This category features articles on general design principles, Web design, typography, user interface
design and related topics. It also presents design showcases and practical pieces on the business
side of design. Curated by Alma Hoffmann.
With the summer holidays coming up, I’d like to share a couple of inspirational illustrations and photos which I hope will help you daydream and relax. There's no doubt that there are a lot of great techniques out there — they just need to be discovered.
While going through this month's collection, you'll notice some pretty interesting and refreshing color combinations. I've made sure to... Read More
Creating an effective web design is like putting a puzzle together, with the various parts coming together to tame the chaos and form a whole, well-organized design. At the foundation of this organization are the gestalt grouping principles.
In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the principles of similarity and proximity to understand how elements can be organized by their... Read More
Icon and vector marketplaces like Iconfinder (where I work) are making well-designed vector icons an inexpensive and readily available resource for web and print designers. Thousands of high-quality premium icon sets and hundreds of great free sets are available.
Every icon set submitted to Iconfinder is reviewed and evaluated for potential appeal to our website users and for potential... Read More
Have you ever wondered how elements come together to create successful designs? It’s no accident that compelling design just seems to work. What most of these designs have in common is the use of gestalt grouping principles to organize information that helps us understand the relationships and differences between elements. As designers, we can use these principles to create our own engaging... Read More
Today we'll be looking at eye candy that will undoubtedly help you start the new week with your creativity freshly nurtured. Grab your cup of coffee or tea, and let these designs shine on you with their smart details, fantastic textures, and well-chosen color palettes.
I’ve sifted through the web to dig up little nuggets of inspiration to indulge in — just for you. This time I’ve... Read More
Vintage design is an endless source of inspiration. Seeing how fellow designers tackled their job decades ago, with a limited set of tools, and how timeless, even classic, some of the pieces are still today, is fascinating.
With this Quick Tip, we want to leave behind current trends and indulge in the aesthetic of past times. We’ll dive into wanderlust-awaking travel posters, design... Read More
The perceptual process enables us to perceive the world through our senses of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. In particular, our visual system processes vast amounts of information in its environment. Rather than perceiving elements separately, our brain organizes patterns, objects and shapes into whole forms that we can understand.
The gestalt grouping principles of visual... Read More
More and more of our experience online is personalized. Search engines, news outlets and social media sites have become quite smart at giving us what we want. Perhaps Ali, one of the hundreds of people I've interviewed about our emotional attachment to technology, put it best: "Netflix's recommendations have become so right for me that even though I know it's an algorithm, it feels like a... Read More
What would a page look like if it had no designer? This odd question occurred to me in the 1980s, while overseeing the transition from lead-based typesetting to phototypesetting of an Indian newspaper. The Patriot’s distinctive design seemed to emerge, not from a designer, but the tactile interaction between lead and the illiterate villager who assembled the pages.
This article examines... Read More
