October 2015 – DesArt Lab

How to Unlock your Creativity and Wake up from a Creative Slumber?

October 31, 2015 Creativity, Design 2

Every once in a while we all find ourselves falling into creative slumber. Nothing seems exiting enough and it feels like you have nothing else to offer to this world. This is exactly the time when you need to take a step back and think about your priorities and things that make your life happier. You can be positively creative only when you’re happy and to reach that level of joy and happiness you don’t need to dwell on the negative things that you cannot change, you have to live one day at a time, finding happiness in small things and dismissing the upsetting ones. Below we’ve collected over 20 ways to help you with unlocking your creativity and waking up from creative slumber.

Image Formats Mega Cheat Sheet

October 30, 2015 Cheat Sheets

It’s not a secret that visual content is highly important, especially in terms of marketing. People like bright and unusual images, be it the Hero themes or simply engaging and interesting photos. We all love eye-candies and they’re the main driving force of sales and conversion. Image can communicate something that a thousand word won’t be able to describe. Nevertheless, not all websites and browsers support all types of images. For example, IE6 doesn’t support PNG images. TIFF images are used mainly in printing of highly qualitative digital photography. Therefore, in order to create optimal content for your purposes you need to have a good understanding of all image formats. This Image Formats Mega Cheat Sheet will help you get a better grasp on how and where to use images, be it on your website or use them for any other purpose.

jQuery Mega Cheat Sheet

October 28, 2015 Cheat Sheets

At the moment, jQuery can be considered the most popular free cross-platform JavaScript library. It’s an open-source software, developed to facilitate client-side scripting. This library is a perfect software for creation of dynamic and fluid web apps and pages. It provides opportunities to develop plug-ins, create animations and widgets. One of the greatest advantages of jQuery is that it’s extensible, which means that it allows nearly unlimited opportunities for adding events, elements and methods. Another important advantage is the fact that this toolkit eliminates cross-browser inconsistencies, greatly facilitating the work of the UI across various browsers. Developers prefer to use jQuery because it allows full separation of JavaScript code and HTML markup. Debates on whether designers should or should not know the basics of programming are still on, meanwhile why don’t you do yourself a favor and learn the main principles of jQuery?! We promise that you won’t regret it! This jQuery Mega Cheat Sheet will definitely help you with that.

Process of Web Design Creation

October 24, 2015 Design, Graphic Website Design

Oftentimes people who are in need of professional web design have a very vague notion of what exactly the process of work on their website’s design encompasses. While some realize the extent of work and approximate time frame, others consider that it can be accomplished in a couple of days and shouldn’t cost much. However, everything depends on the type of design you need and on the professionalism and amount of people you intend to hire. Professional web design studio will charge more, but will provide clean cutting-edge design that will yield lots of new customers, while a simple and amateur work, made on a napkin, will not have the desired marketing effect. “A Web Site Designed” chart below will give you a definite and clear notion about the process of web design creation from the very start to finish. You’ll be able to find out about milestones, degree of your involvement into the process, timeline and the important aspects that need to be considered.

CSS3 Mega Cheat Sheet

October 22, 2015 Cheat Sheets, CSS3

CSS3 is a style sheet language and a magnificent tool, used for creating presentations of the documents, written in a markup language. If website design isn’t semantically accurate CSS3 helps to overcome this problem and get a good ranking. This language also helps designers to create pages, which are compatible with the majority of browsers, even with those you may deem obsolete. It also allows creating engaging elements in web design without additional efforts. For example, you can add text shadow to the page elements, using simple codes. Overall, it’s a multifunctional, yet very simple and comprehensive language. If you are a proactive designer you should definitely learn it and use in in your work, alongside with HTML5. Below you’ll find a cheat sheet with useful CSS3 features.

Graphic Design: Old School vs Modern

October 20, 2015 Graphic Website Design

Graphic design is an art and communication above everything else. Just like any art it’s multifaceted, which is why the approach of two graphic designers can be very different. While some people prefer old school way, others like to employ modern technologies. There is no way to determine which one is better than the other, nevertheless one can certainly compare the two approaches and figure out which one is better for him and his work. So, the question is are you an old school graphic designer or an innovative one?

HTML5 Mega Cheat Sheet

October 18, 2015 Cheat Sheets, HTML5 Design

HTML5 is a markup language, used for creation of web content with the help of the code. People, preferring proactive approach consider it the replacement of Adobe Flash. And it’s fair to say that the responsiveness, speed and scriptable rendering of 2D shapes make HTML5 a great instrument in the hand of the skillful designer. If you want to keep up with the times, you need to learn the basics of HTML5. This Mega Cheat Sheet will provide better insights in HTML5 coding and facilitate your work!

25 Ideas for Designing a Profitable E-Commerce Website

October 12, 2015 Design, E-commerce design

With the flow of time shopping became something that we like to do in the comfort of our home. Why wouldn’t we? E-Commerce websites offer multitude of useful options, such as comparing items, looking through the product’s descriptions and their preview, comparing prices and so on.

With the help of the well-designed e-commerce website you can find and order anything you need. However, despite their identical purpose some E-Commerce websites are popular and can boast of having terrific conversion rate, while others are lagging behind, barely making both ends meet. So what determines the success of the E-Commerce website? Pure luck or detailed research into the user experience and usability? Our bet is on the latter, which is why we’re offering 25 useful ideas on how to improve the structure, user experience and usability of your E-Commerce website and correspondingly boost your conversion rate.

Improving UX on a Budget

October 9, 2015 Design, UX/UI Design

User Experience is no longer a stylish trend, it’s a practice and a “must” for every website that hopes to attract a fair share of visitors. However, despite of what the majority of resources will try to convince you, you will actually be able to create qualitative UX even if you don’t have lots of funds. All you need is wits and ability to exploit the recourses that are at hand.

As a rule the process of UX improvement implies conducting tests and correspondingly paying the participants, purchasing the advanced UI design tools or even taking a usability test lab for a spin. However, in case you have no means for all that, what is your strategy? Is it productive to get upset and give up? Of course not! You need to pull yourself together, analyze resources that you have and make do. It’s not that hard, especially if you follow the tips below on creating affordable and qualitative UX.

Popular Web Design Trends for 2016

October 7, 2015 Design, Interactive Design, News 4

Responsive website design becomes increasingly popular, practically a must for companies that wish to extend their reach across numerous platforms and attract visitors with various devices. Knowing the new tendencies is extremely important for web designers and design studios in general. Nevertheless, it’s worth to read the research papers on the new trends to see if they actually pay off and work as they were intended to, attracting masses. Sometimes, people think that they want something, while actually they lose interest to this item/action very quickly. You need to design your website in a way that will appeal to customers and attract them whether they like it or not.

For example, people just love information, especially interesting one. We are all information junkies, it gives us some sort of rush, like tasty food or sex. However, we’re unable to process big volumes of information, despite our desire to have it. This is the reason why text on the websites is presented in short blocks with clear and large headlines. Thus, you will pay your full and undivided attention at least to one of the presented articles and won’t divert it to some eye-candy: shiny and engaging.

So, in order to be on top of your competition you need to know for sure what tendencies are and will be in next year. What innovations and web design trends are we to expect in 2016? Let’s take a look at the most popular ones.

Archive for October, 2015