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Monthly Archives: July 2015

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More Designers Need to Think Like Engineers

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It’s no secret that the personality types that tend to go for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines tend to be different from the types that go for the arts. Then there’s design. Design fields are supposed to present an intersection of both STEM and more artistic vocations, and thus should appeal to those with an appreciation of both. But in practice, it all really depends on how these fields are marketed and how they are perceived by aspiring designers. Industrial design for example, as a rule attracts a different set of people from architecture or graphic design and so on. But the design industry on the whole seems to be attracting people with the wrong mindsets. In the case of UCreative’s readers, and YouTheDesigner’s in particular, most of us here work in visual design-related fields or are interested in them. We’ve based this observation on the subjects of posts that generated the most buzz over the past four years, as well as through your responses — or lack thereof — on each post. It’s pretty apparent that most of our followers lean towards the artistic, intuitive side of things. This isn’t always a bad thing. We need to continually push ourselves into

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The designer’s guide to Gestalt Theory

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Utilising the Gestalt principles can make designs more coherent, connected or unified – this guide explains how. In the 1920s a group of psychologists in Germany developed a series of theories of visual perception, describing how viewers group together different objects into groups or a single coherent whole when the separate elements are arranged together in a particular way. The prominent founders of the collection of theories and principles are Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka. The term Gestalt means ‘unified whole’, which is a good way of describing the over-arching theme behind the principles: if you collect together your design elements in an arrangement using one of the approaches, your design will feel more connected, coherent and complete. Rudolf Arnheim These principles were developed over a number of years, but came to prominence in part thanks to Rudolf Arnheim’s 1954 book, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (ISBN: 978-0-520-02161-7) which has become one of the must-have art books of the 20th century, and regularly features on university course text lists. While it’s well worth reading Arnheim’s book, to summarise there are six common, basic Gestalt Principles: Similarity Continuation Closure Proximity Figure/Ground Symmetry and order

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18 golden tips for presenting your work

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The industry’s finest creatives explain how they tackle nerves and technology meltdowns to shine as speakers, both on and off the stage. The thought of standing on stage and talking to a packed auditorium might make you want to dry-heave in the corner. But public speaking – done well, and for the right reasons – can be one of the most effective tools for self-promotion in a designer’s armoury, instantly giving you credibility as an expert and supercharging word-of-mouth about your services. However, the skills involved in public speaking are just as valuable off-stage. Being able to talk confidently about your work in any situation – while pitching, during an interview, over a beer – is a fundamental design skill that differentiates the good from the exceptional. So what are the golden rules of presenting your work? How can you blow the minds of your audience – or at least keep them interested for 45 minutes? And what if it all goes wrong? Read on to find out how some of the industry’s finest creatives have tackled nerves and technology meltdowns to shine as speakers, both on and off the stage. 01. Have a story and an opinion “There’s no replacement for having

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Grey: the secret colour trend in web design

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Is grey the new black? Dan Slagen from Crayon shares his research into colours on the web. It’s easy to associate a company with one or two colours, as is often the goal of a brand (eg Coke = red). And there are manyexamples of brands that have successfully ‘owned’ a colour. But right now, something strange is going on. In many cases, the colours brands actually use on their website are not the same as their official brand colours. Take Facebook, for example. What colour do you associate Facebook with most often? Most likely, Facebook Blue which consists of R:59, G:89 and B:152 as pictured below (thanks toBrandcolours.net). But what happens when you take a closer look at the user interface on Facebook.com? As represented above (thanks to Colourpeek), there are over 25 colours represented, which consist of the following RGB ratios: Now keep in mind that the colour that people associate most with Facebook is Facebook Blue. The overall average of all colours used by Facebook as represented in the excel chart above is actually: Average R:106 Average G:126 Average B:133 Look at the difference between the two colours. On the left is the colour that people most

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18 rules for using text

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f there’s text in your design, follow the rules in this infographic and you won’t go wrong. Click image to see full infographic We visited The Visual Communication Guy and found this – one of the best infographics we’ve seen that provides designers with 18 rules for using text – so we had to share it with you. The use of typography can be confusing – which font do you choose, and what size? If you follow these 18 rules you won’t go wrong and quickly start to see a world of difference in your designs.

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10 ways to optimise images for better performance

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If you want to speed up your site, images are the first place to start. Today, the demand for digital is stronger than ever. An abundance of connected devices exists and with the internet available everywhere, it’s clear there’s no shortage of people wanting to use our products. However, customers that will tolerate long waiting times are much less common, and a lot of hard work still needs to be done on this front. Bandwidth is steadily increasing in developed countries, but the same can be said of internet use in remote areas, on public transport, and on congested free Wi-Fi. Like browser adoption, access to the best available technology isn’t an option for all people at all times. Awareness today of how important it is to be fast is very good. Tooling, monitoring and resources are the best they’ve ever been and the financial consequences of poor performance are well known. Yet, month after month, the weight of web pages continues to grow. The most effective image optimisation tools A problem in many large organisations isn’t that development teams don’t know what needs to be done, but that requests to schedule in web performance improvements are vulnerable to being deprioritised when

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5 WAYS EMAIL IS KILLING YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS (+ 5 SOLUTIONS)

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By:  PRESTON D LEE Via: millo.co/   Take a moment and run through the first 15 minutes of your day with me. Any day of the week, a “work day,” the weekend, any day you like. What does your morning routine look like? You wake up. You go to the bathroom. You may read, meditate, exercise, or all of the above. Do you eat breakfast? Maybe you do everything in my small list above. But I can almost guarantee you: pretty early on in the list, you check your email. Most of you probably even roll over in bed–before you even wake up completely, before you even use the bathroom–and check your email on your phone. Let’s admit it, we’re slaves to our email. And as an entrepreneur, you may be even more keen to check the “latest” from your inbox every morning. Then, you spend the rest of your day checking email every (what?) 30 minutes? 15 minutes? Maybe every time your phone vibrates or dings? You’re addicted to email Admit it. You’re addicted to email. We all are. I’m guilty of the same behavior. But a couple of years ago, I started to notice just how much email was taking

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5 key logo trends and what you can learn from them

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By www.creativebloq.com Words: Niall O’Loughlin Niall O’Loughlin of 99designs shares some important lessons from the history of logo design. You’d be forgiven for thinking that logo design and branding were relatively modern concepts. But in reality, they have been around in one form or another for thousands of years. Rather than going that far back in time though, in this article I’ll focus on popular brands in the modern era. Logos are one of the key principles of branding and need to be memorable and in-line with what a company stands for. As we go on this journey, it will become apparent that simplicity has more or less been ‘in fashion’ for more than 80 years. Some organisations stumbled across the perfect logo for their brand and barely changed it while others found the need to make alterations to change with the tastes of their target audiences. 01. The beginning of simplicity (1930s-1940s) The introduction of colour printing and the rise of the advertising industry saw an explosion in logo design as companies allowed their imaginations to run wild. It was common for brands to freely utilise heraldic and agricultural symbols to advertise any product. However, as the lifestyles of the

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