You understand and have created an app that looks amazing. It has a cool story and the visual design is impressive.
The Best of Mobile Design Trends 2016
You understand and have created an app that looks amazing. It has a cool story and the visual design is impressive.
4 Web Design Trends For 2015 That Will Change Your Job Forever
Our day-to-day jobs are soon going to be very different, predicts Paul Boag.
But are we aware of the changes happening in our own sector? The web is now over 25 years old. Are we beginning to get set in our ways? Are we just as blind to changes as other industries?
I am aware I maybe sounding melodramatic and I don't mean to be. We are not about to see our roles disappear. We may not see many travel agents or encyclopaedia salesmen around these days because of digital. But that doesn't mean we are in immediate danger.
That said, there are certain trends that are worthy of our attention. These are trends that might not make us obsolete, but they will change what we do from day-to-day.
The four trends I'm talking about are:
- The move towards in-house teams
- The automation of code
- The rise of software as a service
- The decline of the website
01. The move towards in-house teams
The way businesses perceive the web has changed a lot in recent years. Once seen as another marketing channel, it is now perceived as business critical for a lot of organisations.Many companies have decided it is unwise to rely on an outside suppliers for business critical operations. Instead they are building internal teams to take on the role. This is strategically wise, but also provides significant cost savings over the longer term.
We are beginning to see this impact our sector as agencies compete for a shrinking number of opportunities at the top end of the market. Some agencies such as Adaptive Path and Mark Boulton Design have sold to their clients. Effectively they have become in-house teams. Others are being forced to downsize.
This means that those of us working in high-end agencies need to think about our long term position. The chances are we will see a growing number of agencies close their doors over the coming years. Those of us who work for those agencies may well find ourselves joining in-house teams. That or becoming much more specialised in our role.
But it is not just those working at the top end of the market who will experience change.
02. The rise of software as a service
The rise of software as a service is threatening the lower end of all kinds of sectors. For example, services like FreeAgent are replacing traditional book keepers. In fact SaaS is eroding traditional models in everything from recruitment to customer management.Unfortunately for some, web design is no exception. There was a time when self employed web designers could produce cheap websites from home and make a reasonable income. Today that is becoming hard with services like Squarespace allowing people to build their own website.
What this does is push those low end web designers up market at exactly the same time as the high end agencies are lowering their prices. This squeezes the middle.
Software as a service is commoditising much of what use to be bespoke work. But even bespoke design is becoming easier than ever before.
03. The automation of coding
There was a time when being able to code good quality HTML and CSS was enough. That is no longer the case. Not only is there a surplus of people able to do this, the need to code is waning.Tools like Macaw and Adobe Reflow are enabling designers to do much of the work of front-end coders. Now I know what you are thinking — these tools create terrible CSS. You are right, but they are a sign of things to come. Over time these tools will become more sophisticated. It wouldn't surprise me if eventually hand coding HTML and CSS becomes a skill few still need.
Although these tools will never produce code as good as a person, it will be good enough. In the end it will come down to return on investment. For many 'quick to market code' that is 'good enough' will be a better investment than hand-coded.
It's easy to dismiss the impact of these tools. They don't replace a good coder. But, I remember graphic designers saying the same thing about desktop publishing. DTP didn't replace the graphic designer but it did thin the herd.
If you are a designer, you might be feeling a little smug at this point. After all we will always need people to design websites no matter how we code our sites. But perhaps longer term even that will change.
04. The decline of the website
Have you noticed the gradual decline in the role of the website? Take for example going to see a movie. You know what you want to see, but you don’t know where it is showing.In the past you would have visited each movie theatre website one at a time to see if they were showing the film you wanted. Each website was different, crafted by a busy team of web designers.
My betting is that is not how you look up movies anymore. The chances are you have a single app on your mobile that aggregates movie listings from many sources. Perhaps you even ask Siri or just Google it.
I am sure it won't be long before you ask Siri and she tells you when and where your film is on. The whole thing done by voice command, no user interface at all.
Content is being set free from design. Instead we are sharing content via APIs between applications and sites. Sometimes business owners are choosing to put their content on Facebook, Yelp or Foursquare. They are abandoning the idea of having their own site. This is something that is particularly prevalent in China.
Don't panic!
This might leave you feeling despondent about your future prospects. It shouldn't. As somebody who has worked in the web over 20 years, I can tell you that as long as you are able to adapt then none of this will be an issue. Sure, your role will change but you won’t find yourself homeless.The danger is that the transition could prove painful if you are not aware that change is coming. Whether I am right in my predictions or not you can be sure of one thing — the web will continue to evolve. As Charles Darwin said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
Words: Paul Boag
Co-Founder of Headscape and host of the Boagworld Podcast, Paul Boag has spent more than 20 years of helping organisations manage digital change.
Source: CreativeBlog
What Is Responsive Web Design? How To Use It?
Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course.
Read More...
Typography Trends for 2014
Typography recently has been an important part in modern graphic design. A good typography with perfect combination of type selection, color, size, direction and proportion is always a wish of every designer in every design project. Following are some typography trends expected to dominate the design world in the New Year 2014:
Urge Text
Urge Text is a font family most known with its half – italics characteristic. It looks so gentle with standard italic form on top part of the letters and the more sturdy form in the lower part, which was inspired by the Roman style.
This font family is strongly recommended by experienced designers because of its versatility, with six weights, normal and condensed widths – each one has its own italic form. Therefore, if you want a multifunctional font that can be used in several typographical circumstances, please don’t miss Urge Text in your design tool.
Nocturno
This is an adorable font for stylist texts, especially in fashionable and elegant cases. In the view of many artists and designers, Nocturno is not only a text font, but also beautiful calligraphic. The beauty of Nocturno comes from its oblique axis, short ascenders and descenders, tall lowercase letterforms, and most significantly, its medium contrasts. Nocturno charmingly shows the contrast of its slopes, widths, shapes and weights, which make the text noticeable and highly legible.
Quadon
The German designer Rene Bieder created this font with the aim to link the two fonts: the serif fonts which belong to the past, and the new sans-serif fonts, which belongs to present. Quadon has received a lot of compliments from designers, such as to be an easy-to-read font; to be so customizable with nine different weights that can be used for various design aims, and to be quite modern, light and flexible.
Trend Hand Made
The next font family to be recommended in this list is Trend Hand Made. Designed as a result of long-term research global design trend, Trend Hand Made is expected to be able to capture the aesthetics of fashionable design. The lovely, colorful and childish design of this font allows us to use it without need to add anything external.
Voyage
Voyage is a font family that should be described as classy and decorous. This vintage font is constituted by two weights and ornament sets. Designers are able to create customized headlines thanks for its alternate characters and OpenType features. Voyage font family is a symbol of polite and elegant, and suitable for book covers, headlines, and even advertising.
The Best Bootstrap Design Tools
In this post, i have gathered the best bootstrap design tools for the 2014. Bootstrap is the most commonly used front end framework in 2013 and many of you must have played with it. Therefore, we thought to compile a list of some useful bootstrap design tools for you.
As a designer, it is always useful to look for some more design tools and options to make designing and developing tasks easier. Here, we are presenting 15 best bootstrap tools for 2014. We hope that you will like this collection. Also, let us know if you have more tools to recommend. Your comments are always more than welcome. Enjoy!
Bootstrap Designer is an online design tool, producing awesome HTML5 templates based on Bootstrap framework.
Kickstrap seamlessly combines Bootstrap with top-tier web technologies. It’s so advanced, it can run an authenticated, database-driven web app without a native backend.
Bootply is integrated with other popular Bootstrap plugins, micro-libraries and frameworks.
It’s easy. Really. Just enter the css class you want to assign to your new button style and play with the different button colors to update the live previews in the right. When you are ready, copy the code below and add it to your page below bootstrap.min.css to use the button.
Easel is an in-browser, high-fidelity web design tool aimed at designers and developers on small teams. Design with real web elements, even twitter bootstrap.
Create your front end code simple and quickly with Bootstrap using our Drag & Drop Interface Builder.
Create your front end code simple and quickly with Bootstrap using our Drag & Drop Interface Builder.
Online Web Designer and Theme Generator for Twitter Bootstrap. Design web app, Generate theme and Preview result instantly.
Generate custom icon web fonts from the comfort of the command line.
WordPress Twitter Bootstrap CSS lets you include the latest Twitter Bootstrap CSS and Javascript libraries in your WordPress site.
Simple and flexible web framework to create elegant and modern web applications with the same look & feel of Windows 8.
Flat UI Free is made on the basis of Twitter Bootstrap in a stunning flat-style, and the kit also includes a PSD version for designers.
Twitter Bootstrap Button Generator – the easiest way how to set up your buttons based on Twitter Bootstrap in a seconds.
A simple lightbox plugin based on the bootstrap modal plugin.
Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator to help you getting started with a new project based on HTML5 Boilerplate. It generates for you a clean customizable template with just what you need to start!
