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Robin Good: With the free Keynotopia Mockup Bundle, you can draft, edit and sketch highly-detailed elements of a user interface while using only Apple Keynote (but don't fret. There are libraries and themes also for PowerPoint and other presentation tools). The Keynotopia Mockup Bundle includes: "Keynotopia is the largest collection of user interface design templates that enable you to prototype and test your app ideas in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote, Microsoft PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Impress. The templates include thousands of wireframe and high fidelity vector UI components, meticulously designed from scratch in Keynote, Powerpoint and OpenOffice, and fully editable and customizable without needing additional design tools." The Keynote Mockup Templates Bundle is available in exchange for a simple tweet (normally they are $49). Find out more: http://keynotopia.com/keynote-mockups-templates/ Templates and Themese Gallery: http://keynotopia.com/themes/ 
Robin Good: If you are looking to understand how to create and manage those pop-up content windows that while dimming the stuff in the background, offer you an elegant peek at what you have clicked upon, this guide by Greg Bates will definitely provide you with all of the basic info you need. What are modal boxes? What's the difference between Modal and Modeless? How can they be used? Where can I find some sample scripts to start using and experimenting with them? Informative. Resourceful. 8/10
Robin Good: If you have not noticed yet, the next design trend is all about “undesign”. "Undesign, a minimalist, tablet-friendly approach to website design." It's not, like Dylan Tweney writes on Venturebeat, that design has become less important, but rather that it is receding in the background to leave space for direct access to content. "Instead of pages crowded with links, buttons, and display type of all different sizes, designers were simplifying their layouts. The smartest designers stripped away the nonessential elements of their designs, leaving clean pages that let the eye focus on whatever images or words had been put there by writers and editors. Why? Because if the designers didn’t simplify their web pages, readers were going to use utilities like Readability and Instapaper to do it for them." ... "One of the first apps to embrace this sort of rectangularity was Flipboard, which launched in mid-2010. It transformed the process of browsing RSS feeds into a magazine-like experience by putting stories into a boxy, more readable layout. Last year's big fashion trend was the color block, and this year's tech trend follows suit: It's the square. More precisely, it's the big, colorful rectangle filled with a solid color (like Windows 8) or a photograph (like Pinterest)." Right on the mark. 9/10 Full article: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/07/dylans-desk-design-goes-minimal-online-and-off/ 
Robin Good: Sonny M. Day at Tripwire Magazine has put together a very rich and potentially useful collection of User Interface Design tools that a web designer can use to evaluate, prototype, test, and realize his web design objectives. The collection contains tools and web services to create user interfaces, mockups and prototypes, to receive comments and feedbacks on new drafts, to code more rapidly with snippet libraries and frameworks but for each tool very little information is provided and the collection is not organized in any meaningful way. Rich collection. Badly organized and commented. 5/10 Full set: http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2012/03/user-interface-design-tools.html 
Robin Good: An elegant and innovative visual solution, that communicates effectively and with simplicity the new key emerging design factors to pay attention to:
Must watch. 9/10 
Robin Good: I think these are times in which we will see lots of changes in how content is published and displayed online. Delivery formats, website builders, templates and other tools to format and make your content accessible in a variety of ways will be soon appearing. In this light you may want to look at what are some of key emerging trends as well as some of the best designed and most popular WordPress themes from the last four years in this SmashingMagazine curated showcase. Full showcase: http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/08/wordpress-theme-design-and-development-trends-for-2012/ 
Robin Good: A great, valuable curated collection of one-page-only portfolio-websites illustrating with real-world examples how effective a site can be while keeping you always glued to the same page. Valuable. 8/10 Original collection: http://dzineblog.com/2011/09/42-awesome-single-page-portfolio-websites.html Two Australian designers, Tristan Cook and Thomas Nelson of Humans in Design have a video of their proposal: mortgage statements for the 21st century. There’s a lot of worthwhile stuff in it. Check out the accompanying blog post at http://humansindesign.tumblr.com/post/8490552292/my-mortgage-statement-was-rubbish-so-we-fixed-it . 
Robin Good: Glen Stansberry at Nettuts has curated a great collection of key UI design principles, from ten design masters, that is as good today as four years ago when it was first published. For each principle you get an original quote from the designer bout a key principle, and a few valuable links where that idea can be explored further. Here from the ten, the ones that I think we tend too overlook more often than not:
Highly recommended. 9/10 Full curated collection: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/10-principles-of-the-user-interface-masters/
Robin Good: If you are looking for good design inspiration as well as for specific references for UI development work, you will appreciate the curated collection of resources that Speckyboy has pulled together in this guide. From the best patterns collections to the top UI public design guides, this 25-item collection has indeed all of the best resources you can tap into for any type of web or GUI design related work. Recommended. 8/10 Full guide: http://speckyboy.com/2010/02/01/25-ui-inspiration-and-design-pattern-resources/ 
Here is a free and downloadable GUI components and icons library, which can be used for any web or mobile design project. It is free for every use, even for commercial projects, as long as you credit and link back to the source page. Key features: • A flexible GUI elements library for Illustrator and a pixel-precise icon collection created for interface designers and web designers.
You can easily resize, color or tweak their appearance. • They are based on a precise 16 pixels grid, which means that they stay clear and have crispy look even at small sizes. • 200 graphic styles for buttons, navigations menus or panels.
See a Preview of GUI minimal icons set http://www.webalys.com/images/gui-design/interface-design-icons-library.png See a Preview of common GUI elements http://www.webalys.com/images/gui-design/preview-gui-1.png
http://www.webalys.com/images/gui-design/preview-navigation.png See a Preview of Windows and Containers http://www.webalys.com/images/gui-design/preview-windows.png All files in Illustrator CS2 file format (If you want to use the icons without crediting the author, consider buying the Premium Icon Library for just $37. It's 3 times more vectors icons, with 750 icons .AI, .EPS & PNG icons.) Find out more: http://www.webalys.com/design-interface-application-framework.php (reviewed by Robin Good) 
From the article intro: "Successful design in publishing, advertising, web design, illustration and anything else that ties together elements depends on drawing in the reader and leading their eyes across the page. Some people think it’s not a big deal and that designing a page comes naturally because of cultural lessons we learn growing up and looking at design from childhood yet few, if any understand why it works the way it does." In reality things are not simple, natural or obvious, especially if, you are in the group of those who do not just want to follow the mainstream standards but who like to break out of conventions and innovate while bringing greater value. But how do you achieve that, unless you are already a great designer? What are the rules that can be broken? This good article by Speider Schneider provides some good basic advice, on what is needed to head properly in this direction. Full article: http://www.instantshift.com/2012/01/06/focal-points-in-design-layout/ (Reviewed by Robin Good) 
Robin Good: I have just run into this excellent curated collection of minimalist icon sets. It contains some very elegant and clean icon collections that can be used in many different applications. In total there are 16 free icon sets. Recommended. 8/10 Check them out here: http://creativerepository.com/2011/03/20/free-minimalist-icon-sets-for-web-and-mobile-user-interface-design/ |
From the official guide: "This document defines formatting and style rules for HTML and CSS. It aims at improving collaboration, code quality, and enabling supporting infrastructure. ...like other Google style guides, deals with a lot of formatting-related matters. It also hints at best practices so to encourage developers to go beyond indentation. Many style guide authors know the underlying motivation from the question whether to describe the code they write—or to prescribe what code they want to write. Not surprisingly then, in our HTML and CSS style guide you’ll find both (as much as you’ll still find a lot of different development styles in our not entirely small code base)." Full Guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/htmlcssguide.xml 
Robin Good: If you are looking for good advice, basic technical and design tips and a good bunch of nice examples of how you coud design your own newsletter, this is a good tutorial to check out. It includes good tips, advice on use of tables, CSS and images, as well as how to avoid ending up in the spam folder plus an extensive graphic newsletter showcase. Useful. 7/10 Full tutorial: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/design-perfect-newsletter/ 
Robin Good: Here is a valuable curated list of over 10 useful website resources dedicated to mobile UI design patterns. If you are looking for examples, models, patterns or just inspiration for the look and feel of your new mobile app, you may find what you are looking for in this good collection. Useful. 7/10. By Jacob Gube: http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/mobile-ui-design-patterns-inspiration/ 
Robin Good: As new iPhone and iPad screens are pushing the limits of screen resolution to millions of new users, web designers too will soon need to adjust their web site building strategies to take this major technical issue into consideration. Josha Johnson at Design Shack writes: "...Think about what that means. Apple has retina displays on the full iOS line: iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. This means that millions of people are browsing the web every day on high resolution screens that won’t properly display your images. Make no mistake, this trend will only get worse as other device manufacturers play catch up and Apple explores ways to bring more pixel density to the next obvious place: the laptop market. ...We’re witnessing the emergence of higher resolution screens, but our content is only optimized for the old screens. ...The good news is that we’ve been preparing for this in some ways for years and we didn’t even know it. The rise of CSS3 and HTML5 have really pushed forward the notion of cutting down on the number of images that we use in our markup. ...It doesn’t matter if you love Apple or absolutely hate everything they stand for, the reality is that if you’re a web designer, the rise of the retina display is going to kickstart a trend that will fundamentally change the way you build websites. At this point in time we have a few courses of action to explore: a) HTML5 canvas, b) JavaScript, c) CSS3, d) SVG, and e) media queries together comprise your arsenal of weapons with which to attack the problem of your content being viewed at upwards of 264ppi." Informative. 7/10 Read the full article here: http://designshack.net/articles/html/ready-or-not-here-comes-hd-web-design/ 
Robin Good: For web designers and web app developers. A great example of HTML5 design at work in this useful and information-rich "Field Guide to Web Applications" by Bert Appward. Direct link: http://www.html5rocks.com/webappfieldguide/toc/index/ 
Robin Good: A great showcase of one-page websites from which to draw inspiration. Full showcase: http://spyrestudios.com/35-new-and-fresh-single-page-websites/ 
Here is a well curated basic list of great resources for mobile design and user experience. Useful. 8/10 Curated collection: http://www.enavigo.com/ios-design-and-user-experience-resources/ 
Robin Good: Oli Gardner at unbounce.com has put together a really fantastic collection of great landing pages examples (all created with the Unbounce landing page creation service) that can provide not only great inspiration, but actual examples of the components and layout you need to use to make your pages look truly "professional". In this curated collection, you will not only find large-sized screenshots of the selected landing pages but also some very valuable comments about each sample, alongside a curated list of what are the key components on each of the landing pages that makes them work so well and key suggestions on how to further improve them. Very useful. 9/10 Full curated collection: http://unbounce.com/landing-page-examples/built-using-unbounce/landing-page-design-showcase/ 
Functional web typography is, of course, key to the usabilty of any website. But functional does not mean boring. Big, loud and attention grabbing typography does have the presence and magnificence to truly grab the attention of your visitors. Via Stefano Bossi 
If you are looking for a web design solution that sits in between amateurish self-made work and the professional high-price designer layout, you can give a look to 99designs.com which offers the opportunity to get your design need crowdsourced out to many interested designers. How it works: 1) You submit your "design brief" for a logo, business card or web site. 2) You decide how much you want to pay for it. 3) 99designs publishes your project as a call for participation. 4) From that moment on dozen of designers submit their work proposals to get your work. 5) You give feedback to improve the ones you like and you finally chose your preferred one. 6) If you are not satisfied with any of the proposals, you get your money back. See some examples: http://99designs.com/web-design http://99designs.com/custom-wordpress-themes http://99designs.com/logo-design Browse open projects: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests Find out more here: http://99designs.com/ (Reviewed by Robin Good) 
If you're wondering what tools other designers are using today, here is some visual data from a recent survey by Best Vendor that you may want to check out. http://t.co/Rnb9AfYw Via Michael Allenberg, Pedro Costa Neves 
Stephen Coles at Typographica.org writes: "Most fonts are licensed when needed, selected specifically for the job at hand. But when my (less font-addicted) friends are seeking versatile, workhorse typefaces for future use, I send them this list. These sites offer most of the best fonts available, and — crucially — present them well, too. The focus here is on downloadable desktop fonts for print use, but some of these shops offer webfont versions as well. For now, my webfont-specific shortlist is simply: Typekit, Webtype, Fontdeck." Check out this great curated list of Font Sources (12 foundries included): http://typographica.org/2011/on-typography/my-favorite-font-sources-a-shortlist-of-trusted-foundries-and-retailers/ |
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