Articles by Web Designer Depot from March 2013

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great ...

Its long been thought that Arial is to Helvetica what the ugly step sister is to Cinderella. Helvetica was designed in Germany in the 1950s to compete with Akzidenz Grotesk; Arial was designed in Amer...

In just a couple of years, Pinterest has established itself as the third largest social networking website, behind Facebook and Twitter (and ahead of the likes of Google+). For a website that is ...

Since the very earliest illuminated manuscripts, dating back to the 5th century AD, weve associated flora with enlarged type. Perhaps its something to do with the way plants repeat the same shapes, ec...

If you have a smartphone, a tablet or a regular computer, chances are you have used an app at some point. We can’t get enough of them. They make life easier and quicker. Apps help you remember t...

It may be a project at work you just cant get a handle on, or an important decision you cant seem to make; but regardless of the situation, everyone can relate to the feeling of being stuck. Luckily, ...

The purpose of any website is to get people from your target audience interested in what you’re offering. Whether it be a product or service, 9 times out of 10, someone is going to want to commu...

Today we’re excited to share an awesome vector pack from Freepik.com The set includes a whopping 500 vectors icons, provided as both individual PNG files as well as a master Illustrator file for...

With increasing diversity in monitor sizes, it’s not practical to design single blocks of text that take up the entire width of the screen. The traditional solution is to split text into columns...

It’s the first quarter of 2013 and everyone wants to be the person to tell you what’s next. I’m not sure what we all gain from it other than a solid “I-told-you-so”, but ...

In this tutorial, we’ll be getting started with Adobe’s new animation tool, Adobe Edge Animate. Edge Animate harnesses the power of HTML5 animation, and allows the user to create dynamic, ...

Remember the good old days? You know which days I’m talking about; the days not so long ago when we used to design websites to fixed widths. Looking back now they seem like such a simpler time; ...

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow...

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great ...

Sports branding used to be about differentiating two opposing teams on a field; it used to be about an umpire or referee quickly identifying the team to award points to, or to penalize; it used to be ...

Patterns can make a website design more interesting and appealing. Often mildly skeuomorphic in nature, they bring an element of real-world texture to a site. The variation in tone that they create mi...

Creating canvas apps is the new thing, we can even create games with it, its supported in all major browsers both desktop and mobile, and that makes it a more viable solution than using Flash. In this...

There are two main reasons people utilize the web: to share things and to be informed. Sure, we could pick up a newspaper or switch on the television, but I’d argue that it’s much easier t...

When Google Plus was launched a year and a half ago, it set in motion a multitude of changes to the search landscape. From this point forward, getting traffic from the famed search engine is no longer...

Within the past couple of weeks, I handed in my notice, after spending over fifteen years working in-house as a designer of websites and magazines for a publishing company. This wasn’t a quick o...

VectorStock.comhave a huge collection of vector files, with thousands of new files being added each week.Vectors cover subjects ranging from vintage labels, to floral patterns, to cityscapes. Youll al...

Given the rise in mobile web usage year on year, there is now an increased focus on making websites more responsive, adaptive and user-friendly for visitors on small screens. One key area that is ofte...

In the web-era, major news sources arent restricted to local readership. Whilst a city paper may feature some local news, its sports, national and international news coverage is just as likely to be r...

For most brands, recognition is everything. Occasionally you’ll encounter a company that seeks to create a air of exclusivity by shunning popular appeal, but for the large part companies need yo...

A logo is an essential part of your company brand. It works together with elements such as your website, collateral, brand promise, and marketing efforts to set the tone for your company as a whole in...

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow...

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great ...

Theres a concept in web design that is more important than responsive design, more important than mobile-first, more important than separating style and content; the most important concept in web desi...

First it was the Capulets versus the Montagues; then it was Coke versus Pepsi; and the latest epic battle? Serif versus sans-serif, of course. Lucky for us, the crew at UrbanFonts has produced a nifty...

When I write about the black and white, crossword puzzle-like QR code, I feel like I’m talking about the stone age of human development. The few years of existence for the QR code in marketing e...

The web has grown rapidly in the last two decades and its omnipresence makes it easy to forget that just 20 years ago it was an unheard of concept for most people. While as designers and developers we...

Companies spend thousands on logos and branding aimed at putting a positive gloss over their products. But what if the downsides couldn’t be hidden in the small print or conveniently omitted, an...

The popularity of shopping for items online is greatly increasing. If you ask me why I like to shop online, it’s because I have pretty solid control over my purchase. I get to have time to open ...

Bundled with HTML5 came a large number of API goodness and one of the best was the Fullscreen API that provides a native way for the browser to do what was only possible in flash for a long time: disp...

WordPress has evolved hugely over the years from simple fork of blogging software to a powerful platform. According to a WordPress Survey, 66% of respondents use WordPress as a CMS, not just blogging ...

Human beings are masters at strategically building walls to hide our innermost selves. But what would happen if those metaphorical barriers were suddenly see-through, effectually forcing us to bare ou...

Lately some websites, like This is the Brigade and All You, have started featuring a dynamic and animated menu that resizes on scroll down. Minimizing the main navigation to allow more space for the c...

Its been some time since Facebook made any changes to its News Feed, and like Timeline feature launched in 2011 the News Feed redesign represents a major change to one of the sites core services. In t...

The March edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins and JavaScript resources, productivity and project management tools, CMS’s, CSS and H...

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow...

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great ...

Drupal 8 is due out later this year, and already speculation has begun to mount over what’s going to be included in the new release. One of the key features everybody is looking forward to is th...

Advertising is about eyeballs that is, the number you can get to focus and take notice of your service or product. With that in mind, ad execs often turn to the humorous, irreverent, or even outlandi...

If world leaders were more like-minded, perhaps the elusive goal of world peace might be more attainable. But while international harmony remains a utopian dream for now, French photographer Philippe ...

I recently received a call from a young designer who I met when she was in art school. I reviewed her portfolio and several years later at a local graphic design group meeting, she reintroduced hersel...

When I was in middle school, I took a sign language class. At the time, it struck me as interesting that some words and letters looked exactly like the thing being described, while others seemingly ha...

Stripping a website to its barest form, ignoring for a moment, content which is only text and images, all a browsing experience is, is navigation. Its clicking links that take you to other pages with ...

We launched our new StartupGiraffe website a few months ago, and we’ve been meaning to write a post about how we did a piece of the frontend for anyone interested. Our goal was to create a fun a...

Whether you design WordPress themes or just use them, you’ve got to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of WP theme creation. Every few months we round up some of the best new the...

Lets be clear: people hate filling out forms. Since most websites are lead generators, however, encouraging users to fill out forms is often not just important but critical. So how can web designers c...

One major issue with JavaScript-based applications is that they break the Back button. If you update content on the page with JavaScript rather than loading a new page from the server, no entry made i...

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow...

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great ...

As a writer, Im particularly drawn to typographic art. Perhaps its because the combination of word and art speaks to both the left brain and the right brain and therein lies the magic. Designer Ji Le...

With so many new websites and start-ups springing up every day, a high-quality, professional web site is no longer optional if it ever was. If you want your company to be taken seriously, let alone s...

Adobe has just announced new features in their Muse web design app. Muse launched just nine months ago, and in that time has had a few fairly substantial updates which make it a significantly more use...

Most web design and/or development projects have some history behind them. Sometimes you have to re-design or re-develop a companys existing website to update it and add new functionality. In most cas...