Light effects have been spicing up graphic designs for years. It’s a great way to add interest, realism, abstractionism, or even energy to a bland experience. Some designers consider light effects to be just simply decorations or even a cheap fix to a bad design. However, used properly light effects can really make an impact on the overall design and experience, including your mobile web site.
Contracts are a source of anxiety and dismay in creative work, but they exist for a good reason. A good contract ensures that you and your client have the same expectations, and protects you in case things go south. Ideally, your contract should be a combination of industry standards, legal protection and personal preferences. To help you get started, here’s a set of 10 basic agreements for a variety of common business situations that creative professionals face.
Many of the emerging techniques in CSS3 are particularly well suited to interactive Web page elements such as buttons. In this tutorial Sue Smith will explore using CSS3 properties including transforms, transitions, box shadows, backgrounds and rounded corners. She will be working with an anchor element, animating the button when it is in hover state. Most modern browsers support the bulk of the properties she will be using, but users with non-supporting browsers will still be able to see and interact with the button.
Carolyn Knight and Jessica Glaser can agree that the work they do should inform, should be appropriate to the client and their audience and should, of course, look good. But there’s a fourth attribute worth aiming for: creating a lasting impression. Visual memory is fascinating — they often use it without realizing. If, for example, you ask someone how many rooms they have in their home, before answering, most will walk through each room in their mind’s eye (possibly even with their eyes closed to aid concentration), adding up as they go. If graphic designers can tap into the benefits of this phenomenon, providing visual triggers to keep the subject matter of their work fresh in the audience’s memories, they will surely enjoy advantages.
Read MoreIn this tutorial you will learn how to create a gold trophy cup icon using two stages of design: 3-D modeling, creating of elements of the icons and coloring with creating glare and shadows on the surface. Let’s get started!
The accelerometer embedded in your smart devices is typically used to align the screen depending on the orientation of the device, i.e. when switching between portrait and landscape modes. This capability provides great opportunities to create better user experiences because it offers an additional layout with a simple turn of a device, and without pressing any buttons. However, designing for device orientation brings various challenges and requires careful thinking. The experience must be as unobtrusive and transparent as possible, and you must understand the context of use for this functionality.
Alex Ball is getting to the end of his Learning LESS series, and this is one of the posts he is most excited about. One of the best features of LESS is how modular and organized your code can be, and how it doesn’t add much weight or calls to your live sites (if you compile locally with LESS.app, CodeKit or some other compiler). If you haven’t read the first four posts on the topic, check out the variables, mixins, nested rules and using Functions posts.
In this tutorial Mary Lou will experiment with hover effects on circles. Since she have the border radius property, she can create circular shapes and they have been appearing more often as design elements in websites. One use that she especially enjoy seeing is the circular thumbnail which just looks so much more interesting than the usual rectangular. And because the circle is such a special shape, she is going to create some special hover effects for it!
Just when you think you’ve made something foolproof, God makes a better brand of fool. This maxim of manufacturing also applies to software development, especially on a highly accessible technology like web applications. As much as programmers attempt to anticipate every possible action or combination of actions that a user can take when encountering a web application, no one can foresee them all. When the user takes an unanticipated course of action and breaks the application, the software needs to catch them before they fall.
What would happen if all of the hard work you put into your website was all wiped away by a hacker or malicious virus of some kind? It would be difficult to find the motivation to start all over unless you have a backup of some kind. Using your already established Dropbox account, several options are available to Backup WordPress Sites to Dropbox. To take out some of the work out of backing up your site, below we will show some ways to automate the process and save the backup to Dropbox.