10 ace design magazines to add to your reading list

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/jpYun4xTn2s/10-ace-design-magazines-to-add-to-your-reading-list

Design magazines have a number of functions: they let you know what's going on in the industry, inspire you, offer advice you can apply to your own design portfolio, provide you with insights from design superstars, go behind the scenes on the biggest and most experimental design projects – all that stuff. But design magazines are also obliged to look dead cool while artfully stacked up on your coffee table.

We've picked out a selection of design magazines from around the world; titles with the best writing and photography, the coolest designs, and the top production values. We looked at big-selling design magazines that have been around for decades, and smaller, independent titles that dare to be different.

Wallpaper*

Wallpaper* magazine covers

For interiors inspo, Wallpaper* can’t be beaten

The first of our heavyweight titles is Wallpaper*: 'the world's most important design and lifestyle magazine brand’. The monthly mag has readers in 100 countries, the majority employed in the creative industries, so it covers design from around the world in all its forms. You might see a story about Frida Kahlo next to one about Paris Fashion Week, something on wearable football kits beside a piece about a new bar in Buenos Aires. It's no good for Photoshop tips, but can't be beaten for #apartmentgoals. 

Computer Arts

For practical advice, you can’t beat Computer Arts

Whatever stage of your career you're at – student or studio boss – Computer Arts is a cornerstone magazine. The monthly title champions graphic design, branding and illustration. It interviews the world's best studios and individual designers, but also regularly celebrates fresh new talent. The magazine goes behind the scenes on big projects to see how they're put together.

It's one of our sister magazines, so we're a little biased, but where Computer Arts really comes into own is with career tips and advice: how to upgrade your skills, tips for making it as a freelancer, and what to do if you decide to quit your job. 

The covers always look super-smart too. A particular highlight is Computer Arts' annual cover design competition, run in association with D&AD New Blood. It's a chance for fledgling designers to show off their skills, and for industry pros to take a look at the best upcoming talent. You can see 2018's winning entry on the issue on sale now. Pick up a copy to check out the full shortlist, or check out last year's winners.

Creative Review

Creative Review magazine

CR has been running since 1980

Our final big title is Creative Review: 'We celebrate the work that matters. And we dig into how and why it gets made. We challenge and champion the industry we love.' Since 1980, the title has been covering all quarters of the creative industries – not just art and design but advertising, film and TV, too. It interviews big-name creatives and analyses high-profile projects, looks at how things are made and why, inspires you to go and make your own stuff, and offers practical advice on how to run your own studio. 

Eye

Eye magazine

Eye has great coffee table appeal

Eye calls itself 'the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal' – and it might just be. Aside from always having a killer front cover (this is definitely one to leave artfully stacked on the coffee table), the quarterly magazine offers some of the best writing around on design and 'visual culture' in general. For a taste of what to expect, a recent issue includes stories on Estonian design, the anatomy of a magazine, and an interview with the design director at the New York Times. Eye also does some pretty good student subscription deals. 

99U

99U magazines

99U is made by Adobe, so you know you’re in safe hands

Another one of the best-looking magazines around is 99U. It’s aimed at everyone from designers and engineers to educators, marketers, artists and CEOs: ‘If you approach your work creatively, 99U’s goal is to help you find the inspiration to build an incredible career'. It's made by Adobe so you know you're in safe hands. The current quarterly issue covers Pentagram's Natasha Jen, an insider's tour of Berlin, and 10 designers sharing how they upset the status quo – firing their best client, good stuff like that.

Communication Arts

communication arts magazine

This US-focused mag is aimed at creative professionals

Communication Arts covers design, illustration, typography and photography, as well as advertising and interactive fields. It's US-focused and is for people in the industry more than general hobbyists. The bimonthly magazine is at its best when interviewing designers and design studios – the Surrealist photographer from Portland; the experimental marketing agency in San Francisco – about the work they make. 

The Great Discontent

The Great Discontent magazine

TGD specialises in longform, in-depth interviews

The Great Discontent started out online but it's definitely even better in print. The title specialises in big, proper, longform interviews – in the tradition of literary magazine the Paris Review – with artists, writers, graphic designers, photographers… people from all corners of the arts. You even get the odd musician. It attracts big names like Michael Bierut and Stefan Sagmeister, but the detailed mix of biography and practical advice makes every interview worth your time. The magazine itself is quality, too – and is available in hardcover, as a magazine, or as a travel-sized version.

B magazine 

B magazine

Each issue of B focuses entirely on one specific company

Strictly speaking, B isn't a design magazine. Instead, each bimonthly issue focuses on one specific company, and the 'untold stories behind a brand … its sentiment and culture.' It's a good mix too: there are companies like Netflix, Airbnb and Google, alongside notebook-maker Moleskine, footwear specialist Danner, and outdoor clothing brand Patagonia. 

Patagonia, for example, based in California, lets its people to go surfing when the waves are up, and make up the time later. The system apparently increases productivity. It's this level of detail that makes the magazine a good read for studio bosses or anyone interested in brand marketing and management. 

FORM

form magazine

Each biannual issue of FORM has a particular theme 

Leading design writer Steven Heller called FORM the best design magazine in the world, 'for its holistic coverage of industrial, product, graphic, and hybrid designs.' The magazine prides itself on being a print title first and foremost, so it does all the things that print titles do best: in-depth, long-form articles alongside quality photographs and illustrations. The covers are always exceptional, and it’s bilingual too: German and English. Each biannual issue has a theme. It could be a country (Mexico, South Korea), a topic (sport, designing protest), or something more abstract (danger, failure). 

Printed Pages

Printed Pages magazine

Printed Pages is exceptionally well put-together

Printed Pages is a biannual magazine that covers all areas of art and design, and presents a 'curated view of the best creative work we’ve seen in the past six months’ as well as ‘a host of feature interviews with a list of names who are currently making their mark on the creative world’.  

The current issue's recurring theme is activism and using creativity as a voice for positive change. It includes interviews with designers Sagmeister & Walsh, artists Gilbert and George, and street photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Exceptionally put-together, this one also passes the coffee table test with flying colours.

Read more:

10 ways to make your magazine cover stand out66 brilliant print advertsCreate special print finishes in InDesign

The Ten Best Examples of Minimalist Business Cards to Make a Lasting Impression

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/faRTiMgMWRg/minimalist-business-cards

How you present yourself to the world has always been important. You learned this at an early age from your parents, your family, and the kids on the school bus. They all made it very apparent that life is about appearances and presentation. Throughout school, the right impression could win you popularity, friends, and a […]

The post The Ten Best Examples of Minimalist Business Cards to Make a Lasting Impression appeared first on designrfix.com.

Popular Design News of the Week: July 16, 2018 – July 22, 2018

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/07/popular-design-news-of-the-week-july-16-2018-july-22-2018/

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Google Material Design: Updates, Improvements, and New Tools

 

CSS: A New Kind of JavaScript

 

The Importance of Brand Consistency

 

A Look at Chrome’s New Tab Design

 

Wheel

 

Dark UX Patterns In Advertising

 

Peoplzz – A Collaborative Hub for Company Culture Builders

 

New Netflix TV Interface

 

Listify – A Minimal Space for your To-dos, Tasks & Reminders

 

Handlescout – Get Notified When a Twitter Username Becomes Available

 

Tungsten: A Modern, Industrious Font

 

Cinematography in User Experience Design

 

12 Reasons Why You Need a Design Mentor

 

BuzzFeed Unveils a Sophisticated New Look

 

My UX Resource List

 

Twitter’s Bottom Navigation Bar is Official, Rolling Out to Everyone

 

Is Coding Becoming Obsolete?

 

ColorSpark for Sketch – Discover Unique Colors and Gradients Directly in Sketch

 

Teutonic CSS — a Modern CSS Framework with Style

 

SlickMap CSS: A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers

 

Font Playground

 

How One Typeface Took Over Movie Posters



 

Building the Google Photos Web UI

 

10 Do’s and Dont’s to Get the Most Out of your UX Design Portfolio

 

Why Bad Technology Dominates Our Lives, According to Don Norman

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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20 Freshest Web Designs, July 2018

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/07/20-freshest-web-designs-july-2018/

Welcome to our roundup of the best websites launched (or significantly updated) this month. July is a strange time to launch a site with the Summer slowdown in full effect, but these intrepid entrepreneurs have done so. We’ve got examples of great ecommerce, a couple of agency sites that we couldn’t resist, and lots of incredible art direction.

This month sees a big trend in compass navigation (a link in every corner of the page), and parallax is definitely still a big deal. Whether it’s inspired by the World Cup, or Le Tour, there’s a subtle gallic feel to a lot of sites this month…savourer!

Drift

Drift is a creative agency with some chops. Rejecting the minimalism that seemingly every other agency opts for, they’ve put together a charmingly animated, hand-made site. Not too functional, unless your aim is to communicate creative courage—they stand out.

Unspoken Agreement

Unspoken Agreement is a creative agency that believes in beauty. Its landing page is a schooling in art direction, and the simple bold copy is persuasive. I’m not sold on the compass navigation, but you can’t have everything.

2018 Foosball World Cup

As the final whistle is blown on the Fifa World Cup 2018, this awesome site gives you the chance to relive this Summer’s big sporting event from the comfort of your desktop. Pick a team, and click and scroll your way to victory. No spinning those bars!

Pittori di Cinema

The site designed to promote a book about film artists, Pittori di Cinema, is a suitably bold site with masses of color and strong lettering. Simple to use, it features that compass navigation again. But the graphics are something to behold.

Blackbird

Blackbird is an beautifully minimal Shopify site selling perfume. The site is a great example of how effective parallax can still be, if used effectively. I have no idea what that weird frog video is for, but it’s intriguing nonetheless.

Copenhagen Bike Company

If Le Tour is making you feel like cycling, but you don’t quite have the energy to make it up the Pyrenees, wander north to discover a cooler, more laid back approach to cycling. The site for the Copenhagen Bike Company features on-brand art direction, smooth UI details, and high-end minimalism.

Care Cards

We all get a little stressed from time to time, it’s OK to admit it. Care Cards is a progressive web app with over 80 kind tips to help you cope with the rigors of modern life. Just open it up on your phone (or notebook) and swipe through the gems of wisdom. I love this site.

CHU Sainte-Justine Foundation

Promoting fundraising for Canada’s premier hospital for the pre- and post-natal care of mothers and children. The strong grid layout, coupled with smart brand choices and subtle animation is a winning combination for this important cause.

Apostrophe

It’s always hard to design a site for copywriters, but this site does so beautifully. Hooking up the leading animation to the scroll of the page is an excellent device for driving home exactly what this minimal site is promoting.

Contemple

Another design agency showing us something special, this time it’s an amazing ripple effect on their slideshow as you scroll through the featured projects on their landing page. Click through to the case studies and there’s some awesome work on display.

License IV Wine

This simple one-page site sells a wine brand perfectly, by capturing the spirit of community around a good bottle of French wine. The License IV wine label is bringing French savoir faire to wine drinkers in the USA with this charming site.

In Caso di Mag: Kitzbühel

Kitzbühel is the latest in an ongoing series of craftily designed travelogues around the world’s best ski resorts. Each location gets its own page, with custom art direction capturing the spirit of each place. I love the attention to detail.

Carpe Diem Santorini

If there’s one place I’d love to spend some time, it’s among the cycladic minimalism of Santorini. The tiny Greek island is world famous for the beauty of its sunsets, and this enchanting site sells the romance of the destination perfectly.

La Gent

Who doesn’t love quality, independent brands that put timelessness ahead of fashion. La Gent’s site is designed for browsing. I love the fact that their slider has just two items, enough for variety but not so much that you get lost.

Fortnum&Fox

Another design agency with a flair for art direction, the site for Fortnum&Fox features an exceptional split screen design showing off an impressive back-catalogue of work. I particularly like how cohesive and simple the whole experience feels.

Maman Corp

Maman Corp is a construction company and their site reflects this with a grid-based layout and animation that feels like the site is being constructed before your eyes. I love the full-screen video and beautiful typography.

Twill

Twill is an open-source CMS kit for Laravel, offering increased productivity and more control. It’s promoting itself to developers, and that’s never an easy task, but breaking down the benefits in this one-page site it’s clearly worth checking out.

Knight Associates

You don’t get more minimal than this site for a New Zealand-based interior design firm. A simple list of projects click through to case studies. It’s a exercise in restraint from the design team than fans of simplicity will love.

Bang & Olufsen SS18

Bang & Olufsen’s spring and summer collection features aloe, teal, and steel blue hues inspired by the ocean. The whole microsite feels like its floating in water, and there’s a great liquid hover effect on the images.

Harris Farm

If you’ve had your fill of minimalism for this month, then browse over to Harris Farm. The positive feeling site is packed with illustrations and lettering that capture the spirit of this healthy, food-loving Australian company.

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What It Takes to Be a Graphic Designer in 2018

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/vU0-fKAWLaw/what-it-takes-to-be-a-graphic-designer-in-2018

Dubai gives unmatched opportunities to entrepreneurs who want to make their career in graphic designing. In the competitive industry of graphic designing, it is difficult to make a brand name. However, if one is creative and can come up with fantastic ideas for graphic designing, then Dubai would be a paradise for them. Graphic designers […]

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How To Drive More Quality Traffic To Your Website

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/LvFJvIKYfyQ/drive-more-quality-traffic

Driving more potential customers to your website can have a major impact on your bottom line. Netting more traffic takes a combination of web design, user experience, marketing, and outreach. In fact, the top five traffic driving assets include email marketing, landing pages, content marketing, search optimization, and social media.   More quality traffic, the […]

The post How To Drive More Quality Traffic To Your Website appeared first on designrfix.com.

Fresh Resource for Web Developers (July 2018)

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/designers-developers-monthly-07-2018/

An interesting mix of tools including Sketch library by WordPress, React.js and Vue.js tools and resources to learn development skills.

The post Fresh Resource for Web Developers (July 2018)…

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

Breathing New Life into an Old Website

Original Source: https://inspiredm.com/breathing-new-life-into-an-old-website/

Everyone working in development is bound at some time to discover they’ve been shelling out good money for hosting an old website that has been forgotten about.

Rather than letting this investment go to waste, you could actually revive the old site by updating it. What you do with it after that is entirely up to you. You could sell it on to a new owner, monetize the content with advertising, use the site to promote a new product or service, or simply keep it as a portfolio example of your work.

The longer the site has been sitting around, the more work you will need to do to getting working well. What follows are the basic things you’ll need to check and basic steps you can take to correct any problems you encounter.

1. Make sure you actually own the rights to the site

This is not always as simple as it seems. Sometimes you may have developed the site on behalf of somebody else, in which case they may be the legal owner of the site under most circumstances.

It gets complicated if:

the business that contracted the original site ceases to exist
the client never pays for the work
the site was developed in partnership, and the other partner withdrew from the partnership

If the site was one you developed entirely on your own and entirely for yourself, you can do as you please. In all other cases, you should check your ownership.

2. Scan for any trademarked or copyrighted content

This is similar to the above. You don’t want to have a problem from somebody else claiming you have infringed their copyright or trademark. Also you’ll want to know if somebody else has stolen your content and is using it on another site.

illustration by Kyle Anthony Miller

3. Check for broken or outdated links

The web is a dynamic place and sites come and go all the time, and site owners sometimes move content around without redirecting properly. Broken links can be frustrating and detract for the user experience, so we should always attempt to fix broken links when we find them on our sites.

These are the steps to take when you discover a broken link:

Try to discover the new home of the content the link was supposed to point to
Try to find an alternative content source that would be sufficient
Search the Wayback Machine to discover if there is an archived version of the content you can link to.
If all else fails, remove the link.

Obviously also you should make sure the link is still relevant to whatever purpose you originally included it for, which brings us neatly to our next tip.

4. Make sure content and links are contemporary

If your original content was all about getting ready for the 2014 Singapore Film Festival or an article extolling the virtues of XHTML as the perfect development language, or recommending Flash as the perfect online animation tool, you’ll want to update that content and the links that go with it.

The site for the 2014 Singapore Film Festival may still be online, so the link might not be broken, but it would normally be of more value to include a link to the upcoming or most recently completed Singapore Film Festival.

Likewise there may still be a few dinosaurs making sites in XHTML instead of HTML 5, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you are extolling the virtues of technologies that most coders consider to be virtually obsolete, it runs the risk of you appearing to be obsolete.

Keeping your content contemporary and fresh is important, and an often overlooked requirement. It’s most noticeable if you’re talking about technologies, scientific theories, health issues, and so on.  New discoveries can make your site content stop being factual, and as a publisher you have a responsibility to not present wrong information.

5. Don’t forget about social media

There are two ways you can have problems about social media in relation to your websites. The first, and most common, is that your site doesn’t link to your social media (and your social media doesn’t link to your site). This is simple enough to correct.

The second problem you could face is that your site might point to the wrong social media. For example, you may have had a Facebook page back in 2012 and your site pointed to that, but since then you no longer have control of that Facebook page even though it still exists.

illustration by Csaba Gyulai

That’s a problem because the traffic flow isn’t working for you, it’s working for someone else or it’s working for Facebook. You should fix these kinds of problems.

You should also consider creating a new social media presence specifically for this site, as that can give you the most value from traffic flow.

6. Fix security and privacy flaws

There are things we used to do, like putting our plain-text email address on a page, that we really shouldn’t be doing now. You may also have published content in a more innocent age that today would be considered a serious privacy risk to yourself.

You should check for this kind of stuff and remove or censor it. There are definitely better ways of allowing users to contact you than publishing your email address in plain text, and that image of your car showing the license plate number really should be doctored to obscure the number and any other features in the image that might put you at risk.

There’s no need to be paranoid, but sensible precautions certainly won’t do any harm. Failing to take precautions, on the other hand, has been known to create problems for some people.

illustration by Hurca

Giving your old site a new lease of life can be a good thing

The decision about whether to delete a site or revive it depends on a lot of factors, and it’s not always best to keep that old site up and running.

On the other hand, if you’ve been paying to host it, it has some half way decent rank on Google, and gets a reasonable amount of incoming traffic, it would feel wasteful to squander the opportunity reviving that old website represents.

You can benefit from that positive traffic and relatively good Google rank, and possibly your old site can bring new traffic to other sites you want to generate interest in. It may be prudent to hesitate before hitting the delete button, and think about the potential value your old site still holds.

header image courtesy of Mansoor

The post Breathing New Life into an Old Website appeared first on Inspired Magazine.

Introducing “The WebP Manual”

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/07/webp-manual/

Introducing “The WebP Manual”

Introducing “The WebP Manual”

Markus Seyfferth

2018-07-24T12:00:00+02:00
2018-07-24T10:53:31+00:00

What’s WebP in the first place? Can we actually use it today? And if yes, how exactly? The role of media in performance, specifically images, is of huge concern. Images are powerful. Engaging visuals evoke visceral feelings. They can provide key information and context to articles, or merely add humorous asides. They do anything for us that plain text just can’t by itself.

But when there’s too much imagery, it can be frustrating for users on slow connections, or run afoul of data plan allowances. In the latter scenario, that can cost users real money. This sort of inadvertent trespass can carry real consequences.

In this eBook, you’ll learn all about WebP: what it’s capable of, how it performs, how to convert images to the format in a variety of ways, and most importantly, how to use it. Of course — the eBook is — and always will be, free for all Smashing Members.

Looking for a sneak peek? Read an excerpt.

84 pages. Written by Jeremy Wagner. Cover Design by Ricardo Gimenes. Available in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats.

Smashing Book 6

eBook

Free for Members

$14.90Get the eBook

PDF, ePUB, Kindle.

$0.00 $14.90 Free for Members →

…along with 12 webinars and 56 other eBooks.

What’s In The eBook

This guide will encourage you to experiment and see what’s possible with WebP:

WebP Basics
WebP images usually use less disk space when compared to other formats at reasonably comparable visual similarity. Depending on your site’s audience and the browsers they use, this is an opportunity to deliver less data-intensive user experiences for a significant segment of your audience.

Performance
We’ll cover how both lossy and lossless WebP compare to JPEGs and PNGs exported by a number of image encoders.

Converting Images To WebP (Excerpt)
This can be done in a myriad of ways, from something as simple as exporting from your preferred design program, by using Cloudinary and similar services, and even in Node.js-based build systems. Here, we’ll cover all avenues.

Using WebP Images
Because WebP isn’t supported in all browsers just yet, you’ll need to learn how to use it that sites and applications gracefully fall back to established formats when WebP support is lacking. Here, we’ll discuss the many ways you can use WebP responsibly, starting by detecting browser support in the Accept request header.

About The Author

Dan Mall
Jeremy Wagner is a performance-obsessed front-end developer, author and speaker living and working in the frozen wastes of Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also the author of Web Performance in Action, a web developer’s companion guide for creating fast websites. You can find him on Twitter @malchata, or read his blog of ramblings.

Here’s Why This eBook Is For You

The WebP Manual will get you ready for the new image format that is capable to significantly less data-intensive user experiences for a majority of your audience:

Learn how lossy and lossless WebP compare to JPEGs and PNGs exported by a number of image encoders.
Learn which services and plugins you can use to export or convert images to WebP with your preferred design tool or command line tool.
Learn how to can use WebP in production, and how to implement proper fallbacks for browsers that don’t support WebP just yet.
Learn how to use the full potential of the WebP format. It will substantially improve loading performance for many of your users, customers, and clients, and it will become one of your favorite tools for making websites as lean as possible.

The eBook is free for Smashing Members (you can cancel anytime, of course).

Smashing Book 6

eBook

Free for Members

$14.90Get the eBook

PDF, ePUB, Kindle.

$0.00 $14.90 Free for Members →

…along with 12 webinars and 56 other eBooks.

8 Secrets of the Perfect Link

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/07/8-secrets-of-the-perfect-link/

A few weeks ago a frustrated face appeared around the corner of my desk. “Sorry mate, you don’t do any printing do you?”

“Well yeah, sometimes,” I said.

I have a dedicated desk in a co-working space, we share a printer, and it was this shared printer that was frustrating the face in question: “I’ve been trying for hours to get this bloody thing printed, I’m absolutely desperate, I can’t find the right driver anywhere…”

“I think you just log into the dashboard and download it,” I said. “I think that’s what I did, hold on let me try,” I said, firing up the office dashboard. “You go to printer instructions…”

“Yep, I did that.”

“…and then you click…”

“Oh God!” he wailed. “It’s a link isn’t it.”

Here are the instructions that he’d been struggling with:

An intelligent, professional person, had spent two hours searching for the right driver for a Canon printer, never realizing that the “Download Driver” instruction was a link.

As he slunk back to his workspace, it seemed impolite to enquire as to whether or not he’s color blind, but I’d put good money on it; if he is, that link probably appears mid-grey, blending in with the rest of the text.

Links are arguably the most important element in any document. Without them, the web is just a collection of files stored on the Internet. The perfect link is simple, honest, and usable. Here’s how to design it.

1. A Good Link is Not a Button

…and a good button is not a link.

We frequently misunderstand the role of links on the web. A link describes the relationship between two pieces of data, providing context, and often providing meaning.

Buttons perform actions, links form contextual relationships

A link does not perform an action. The printer driver link above should not be a link, it should be a button; buttons don’t link data, they perform an action.

It’s entirely true that the vast majority of GUIs allow you to tap or click a link in order to access the linked data, but that is simply a shortcut. The primary role of the link is to establish a connection between pieces of data.

Buttons perform actions, links form contextual relationships.

2. A Good Link Clarifies its Purpose

Central to the problem of how a link should be used, is the fact that the anchor element is flexible enough to be used in a number of ways without breaking. A mailto: link for example should not be a link (it’s an action, not a connection between pieces of data) that has escaped deprecation by being really very useful.

We have a whole hierarchy of headings—including the relatively useless <h5></h5> and <h6></h6>—but we have a single anchor element. In an ideal world we’d have multiple anchor elements to give semantic meaning to links, perhaps a <ae></ae> element for external links (data on a different domain) and a <ai></ai> for internal links (data on the same domain). At present the nearest we can get to giving links semantic meaning is using absolute paths for external links and relative paths for internal links.

We can of course apply different styles to different classes of anchor using CSS. It makes sense that to clarify purpose, internal links should be styled in-keeping with the site’s brand, but that external links should be distinct in some way.

In Tim Berners-Lee’s 1997 thoughts on the nature of UI, he states that:

the interface to a universal space should have a certain universal consistency

Certainly users’ understanding of how to use the web has developed since those words were written, but the essential point holds true; users prefer a UI that reflects their wider experience. While there is an argument to say that internal links should be in-keeping with a site’s brand to clarify what they link to, there is an equally valid argument that adhering to the default styles—blue, underlined, system fonts—for external links, not only simplifies an interface, but clarifies that the data being linked to is outwith the current site’s domain.

Whether inconsistency of links causes more confusion than it relieves should be addressed on a case-by-case basis. But in cases where internal links and external links are styled the same, in the interests of usability, it’s the familiar blue, underlined, system font approach that best serves the user.

3. A Good Link is Visited

Thanks to William Gibson-esque metaphors, we have a tendency to conceptualize surfing the web as traveling to different locations. Links are viewed as a gateway to somewhere else, when in fact they are a gateway to somewhen else. Take a look at your browser history. It’s not a map of locations, but a chronological record of events. Links are points in the timeline of our data consumption.

visited links are the low-hanging fruit of UI design

As important as links to future data, are links to past data: visited links. Visited links are important because it is visited links that contextualize our data consumption and highlight (by their elimination) that data that we have yet to consume.

Visited links can be a little crude—ideally a link would be compared against a user’s browser history to determine not just if the document had been visited, but if the document had been updated since the user’s last visit. Despite this, visited links are the low-hanging fruit of UI design—easily styled as a slightly desaturated, less urgent version of an active link—and provide invaluable information to the user about their experience.

4a. A Good Link is Always Blue

The principle formalized by psychology as the Mere Exposure Effect teaches us that the more familiar something is, the more appealing it is.

The default color of a hyperlink in a browser, is blue. Hyperlinks appear to have been established as blue by sheer chance (presumably someone somewhere’s personal preference). The fortuitous decision benefits usability because almost no one has a blue sight deficiency; unlike red and green, we can nearly all see blue.

Whether a learned behavior, or an inherently more usable color, blue links are clicked more.

(Because of this deep association, no text should ever be blue unless it’s a link.)

4b. A Good Link is Rarely Blue

Blue is the most popular color across the board. Blue is also the most common color in UI design, especially among technology and news sites.

The omnipresence of blue raises a challenge for designers: if the primary brand color is blue, should the links in the document also be blue, or does the use of blue in the general design obfuscate the location of links?

Whenever designing with a lot of blue, I’ve found users prefer complementary colors for links; orange, or green for example. However, with the proven effectiveness of blue links, it’s worth edging towards the blue end of the spectrum: reds should edge towards purple, greens towards turquoise.

5. A Good Link is Underlined

The argument for underlining is that, as with the printer driver example, underlining reinforces the color indicator; if a person is color blind, they can still see the underline.

The argument against underlining is that it interrupts the flow of text. Google removed underlined links years ago with no apparent downside—at least not enough of a downside to cause them to reverse the decision. But then Google’s links are blue, the linkiest of all link colors, and less of a problem for the color blind.

If underlining text is genuinely too disruptive, there are two simple alternatives: you can either style a pseudo-underline by applying a dashed or dotted bottom-border to the link which will be visually less impactful, or you can highlight in a different way, such as applying a background color to the link.

(As with the avoidance of blue text, never underline text that isn’t a link; users will conclude that your link is broken long before they realize you made a poor design decision.)

6. A Good Link Stands Out

Links should be identifiable at a glance. Interaction is inconsistent across devices, and relying on scrubbing the page to uncover links is a recipe for user frustration.

Links should be identifiable at a glance

Eye-tracking research suggests that users scan through links, just after titles, to identify the parts of the page most interesting to them. This ability is even more important for screen reader users, who can’t visually scan a page for relevant content, but can (and do) scan through links to identify interesting content.

When treated as bullet points, links describe not only the data that they link to, but the content in which they sit. You wouldn’t link to information on perfume from a paragraph on mountain bikes, so it’s common sense that if there’s a link to mountain bikes, then the paragraph in which it resides will also be about mountain bikes.

7. A Good Link Uses Good Microcopy

If possible, keep links at the end of sentences, or the end of blocks of text; this limits the interruption to the thought process, and creates a less disjointed experience. However, never employ the “more information…” approach.

Running a search on Google for “click here” returns 5,090,000,000 results. A similar search for “read more” returns 17,090,000,000 results. What a waste.

Beyond the evident SEO failures of “read more”, “find out more”, “click here” etc. poorly written links give the impression that the current content is abdicating its authority. You are in effect saying, “this information is shallow, there’s better information elsewhere.”

If a link is designed well enough, it is clear at a glance that it’s a link, and “click here” style instructions are superfluous.

8. A Good Link Facilitates Good UX

It’s essential that links can be easily triggered, regardless of the delivery device; mobile sites need large enough hit areas, speech readers need distinct microcopy.

A link must always keep its promise

Links should follow the reasoned approach of the majority of use-cases. That means that internal links open in the same window, and external links open in a new tab. There are exceptions, a link to a privacy policy for example is an internal link but should be opened in a new tab. Whenever making this choice, ask yourself if the user is likely to need the back button. If so, use a new tab so it can be easily closed returning the user to the previous information.

No link should ever surprise a user, and that includes the type of content you’re linking to. If you’re linking to content that is NSFW, or behind a firewall, consider using the :before or :after pseudo elements to insert an icon next to the link, warning the user of what’s coming.

A link must always keep its promise. That means that when a user clicks, taps, selects, or otherwise triggers a link, they get exactly what they were expecting. And that includes ensuring that links are never, ever broken.

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