Don’t say I didn’t ever give you anything. <grin>
Compliments of WebDesignerDepot
Category: design
Bulletproof Email: HTML5 and CSS3
“You can’t use HTML5 or CSS3 in email.”
Due to their “limited” support, this is a commonly-held notion throughout the email design industry. However, we’re calling it a complete myth.
While support certainly isn’t universal, many of the leading email clients support HTML5 and CSS3. In fact, about 50% of the total market and 3 out of the top 5 email clients support them. Support may be even bigger for your particular audience.
Design Tools at Instagram
Let’s face it, as designers, we waste a LOT of time on menial tasks. For us at Instagram, filling out a PSD or Sketch file requires a lot of manual labor. You know the process: make a rectangle in Photoshop, go to the web (in our case, instagram.com), find an image you want to use, drag it into Photoshop, resize and move it into place. Making a grid? Repeat that 15 times and try not to cry.
Everybody scrolls: Article from HUGE
Evolve your design too quickly and you’ll leave your users behind. Design too slowly and your users will do the same to you. It’s crucial to keep design practices aligned with the way users really interact with digital products and interfaces. To help, Huge’s UX and research teams are collaborating to test conventional and emerging design and usability standards.
Google’s Material Design Language
It’s called Material and it’s a visual language for designers, developers and users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. All design work for this was done by the amazingly talented agency, Huge.
Sheer brilliance! Continue reading “Google’s Material Design Language”
Latest Spec Project: Recoup
This is the result of a rainy Saturday afternoon. I wanted to do a packaging project and this popped into my head as I was just returning from the store picking up some lunch fixings. Once I got to the point where I was somewhat happy with the type and form for the packaging, I thought I’d do a couple ads as well.




Typography in 10 minutes
This is a bold claim, but I stand behind it:
If you learn and follow these five typography rules, you will be a better typographer than 95% of professional writers and 70% of professional designers.
Ready? Go.
- The typographic quality of your document is determined largely by how the body text looks. Why? Because there’s more body text than anything else. So start every project by making the body text look good, then worry about the rest.In turn, the appearance of the body text is determined primarily by these four typographic choices:
- Point size is the size of the letters. In print, the most comfortable range for body text is 10–12 point. On the web, the range is 15–25 pixels. Not every font appears equally large at a given point size, so be prepared to adjust as necessary.
- Line spacing is the vertical distance between lines. It should be 120–145% of the point size. In word processors, use the “Exact” line-spacing option to achieve this. The default single-line option is too tight; the 1½-line option is too loose. In CSS, use
line-height
. - Line length is the horizontal width of the text block. Line length should be an average of 45–90 characters per line (use your word-count function) or 2–3 lowercase alphabets, like so:abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdIn a printed document, this usually means page margins larger than the traditional one inch. On a web page, it usually means not allowing the text to flow to the edges of the browserwindow.
- And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts that came free with your computer (known as system fonts) and buy a professional font (like my fonts equity and concourse, or others found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one.If that’s impossible, you can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose times new roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.That’s it. As you put these five rules to work, you’ll notice your documents starting to look more like professionally published material.
The Urban Dictionary of Design Slang
Joining the ranks of any profession is the same as committing yourself to learning an entirely new language, most of which is frankly gibberish. (TPS reports, anyone?) Design is no exception. So we asked some of our friends at design firms—including Pentagram, Ammunition, Huge, Ziba, Pensole, Google Ventures, Sagmeister & Walsh, and more—to define their favorite examples of design slang and jargon. The answers we received range from serious to tongue-in-cheek, but if you’ve ever been puzzled by a designer telling you he needed to “ideate a more approachable FTUX” or “add more value to that horsey megamenu,” this resource should help you translate. Continue reading “The Urban Dictionary of Design Slang”