Archive for year: 2017

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/VYTvtNy8n2M/

Icons are one of the must-have assets that every designer needs in their toolbox. They’ve become an essential part of crafting the perfect UI.

The trouble is that it can be difficult to find the right icon for the job. Sure, it may be the right object. But it may not be the right color or available in the size you need. That leads to having to settle for something that doesn’t work as well as you’d like.

That’s what makes IconShock 2.0 so unique. They’ve hand-crafted over 2 million icons – over 400 sets in all. Not only that, but they cover over 30 styles with almost all of them being pixel-perfect vectors. But that’s just scratching the surface of what IconShock 2.0 can do.

Customized to Fit Your Needs

It’s one thing to simply download an icon file and then try to make it fit your project. It’s quite another to download an icon that is customized to your exact specifications. Yet IconShock provides you with that very experience.

Using their web-based customization tool, you can pick an icon and make it your own. Choose the sizing and colors you want. You’ll even get a list of related icons and the ability to search for others. From there, download a transparent PNG file. Premium members get even more options, like large sizes (up to 512px) and the ability to export to SVG or AI file formats. Plus, premium members get access to every single icon in the collection – with 100+ new ones added weekly.

As well as being able to choose and customize those particular icons your project requires, now, with IconShock 2.0, you can also download many of those icons in icon font format as well!

The whole process is quick, fun and really increases efficiency. The end result is getting exactly what you want – which ends up in a better project.

A True Variety of Icon Sets

IconShock 2.0 offers an incredible array of choices (2 million+ icons makes for a pretty good selection). Their icon sets cover multiple industries and, odds are, you’re going to find the perfect fit for whatever you’re working on.

Let’s take a look at five of their most popular sets, each with hundreds of icons you can customize and download for free:

Flat Icons

IconShock 2.0’s Flat Icons Bundle sports a clean, colorful style that will help you to create a standout UI. The soft color palette combined with geometric shapes will add a touch of class to any design project.

Glyph Icons

The Glyph Icons Bundle is made of up minimal outlined shapes. Perfect for when simplicity is a must.

iPhone Icons

With the iPhone Icons Bundle, you’ll find a set of solid monochrome icons based on the original iOS 6 designs. They were built with the original iPhone sizes in mind, but can be customized to match your needs.

iOS Line Icons

If you’re looking for truly minimal outline styling, the iOS Line Icons Bundle may be a great fit for you. They’re conceptually accurate with iOS 7 and above.

Material Design Icons

The Material Icons Bundle is a great choice when following Google’s Material Design. Based on minimal glyph icons, but with Material’s color palette added in for extra punch.

Icon Fonts

And, don’t forget that all of the above icon sets are available to download in icon font as well. All perfect for quick integration into popular web frameworks like Bootstrap and Semantic.

Looking for Something Else?

We’ve only begun digging into the vast icon library of IconShock 2.0. Take a look at their entire list of icon sets to see all that they have to offer.

Start Using IconShock 2.0 for Free

Now that you’ve seen the top-quality icons and game-changing tools of IconShock 2.0, it’s time to add their collection to your design toolbox. You can start using these stellar icons for free. If you’re looking for even more power, upgrade to a premium membership and take things to the next level.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/10-unexpected-sources-of-design-inspiration/

There's a source of inspiration for every type of design you can think of. Struggling to create the perfect font pairing? Head to Typewolf. Searching for ideas for your website redesign, or a specific webpage? Browse Crayon. Looking for all-around epic sources of design inspiration? Check out the latest crop of Webby Award winners.

But as awesome as these collections are, it's dangerous to rely on them exclusively. If all designers are referencing the same ideas, concepts and templates from the same websites for design inspiration, every design then sort-of becomes a variation of an existing one. It's almost impossible to create something novel or unique, when all designers are basing their ideas on the same inspiration sources.

Luckily, there's a solution for that…

Throw some new sources of design inspiration into the mix, alongside your regular sources! These 10 websites will keep you inspired in unexpected ways.

1. 99% Invisible

99% Invisible is a blog and radio show hosted by Roman Mars. It delves into the unnoticed yet beautiful, intriguing and significant forces that shape our world.

In other words…the 99%.

Each episode is approximately 15-25 minutes long and covers a single topic related to architecture, objects, visuals, history, technology, society, cities, sounds and infrastructure. Not only will it help you look at your surroundings with fresh eyes, but it'll help you hone your attention to detail. It's the "little things" that often make or break a design, so an enhanced focus on little details is definitely a skill worth mastering.

2. The Dieline

My grocery trips have been taking twice as long since I discovered The Dieline. This epic website features at least one innovative packaging design per day, but often shares two or three. You'll be both surprised and delighted to see how the most mundane items (like pencils) can be elevated by logo design and clever packaging.

The fundamentals of design apply to packaging like any other aspect of design. For example, if there's not enough white space in the design on a bag of coffee, it’ll look crowded and strain the consumer's eyes when they're trying to read it in the supermarket, resulting in a loss of sale. Because these design concepts carry over in many ways, scrolling through The Dieline will reinforce your existing design knowledge regardless of whether you’re you're a logo, web or user interface designer.

3. The Great Discontent (TGD)

The Great Discontent is a print and digital magazine showcasing all types of creatives from photographers and graphic designers to illustrators and filmmakers. Unlike many other design inspiration sources, TGD features the astonishing designers behind the work, not the only works themselves.

Sometimes it can be even more inspiring to read about an artist's beginnings, their current projects, and the biggest challenges they've faced, than to see the work itself.

After all, creative work can be emotionally draining, since you're not using up both your physical and mental strength equally, but rather 100% (and sometimes more!) of your mental strength. Knowing that others can relate often rejuvenates you and inspires you to carry on. You'll also learn how other creatives generate their amazing ideas.

4. Design Milk

Design Milk never lets me down when I need straight-up visual eye-candy. This online magazine curates the best art, interior design, furniture, fashion, technology and architecture from around the world. The photographs are stunning, the cultures and aesthetics are stylistically varied but universally interesting, and the writing is solid. If you need bursts of inspiration from a variety of different art concepts, Design Milk is definitely for you.

And, if you're only interested in a specific vertical—say, architecture—it's easy to filter out other content and narrow down your search.

5. Style Guides by Brad Frost

Nothing fuses the creative and the orderly together like a style guide. Brad Frost, well-known front-end designer and author of Atomic Design, created Style Guides to house an ever-growing collection of resources on the topic. The Talks and Tools sections are certainly worth scrolling through, although my favorite is Examples. You'll find some of the most well-crafted style guides in existence, from the biggest brands today.

Better yet, you can sort through them by their content.

6. Card Nerd

Counterintuitively, rules and restrictions often inspire some of the most inventive designs. After all, they force you to find unexpected solutions and workarounds, where a "no-limits" approach has the tendency to make designers feel lazy.

This explains why business cards are a reliable source of inspiration. A business card designer has a tiny medium for a big task: communicating someone's professional identity. Whenever you're struggling to pare down your copy to the essentials, or make a design feel less busy, use Card Nerd. This gallery is updated several times a day with new business cards, ranging from minimalist to bold and colorful.

Continue reading %10 Unexpected Sources of Design Inspiration%

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/jaYWctjPQ3I/

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AR Experiments

A growing collection of augmented reality experiments.

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Guide to building layouts with CSS Grid

A place to learn and prototype with CSS Grid.

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Bringing Sketch and After Effects Closer Together

Josh Fleetwood introduces two new animation workflow tools from UX Motion Design at Google.

Read it

The Complete Guide For Web VR and immersive experiences

Yuval Keshtcher interviews Austin Knight about virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

Read it

CSS Checkbox Library

Lots of custom checkboxes with many styles to choose from.

Check it out

Vivify

An easy-to-use CSS animation library.

Check it out

User Interfaces for Variable Fonts

Andrew Johnson writes on how to structure design tools to adapt to the new advantages variable fonts provide us with.

Read it

Crystal Caves

A light and shadow experimentation with 2D projections in canvas by Huw.

Check it out

Getting started with Puppeteer and Chrome Headless for Web Scraping

Emad Ehsan has put together this starter guide on Web Scraping in Chrome Headless.

Check it out

Git Cheatsheet

A great reference for Git with useful links and resources. By Ashish Rawat.

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Breaking Down a CSS Grid Layout

An article by Tim Wright where he dissects a CSS Grid Layout.

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Make Medium Readable Again

Matt Baer made a Chrome extension to neutralize some bad UI on Medium-powered sites.

Check it out

So you need a CSS utility library?

An article on CSS utility libraries with lots of resources by Chris Coyier.

Read it

Your logo is copied

Ferdinand Vogler writes on how after a few years in design you eventually find out that everything has been done before.

Read it

Roadtrip

Remembering a 3500 km journey through Google StreetView. By Lionel Tardy.

Check it out

Manual priority control of resource fetching

Addy Osmani suggests that there should be a value in exposing a way to manually specify the priority of resource requests.

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Free Font: Alexana

Mark Mora designed this interesting display font.

Get it

Curl Noise

A mesmerizing demo by Misaki Nakano.

Check it out

What does it take to build a chatbot? Let’s find out.

Vanco Stojkov shows how straightforward it is to build a chatbot.

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The Web in 2050

Jacques Mattheij has a gloomy outlook on the future of the web. Something to think about.

Read it

Designing for the Arab User – Basic Arabic UX for Business

Some great insight to designing layouts for Arabic interfaces. By Anna Rubkiewicz.

Read it

CSS Camera

A great demo of an animated CSS only camera by Cassidy Williams.

Check it out

Collective #344 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/pZKTCsIm_uA/design-beautiful-mobile-apps-online-store

One can see the importance of the mobile app for shopping in that the projected worldwide sales figure for mobile e-shopping will touch $162.5 billion by the end of the year. And yet there is no urgency shown by the online retailers in moving towards this platform. Only 10% of them offer mobile e-shopping facilities […]

The post How to Design Beautiful Mobile Apps for an Online Store appeared first on designrfix.com.

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/08/introduction-gravit-designer-designing-weather-app-part-2/

 

 

Welcome back to the second part of this tutorial on Gravit Designer. In the first part we took a general look at Gravit and set everything up, created the background image in the weather app and the status bar, and then started to make the initial elements of the design’s content. Let’s continue where we left off.

Having created the main text layers of the content area in part one of this tutorial, let’s continue with the weather conditions for the different times of day.

The post An Introduction To Gravit Designer: Designing A Weather App (Part 2) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.