Design

This is the start of a monthly series of a roundup of 8 websites that I have found that are well designed. There is no particular theme, other than inspirational, which I hope you find is the case. I’ve added a few notes around why I believe they’re well designed as well.

Memorising shortcuts of any application improves efficiency. Now I’m by no means the most efficient person in Illustrator, I’m generally just happy designing. However, there are shortcuts you absolutely must know, because it saves you tediously clicking through panels and menus.

The redesign of this website has been needed for some time. Overall the website is quite small in terms of templates required. I wanted to put the effort into making the website feel like it is a growing source of content. There is much to cover in this, as I start with the new logo briefly, sketching, wireframes and design.

Circular is very much in the spotlight at the moment. It has a distinct look to it that so many huge companies are using. From Google to airbnb, it’s everywhere. If you’re looking for alternatives, with different prices and through a different service, this post is for you.

In the last post the basis for the visual style was set. In this post it will continue with that to complete the filters. There are some challenging areas like colour selection, as it can look overwhelming.

The previous post in the series completed the wireframes. They’re a solid basis for adding visual style. The content and interface elements required are all there. Further layout refinements, colour choices, typography and clarity improvements will be made throughout this post.

Continuing from the last post, which looked at the initial sketching and wireframe. This post will focus on the completion of each of the filters.

Filtering is a huge part of online shops, it’s an effective form of navigation. In most cases it’s an area which is overlooked on small screens. I have seen some good implementations and many lack the ease of a larger screen. In this post I want to explore the idea of it being a tab bar, starting with sketching & wireframes.

Illustrator being a vector application means it can be easy to overlook the export process and making things pixel perfect. It’s easy to do, so you don’t notice it. It’s particularly important that you try to retain this for logos and icons.

I’ve finally done the redesign of this website! Version five lived for longer than I ever intended. This post is going to be a shorter summary of the changes. I’ll be posting a full case study over the coming weeks.

It’s likely you know how to align things in Illustrator, but you can never remember how to space things equally, so you resort to the tedious way of spacing them individually. If you want to align objects with an equal space between them, this quick tip will show you how.

It’s been proven as apps have shifted away from the ‘hamburger’ navigation, to a bottom bar, engagement and browsing metrics have increased. Over time these findings have an impact on the thought process of those designing websites. In this post I detail a list of websites that are using the tab bar navigation.