Design

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.

Pricing tables are reasonably common for various types of services, they serve as a way to give the user an anchor. Generally meaning that you’ll be able to direct the customer into the package the company really wants to sell most of. While this post won’t cover the psychological side of that, it will focus on clarity and visual style. It’s an interesting website element to take a look at, so let’s start.

One of my aims during redesigning this website is to keep the seamlessness between content output and redesign. It’s not the easiest of tasks, as any time spent writing, is time taken away from the redesign or vice versa.

Tables in general are something I naturally avoid doing in design applications, they’re frustrating to make. They are easily to overlook due to this and that they can be quite uncommon in use. Let’s say you wanted to design a table in Illustrator, and you wanted a quick and accurate way to do so. This post will show you how.

Aligning to a key object in Illustrator is one of the most useful alignment options. If you’ve ever been frustrated with aligning objects centrally, then everything nudges over a few pixels. This is where align to key object comes in, read on for how to.

Following on from the datepicker post where it was more about getting the basics in place and focusing on some important Illustrator techniques that allow for accuracy and efficiency. This post will focus on guiding you through the process of making the datepicker easy to understand and have better aesthetics.

In this post I’m going to show you how to make a datepicker efficiently. A reasonably common user interface element, but can be a source of frustration, to make in design applications. Due to the grid, and amount of items in that grid it can be difficult to align everything…

So you use Illustrator for designing websites, and that could be because you’re on a retina screen and Illustrator is vector. So you can design at 1x and it not matter, at least that’s the case for me. However, when it comes to exporting it’s a pain, you can use ‘Save to Web’ and increase the size to 200%, but that’s tedious. You know how to export SVG, but exporting PNG files is the issue at retina sizes. In this post I will show you how to overcome that.

Swatches in Illustrator isn’t something I have used very often. Partly this has been down to being unsure of the best way, and not trusting that they will remain there. As there are random ones to begin with that you will never use and the process of deleting them seems annoying each time. In this post I’ll show you the best way to clean up existing swatches, add your own and keep them updated.

I figured I would write a post about the tools I use. Some will be familiar, but hopefully there are some that are unfamiliar and end up being useful to you.

The second to last post in this series, coding the page. You’re going to build the page using flexbox and make it responsive. The method that will be used to make it responsive, is mostly mobile first, but it will be making logical decisions based on where CSS only needs applying. This saves you from having to undo it in another media query.

The focus has been very much desktop so far, but considerations have been highlighted throughout for smaller screens. I will only cover ‘mobile’ sized resolutions, as for this particular layout you will only need to make minor adjustments for ‘tablet’ sized resolutions.