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I recently travelled 2517 miles to try to solve 50 problems in 50 days using design - a journey that would challenge me to fundamentally rethink my understanding of the user-experience design process. I set myself a challenge. I wanted to test the limits of design's ability to solve problems - big and small. To do this, I left the comfort of my computer chair and set out into the unknown. Each day, I had 24 hours to observe a problem, attempt to solve it and then communicate the solution.............read more

Responsive Web design has been around for some years now, and it was a hot topic in 2012. Many well-known people such as Brad Frost and Luke Wroblewski have a lot of experience with it and have helped us make huge improvements in the field. But there's still a whole lot to do.

On the 5th of March, Twitter is going to retire version 1 of its API. The replacement, version 1.1 is very similar, but with one major difference; every single call must be authenticated. This means that come March, your existing API calls will break; including simple things like displaying tweets on your site. To fix this, you need to move to the new v1.1 API, and authenticate with Twitter. Let's look at how to do this in WordPress, by embedding a list of tweets on your site

The thing about design patterns is that there is a wide variety of them and it would be near impossible to do justice to each of the patterns in a series here on the blog. Nonetheless, hopefully taking a look at these three have helped kickstart your interest in using design patterns in your work.

Many opinions lean towards hating pop ups for being intrusive, rude and a place to lose your soul (I joke, but see my recent tweet). There are however those who swear that pop up forms are super effective for increasing email signups (see Problogger's tweet). So maybe you're considering a pop up form on your site but are wary of how it will affect your visitors and rub them the wrong way. Thankfully there are ways to use pop up forms and still give visitors a great experience. Here are 5 things you can do that will boost conversion rates on email pop ups while not annoying your visitors.

Whoops is a small library, available as a Composer package, that helps you handle errors and exceptions across your PHP projects. Out of the box, you get a sleek, intuitive and informative error page each time something goes pants-up in your application. Even better, under all that is a very straight-forward, but flexible, toolset for dealing with errors in a way that makes sense for whatever it is that you're doing. The library's main features are: Detailed and intuitive page for errors and exceptions Code view for all frames Focus on error/exception analysis through the use of custom, simple middle-ware/handlers Support for JSON and AJAX requests Included providers for Silex and Zend projects through the bundled providers, and included as part of the Laravel 4 core Clean, compact, and tested code-base, with no extra dependencies

Whenever I have to develop a specific and focused library like this, I like to start with the outcome of, how do I want this to work? So, we can begin by writing down some of the features that we'd like it to have: The ability to load different pages according to the URI Reading parameters from the URI (placeholders) Keeping the pages dynamic as per the Meteor standard That looks pretty good. Now after looking over these features, you may think they are pretty similar to a 'router' type of library and I agree. So, let's take a look at how our 'router' library would work in action:

Make Colloidal Silver for pennies per gallon. Premium Quality! With wearable gadgets like Google Glass and Memoto, taking firsthand videos or snapshots of what you are doing is real easy these days. But today we are going to show you a mind-boggling new way of taking videos, 360 degrees wide. Check out this video (if you want to skip to the gist, go to 0:35).

The World Wide Web gives anyone the chance to reach a truly global audience. But there's a lot more to successfully doing so than simply setting up a single English language site and hoping for the best. English is still the most commonly used language on the internet. An analysis of the technologies used in website construction suggests that over half of all sites on the web today are in English. If we take a look at the languages used by surfers however, English still comes out on top but only marginally. Around 27% of internet users speak English compared to 25% who speak Chinese, while Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish are all experiencing rapid growth. This is due largely to increasing internet penetration rates in developing countries (with Latin America accounting for the large rise in Spanish and Portuguese).

You often find interesting pieces of information, from videos, images and articles online that you want to save. There are a number of ways to do this: you can use a bookmarking feature that comes with most today's browsers, or else using social bookmarking sites, like Digg...........

Today we are going to look over the shoulders of quite a few professional designers. Using their original PSDs with open layers, we will be able to exactly reconstruct, what has been done and how. If you are like me, this way of learning by doing proves more effective than working through step-by-step tutorials. The following files come with lots of layers to be examined, as we are going to dissect a camera, a sports shoe, a cell phone and lots more. Have fun looking through the eyes of the most able Photoshop professionals. Before I forget: watch out for some layer-related Photoshop tips, I may have left for you throughout the collection…

So you're a pretty great web developer already. You've got some killer CSS chops (cross browser even), perhaps you've been a Photoshop expert for years, and you've got enough jQuery knowledge to make almost any chained animation go smoothly. But certainly you ask yourself, what's next? In fact, one of the most asked questions about web development is, "how do I stay on the leading edge?" Chris Coyier recently presented a fantastic talk on the subject, and there are sites fully dedicated to staying up to date on the latest web design news. Addy Osmani's roundup on becoming a better front-end engineer sets some great content out on the board for you to consider on the subject; needless to say, a lot of smart people are thinking about this very subject, so you're headed in the right direction.

The usage for twitter is on the rise and growing day by day. Everyone wants to be unique in everything they do. That is the reason people get customized clothes, cars and accessories. They want everything of theirs to give a statement a about them. This trend has fast caught up social networking profiles. However, a few people know that they can actually improve and customize their twitter backgrounds as well. I am here to reveal these secrets to you:

Good landing pages are indispensable from a marketing point of view. They are the entry points for valuable visitors, and every business wants pages that can funnel users in the right direction. A lot is riding on landing pages - they have to be perfect. As a graphic designer working on a corporate landing page, I felt a trifle stifled at first. We had to do a conversion-centered design and there were a dozen components that had to be there: USP headline and sub header, a section detailing the benefits, a picture representing our services, a prominent call-to-action, social and other contact points, etc. Designing a successful and attractive page was not difficult. After all, the structure of the page was driven by the different elements that had to be accommodated. The wireframe I created for the page looked too much like an infographic - it served its purpose, but there wasn't anything special or creative about it. In order to find inspiration for creating innovative and graphical landing pages, I trawled hundreds of pages on the web. Here are fifteen of the most innovative landing pages on the Internet.

Many clients and individuals have preconceived notions about web developers and designers. Some stereotypes have a basis in fact, while others are simply anomalies and are untrue. For example, people often think of web developers and designers as geeky, programmer-types who work in solitude until the wee hours of the morning. Many web designers and developers are technically inclined and many do work on projects that require long, strange hours. However, not all web designers and developers are technical wizards with no social life.

How're you all doing mates? In this post we will be featuring a little bit of Graffiti Art. Technically, Graffiti is defined as any writings or drawings that are usually sprayed, illegitimately, on public places. Although detested for its unapproved activities, graffiti artists find this kind of art as a way to show their artistic expression for their emotion, opinions, and personal messages. It is said that graffiti originated way back the ancient times and with no doubt, is still alive and sprayin' until today. To share to you some cool works, we have gathered 30 Awesome and Creatively Expressive Graffiti Artworks. Have a glimpse on some of the amazing artworks made by different graffiti artists around the world. You might want to have a pair of artistic eyes and open mindedness to appreciate these daring works of art. Come, take a peek, and your mind be sprayed. Enjoy!

As you've already seen in our previous posts about Single Page Website Designs that showcasing your work in single page design is a hot trend. It's kind of ironic to see what designers can do with single pages as modern age designers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with their work. Even though this is not a common trend to follow but still as the new design styles come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them in their work, this kind of trends emerge.

The web is crammed full of words. There is enough content to keep you reading until you take your last breath, even if that moment is still 100 years from now. So far for the good news ;-) The bad news is, the web grows faster than you could ever possibly keep up with. Sooner or later, any netizen will suffer from information overload. I know I do already. This will become a growing problem for brands and their communication strategies as they will need to cut their messages short or risk to not get noticed. If you ask me, one of the best ways to deal with this necessity is the infographic…