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Is Your Design Minimal or Nonexistent?
Like any style, minimalism is loved by some and hated by others. And to the untrained eye there might not be a lot of difference between a webpage that is under-designed and a page that is simple and minimal, but the difference in the design execution is huge. In web design, minimalism means a lot more than sparse. Using the principles of minimal design to simplify your site can shorten load times, facilitate responsiveness, and help with usability.
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Collaboration Tips For Your Web Design Team
Over the past few years, we in the web and product design industry have benefited from improvements in cross-department collaboration between strategists, designers, and developers. This post will focus on how these collaboration techniques can be used to improve communication and efficiency within a single department: design.
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Freebie Friday: 4 Clean & Crisp City Actions
It's Friday, which means we're back with another one of our Freebie Fridays!This is our first set of PS actions released, and as such we wanted to explain it, as it's a bit different than our normal freebies. If you're not familiar with actions, it's a set of commands saved in sequence, so you can open any photo, hit "go" and the photo edits will occur. We've set all these up for non-destructive editing, which means all effects are in layers grouped above your original photo...
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Adding Delight to Usable Web Designs
Not too long ago, there was a debate over at UX Mastery over the following statement: We should design for usability, then add delight. One camp argued that, yes, good design is the result of a usability first approach, while the other side made cogent points like...
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Experience Design and Visual Design: What's the Difference
In web design, Visual design and Experience Design (or UX, abbreviated for User Experience) are two sides of a coin; there is a lot of crossover in the two disciplines, and in many small companies both positions may be filled by the same individual. But while they retain similar goals, the thought processes and deliverables are very different. To use a more familiar metaphor, you can think of the UX Designer as an Architect, and a Visual Designer as an Interior Designer.
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Best Free Web Tools for Designers & Developers - Fall 2013
We're back with more Monkee-Boy favorites to show you some of our new favorite free tools on the web for a more productive workflow! Some are old, some are new, but all 11 are guaranteed to make your life much easier. Enjoy! Want more? Check out our previous post on our favorite resources from January 2013. And now on to the good stuff!
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10 More Awesome Google WebFont Combinations to Try Today
We're back with more useful and fun Google WebFont combinations! Google WebFonts offers hundreds of great open source web-friendly fonts, but digging through them all can be a little overwhelming. That's why we've hand-picked a variety of combinations to help inspire you for your next web design project! Feel free to implement these in your work!
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How to Give Good Web Design Feedback
Design feedback shouldn't be a painful process. In fact, if it's a painful process, I'd say someone's not doing it right. The most successful projects are usually ones with a collaborative workflow between a well-balanced team of designers, developers, project management, and of course - clients!
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