyleBot on Chrome and User CSS on Safari. The Chrome version can be installed straight from Stylebot​.me. Stylebot​.me also has a userscript version which could be used with Greasemonkey, but my styles don’t seem to translate well to Firefox, yet. I’ll work on that when I have time.

Here’s the raw stylesheet if you want to grab it and use it in User CSS or somewhere else: pinboard.css. I’m not going to tell you it’s bulletproof, but feel free to send in obvious bugs. Also feel free to pick it up and run with it, just link the “credit chain” back and make sure to show us what you did!

"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."

—Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
How can we design systems when we don't know what we're doing?

The most exciting engineering challenges lie on the boundary of theory and the unknown. Not so unknown that they're hopeless, but not enough theory to predict the results of our decisions. Systems at this boundary often rely on emergent behavior — high-level effects that arise indirectly from low-level interactions.

When designing at this boundary, the challenge lies not in constructing the system, but in understanding it. In the absence of theory, we must develop an intuition to guide our decisions. The design process is thus one of exploration and discovery.

How do we explore? If you move to a new city, you might learn the territory by walking around. Or you might peruse a map. But far more effective than either is both together — a street-level experience with higher-level guidance.

Likewise, the most powerful way to gain insight into a system is by moving between levels of abstraction. Many designers do this instinctively. But it's easy to get stuck on the ground, experiencing concrete systems with no higher-level view. It's also easy to get stuck in the clouds, working entirely with abstract equations or aggregate statistics.

This interactive essay presents the ladder of abstraction, a technique for thinking explicitly about these levels, so a designer can move among them consciously and confidently.

I believe that an essential skill of the modern system designer will be using the interactive medium to move fluidly around the ladder of abstraction.

css border transitions

Naturally, you'd leave a page that seemed like it wasn't going to give you the information you were looking for pretty quickly, and head back to Google to search again. When you're looking for answers, it's good to be skeptical. But what if your first impression isn't accurate? What if the page you just left did have what you needed, but just didn't make that clear to you quickly enough?

A webpage can't be everything to everyone, but that's hardly ever really the problem. In most cases, users are looking for clarity more than comprehensiveness. If a webpage's purpose—what it's offering and what it's asking for—is not immediately clear, a user won't give it the time of day, no matter how well-written its content. So, it often comes down to issues of design that determine a webpage's effectiveness, and whether it's able to disarm a user's skepticism.

In this article, I'd like to take a closer look at how design can support or obstruct content. I'm going to visually examine several examples as well as put them through a user-testing session fashioned after Nielsen's 10-second quote—what I'm going to call ten second tests.

How to use the Home Button

Your iPhone has one button on its front. Pressing this button may perform different actions in different circumstances. This simple visual guide shows you how it works.

I can’t overstate the value of a good flat, sharp, detailed icon. You can style it any way you please, use it in a variety of projects, and communicate difficult interface concepts in a 16 pixel space. Considering the incredible amount of work that goes into designing each icon, and the quality exhibited below, these sets are scandalously low priced. So get ready to do some serious tax-deductible shopping.

Great type design remains hidden in the jungle as it isn’t promoted by a type foundry. Fontseek features these hidden treasures. It links you to the designer’s website by clicking on the specimen, where you will find purchasing information or how to get in touch directly. You can filter the selection by using the category tags. Check out the list of selected  F O U N D R I E S  distributing quality fonts. These I N S T I T U T I O N S offer Typedesign Education. C O N T A C T me.

We often get potential clients innocently ask us “What does a website cost?” and as we're sure you can appreciate, often it's not a simple matter working that out.

A website can have many components, these are just some of the things that can go into making a website to illustrate why it's simply not possible to give a figure off the top of our heads and that building a great website requires thought, planning and a partnership between client and agency.

Not all of the things on this page are needed on every website but we hope it gives potential clients a little more insight into what can be involved then we're happy.

Folio Focus has an article up titled ‘How to Choose a Web Designer’. It talks a lot about using design galleries to find someone experienced, who fits your budget and has the right style and skillset.
But these questions are trivial compared to the important stuff. They’re questions to ask the designer himself after you’ve identified him as a likely candidate.
Here, in five simple steps, is how to actually choose a web designer:–

I’ve had laptops and cellular internet connectivity for 7 years, but I never would have done something like this before. Why?

I wouldn’t have been able to easily find a good app to do this without being bombarded with spam in my Google search. (And many of them would be Windows-only.)
When I did finally find an app that looked reasonable, I wouldn’t have been able to find any trustworthy reviews, being bombarded instead by more search spam.
When I went to buy it, it probably would have cost more.
I wouldn’t have trusted it comfortably enough to install it on my computer.
It might not even work.
If it did work, I’d probably need longer to figure out its learning curve, and navigating wouldn’t be as easy or fast with a keyboard and trackpad.
Taking out the laptop in the car, and passing around a laptop to show the final product, would feel much clunkier than using the iPad.
The computing revolution brought on by iOS, the hardware, and the App Store ecosystem is a bigger deal than we realize.

Prototypes for Mac turns your flat mockup images into tappable and sharable prototypes that run on iPhone or iPod touch.

Today, I work as a consultant, advising corporations, startups, and non-profits alike how to thrive by putting people at the heart of their thinking. My fellow consultants will recognise that one of our most powerful advantages is the naive viewpoint. We can ask dumb questions and give our honest opinions on how things look to the untrained eye, before we become embedded within the politics, language, and mindset of our client.

That’s the angle I take today. Working in a different country and being part of a different community, I’ve faced similar but different challenges to many of you. So I hope I can offer a fresh perspective on things: the view from my neighbouring hill.

I’d like to talk about the fall and rise of user experience.

Ethan Marcotte established the idea of responsive web design in his 2010 A List Apart article of the same title.  Succinctly, responsive web design is device-agnostic content presentation. A responsive design looks great on a desktop monitor, a tiny phone screen or a large format display.  This brief paper first details where responsive web design fits in the front end design stack. Then it will describe how a responsive web design is constructed.

In my last post, Pure CSS3 Speech Bubbles Without Images, we saw how the :before and :after pseudo-elements could be used to create different effects. In this post we’ll use similar techniques to create a variety of ribbons.

Ribbon effects are in vogue. Most designers use positioned images, but we’ll create them without using border effects and a single h2 tag:

The Tea House is nestled within a leafy backyard of a suburban home. Constructed of bronze and glass, the new structure references the form of a Japanese lantern and functions as a tea house, meditation space, and stage for the family’s musical recitals. This project recently received a 2010 Washington DC AIA Award of Merit.  Photographs and drawings of the Tea House designed by David Jameson Architect following the break.

After experiencing the image of the lantern as a singular gem floating in the landscape, one is funneled into a curated procession space between strands of bamboo that is conceived to cleanse the mind and prepare one to enter the object.

After ascending an origami stair, the visitor is confronted with the last natural element: a four inch thick, opaque wood entry door. At this point the visitor occupies the structure as a performer with a sense of otherworldliness meditation.

Ah, tabs.

Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching?

This is a short piece concerned only with the different behaviours when closing tabs in Google Chrome, as I think these behaviours are fantastically thought through.

Khoi Vinh: Because I recently left a job at one of the most prominent publications in the world, people often ask me about my opinions on the cavalcade of publications rushing to the iPad — those apps designed and developed by newspapers and magazines principally to deliver their print content — and the chances I see for their success. So here it is.

It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

I’m kind of weird, I love negative feedback. Unsolicited complaint means somebody cared enough to write it down, and then when you fix their pet peeve they transform into a fan. Plus you got to fix a real problem for a real person, which is pretty rewarding. The oft-bemoaned fact that iOS developers can’t reply directly to App Store commenters is all the more reason to fix the root of the problem.

Customer comments do ease the planning of future software releases a little. They’re the squeaky wheels. It’d be foolish to ignore your own ideas and priorities in favor of being 100% feedback-driven… you’d find yourself in the Henry Ford «my customers wanted a faster horse» situation pretty quickly, but it’s helpful nonetheless. Popular feature requests jump up the queue, others languish.

Some negative feedback just isn’t helpful, but that’s life. The world has its share of caustic assholes with nothing better to do than give 1-star reviews on iTunes, but if mean words really bother you, you have no business making things and selling them to the public. Don’t be a musician, either. Or a writer. Or a chef.

Does beautiful design matter?

If you look at the success of some of the most popular sites on the web, it seems to be a mixed verdict. Yes, many have had beautiful designs for years, but for some well-known sites, aesthetics promptly took a backseat to form and function… and stayed there.

And surprisingly, most of their visitors don’t seem to care.

There’s something comforting about a homely design. The average site portrays a kind of “mom and pop” flair that instantly lowers people’s built-in B.S. detectors and says, “Hey, we’re just like you!”

In fact, these ugly sites have gained such a fanatically loyal audience over the years that their owners wouldn’t dream of updating their design today. They pride themselves on a site that may not be much to look at, but it’s incredibly easy to use and understand.

Here are four such sites, as well as lessons we can learn from them:

Hur man kan göra geometriska mönster i Illustrator.

Artikel om "grid-based design" för webbsidor. Innehåller även exempel på en del snygga sajter.

Designers väljer sina favoriter från 2007 års typsnitt. Många snygga.

En användartest på hur olika placeringar av skicka/avbryt-knappar påverkar tiden det tar att ta sig igenom ett formulär.

En utmärkt hypotes för "Human Interface Design", användargränssnittsdesign, av Tantek Çelik. I korthet handlar det om att ett användargränssnitt blir bättre om det är enklare, färre klick för att genomföra en uppgift, färre textfält att fylla i och om det

Fantastiska fotorealistiska bilder gjorta helt i vektorgrafik (de flesta i Adobe Illustrator) med målet att efterlikna fotografier.

Funka Nu har publicerat ett gäng ikoner som är fria att användas på en webbplats för att användaren ska känna igen sig (t.ex. en utskriftsikon).

En intressant titt på förslag till redesign av en sajt som inte användes.

Thomas Phinney på Adobe bloggar om kvalitén både i teckensnitt och typsnitt (där typsnitt syftar på filerna).

En läcker kaminliknande gaseld som kan hängas på väggen som en tavla och inte avger någon rök alls.

En artikel om olika typer av sätt att anpassa webbsidor för sökmotorerna, både de etiskt rätta och de mera tveksamma.

Ett tävlingsbidrag i en japansk (?) designtävling som använder sig av lysdioder i själva vattenstrålen för en häftig effekt.

Fräcka designade vattenkranar med lysdioder som med färgat ljus ander temperaturen på vattnet.

En sajt med massor av nedladdningsbara ornament och symboler i postscript. Kan vara en guldgruva för designers.

En innovation för badrummet: en handduksvärmare i glas! Kunde ha varit ännu snyggare, men fräck ändå.

Ett tjusigt glasbord med lysdioder i bordskivan utan synliga kopplingar. Vill ha!

Smaken är som baken säger man. Här är det baken som är smaken.

Digital Web Magazine har en artikelserie om CSS, grundläggande CSS. Detta är del 1.

Digital Web Magazine har en artikelserie om CSS, grundläggande CSS. Detta är del 1.

Douglas Bowmans väldigt snygga fotoalbum med intressanta lösningar.

En enkel guide till hur man gör boxar i Photoshop.

Vissa logotyper borde aldrig lämnat ritbordet.

En sida där man kan se exempel på hur alfabetet kan se ut i olika språk.

En bokliknande layout med snygg och smart användning av CSS.

Snygg retrodesign på Lee Jeans hemsida. Mycket grafiskt så att säga.

En lista på de tio värsta designbuggarna i datorer (framförallt macar) hittills. Det ligger något i det.

En bra artikel om varför "drawers" eller utdragslådor, är en dålig lösning, ett dåligt gränssnitt. Jag har aldrig gillat utdragslådor.

En bra översikt över de 5 vanligaste misstagen band och skivbolag gör när de skapar hemsidor.

Paul Graham skriver om varför vissa amerikanska saker fungerar så bra och andra inte, för en japansk läsarskara. Han berättar om programmering och skillnaden mellan japanska och amerikanska bilar. Och han tar Apple som exempel på något ovanligt för att va

Snygg sida med luftig layout och intressant stort sidhuvud.

En blog som är färgglad och snygg med bra användning av drop shadow i CSS.

En förklaring till redesignen av Hiram College.

En snygg och funktionell sajt för Hiram College. Av killen bakom Authentic Boredom.

Hur man gör en global reset av allt "vitutrymme".