Archive for category divKnowledge
Follow this step by step Illustrator tutorial to create a vibrant abstract design. We’ll put Illustrator’s Gradient Mesh tool to use to create a colourful shape, then build up layers of objects to create an abstract design with lots of vibrancy, bright colours and transparency effects.
In this week’s question time I talk about how you can find new clients on the Internet; what the best application is for designing logos; whether I’m right or left handed; if there’s still room for new designers in this saturated industry; and why I don’t make video tutorials.
This week’s questions
- I am finding it hard getting myself out there too the local public. I’ve tried finding clients via the internet but it is far too competitive. How can I help myself?
- What would be the best program for logo design? Illustrator vs Photoshop or others?
- Hey Chris! I always wondered if you were left or right handed?
- Would you say there’s room for new graphic designers in the business? With the vast amount of designers out there, I do worry that maybe there isn’t ‘room’ to get noticed anymore. What is your opinion?
- Hey yo! I like all your art work and tutorials. It is so cool man, can you make video tutorials? PLZZZZ
Interesting links
How To Create a Print Ready Cafe Menu
After the home page the most popular landing pages for Supercircuits (one of the online stores I run) are the category pages.
While they are well optimized for SEO, since I joined the company I’ve wanted to make them more like landing pages — jumping off points from which to explore our products.
I finally had a chance to start making some moderate improvements to our security cameras page; namely adding the product sub-categories to the main body of the page instead of them solely being accessible via the left hand navigation.
Here’s how the category page looked before:
Security cameras category page before update
And here’s how it looks after adding the sub-categories to the main area:
Security cameras category page after update
Please bear in mind that this was a quick test to see if making changes to the page would have any effect on bounce rate.
The good news is that in the month since the changes have been in effect, bounce rate has gone down from around 35% to 28% — a 20% reduction.
Here’s how it looks in Google Analytics:
Security cameras category page bounce rate: October through April
Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to point out that the original page design was not very appealing to visitors and didn’t help with orienting new visitors to the page.
However, it’s interesting to note that just pulling out the product sub-categories from the left hand navigation and into the main area of the page significantly reduced bounce rate.
Next steps are to improve the design and add more landing page-like features such as product offers, featured items, etc. That will probably have to wait, though, as we’re moving to a new e-commerce platform and a new site design (can’t wait!).
You will have seen blogs showcase their Twitter, Facebook, and RSS counts with typography. With these numbers in plain text, you can style them into your website
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Carving Pixels
Apr 27
Developers—that is, those who spend most of their time on back-end code rather than front-end—often say that they’re no good at design. Sometimes they put things together that end up looking rough, and they take it as proof of their lack of design talent. Of course lacking experience is a major reason for this, but I don’t really buy it that developers can’t design. I think there is something else at play here.
When you write code, the end product either works or doesn’t. There is no sort-of-works stage. Yes, the software as a whole may have bugs which put it in the sort-of-works box, but its individual components either work or don’t work. Recently we’ve got the whole test-driven development movement which advocates writing tests
The retro style badge/emblem of logos is a hot trend at the moment, and it’s no surprise why – They’re super cool! We’ve already looked at a showcase of retro and vintage style logos
On CSS Galleries
Apr 24
Designing UX Exchange
Apr 24
A few weeks ago Jin Yang
