Category: Tutorials

You learn something everyday if you pay attention

Designing for Apple Watch: Product Strategy

When Apple launched the Apple Watch, there was a lot of excitement. Wearables are a new category to design experiences for. The caveat? Translating your app to a smartwatch experience is different from building a responsive product for example. It’s not a matter of fitting content onto a smaller screen. In fact, it starts much… Continue reading Designing for Apple Watch: Product Strategy

How to Work With WordPress User Metadata

In the previous article, we discussed working with post metadata in WordPress using the provided APIs. We also covered a variety of tools, the ideas of security, and what would be required in order to set up the environment in which to work with the code that would be provided throughout the tutorial. If you… Continue reading How to Work With WordPress User Metadata

Weekly Inspiration: Discoverability and Feedback

Recently Vox, together with 99% Invisible, produced a brilliant short film about a door on the tenth floor of the Vox Media office. Besides many other doors, it featured Don Norman: design icon and celebrated author of The Design of Everyday Things. The purpose of the film was to highlight the usability of products and systems, whittling down… Continue reading Weekly Inspiration: Discoverability and Feedback

International Artist Feature: Mexico

For this article in the international artist series we turn to Mexico, featuring six illustrators and designers who create fantastic work, from illustration to lettering to graphic design and more! I asked each artist how their country and culture inspired their work, and they delivered fantastic answers. Enjoy! Gaby Zermeño Gaby is an illustrator and… Continue reading International Artist Feature: Mexico

Getting Started With Ionic: Introduction

Ionic is a popular mobile app framework that helps you build hybrid mobile apps quickly, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this series, you learn how to set up and build your own mobile apps with Ionic by creating a fully functional mobile app together. We start with an introduction to Ionic and learn how… Continue reading Getting Started With Ionic: Introduction

How Welcoming are WordCamps to Women?

This month it’s International Women’s Day, a worldwide event designed to raise the under-representation of women in many walks of life and encourage us all to open up more opportunities to women and girls. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look at gender diversity at WordCamps, and compare these with… Continue reading How Welcoming are WordCamps to Women?

Build a Real-Time Polymer To-Do App

  If you kept up with Google I/O 2015, then you likely saw that Polymer 1.0 has been released to the public. If you have been around since Polymer 0.5, then you likely saw that all your favorite building blocks have been deprecated. For all those who have used 0.5, consider this a migration assistant.… Continue reading Build a Real-Time Polymer To-Do App

10 Top Tips for Fashion Illustration

Fashion Patterns From clothes to accessories, fashion illustrations have a long history as a visual reference for a designer’s concepts or current fashion trends.  What makes a good fashion illustration, though? With help from content from Envato Market, let’s count down 10 top tips for creating great fashion illustrations to better your own sense of… Continue reading 10 Top Tips for Fashion Illustration

10 Stunning Ionic Templates

Ionic is a popular framework for creating modern, hybrid, mobile applications, using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Ionic is powered by AngularJS and Apache Cordova. Because developers can use technologies they are already familiar with (JavaScript, HTML, and CSS), the learning curve isn’t that steep. CodeCanyon offers a wide range of application templates to kickstart your Ionic development. In… Continue reading 10 Stunning Ionic Templates

Photoshop in 60 Seconds: What Are Histograms?

Vibrant Welcome to our Photoshop in 60 Seconds series, in which you can learn a Photoshop skill, feature, or technique in just a minute! What’s a Histogram? In Photoshop, histograms are those graphs that are visible behind the Levels and Curves adjustments. We’ve all seen them, but what do they mean? Take just a minute… Continue reading Photoshop in 60 Seconds: What Are Histograms?

How to Work With WordPress Post Metadata

In the first post in this series, I gave an overview of all of the various types of metadata offered by WordPress, where it’s kept, and what we’re going to be covering throughout this series.  Further, I defined what metadata is; its role within WordPress, and how it’s relevant to us as developers. But the… Continue reading How to Work With WordPress Post Metadata

Editing Images in CSS: Combining Techniques

In last two tutorials of this series, we have discussed how filters and blend modes can completely change the appearance of images. In this tutorial, I will cover the basics of editing images by using both these properties together. The Basics of Layering Image Effects With CSS Any non-primitive image editing usually requires more than… Continue reading Editing Images in CSS: Combining Techniques

10 Tips for Improving Your Photo Manipulation Skills

Over it’s 20+ year history, Photoshop has proved itself useful for a great many things. One of the primary applications is photo manipulation. In fact, it’s photo manipulation that is meant by the colloquial term “to Photoshop”. Yet pulling off a successful photo manipulation isn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  So whether you are… Continue reading 10 Tips for Improving Your Photo Manipulation Skills

Take a Free Course on Programming Interactive Art With p5.js

What You’ll Be Creating Do you want to learn a new way of creating animations and interactive graphics, in less than an hour?  If so, check out our new course on How to Program Interactive Art With p5.js, in which you’ll learn how to create an interactive, animated web page with p5.js.  The course consists of just… Continue reading Take a Free Course on Programming Interactive Art With p5.js

Weekly Inspiration: Scrollin’, Scrollin’, Scrollin’

Web browsers all have one thing in common: almost without exception they allow us to scroll through content. Scrolling gets us from the top of a document, to the bottom. But it allows much more than that–and for better or worse, web designers have been challenging the scrollbar for some time now, seeing how else… Continue reading Weekly Inspiration: Scrollin’, Scrollin’, Scrollin’

Making an Original Corporate Theme in WordPress: Designing Other Page Types

Let’s recap: My claim is that the reason of the magnitude of WordPress’s market share is because it’s so darn easy to create corporate websites with WordPress, and this is also the exact reason why the top-selling WordPress themes are corporate (or multi-purpose) themes.  Theme makers might have clogged the market a bit by putting… Continue reading Making an Original Corporate Theme in WordPress: Designing Other Page Types

How to Conduct an Interface Inventory With InVision

By definition: an inventory is a gathering of items tracked in a list. This term isn’t anything new, but the idea of using this concept towards interfaces is. Brad Frost, who coined the term “Atomic Design”, states that creating agnostic patterns helps to build far more versatile components that can be used widely across a… Continue reading How to Conduct an Interface Inventory With InVision

How to Work With WordPress Metadata

If you’re someone who is just getting started working with WordPress, then it’s natural to be curious about some of the advanced features offered by its API. So where might you stand regarding your experience? Maybe you’ve tweaked the code in a few themes. Perhaps you’ve altered the functionality of a couple of plugins. Maybe… Continue reading How to Work With WordPress Metadata

15 Premium Business Card Templates (In Photoshop, Illustrator, & InDesign Formats)

Are you rebranding or launching a new business? Maybe you have a big conference or meetup fast approaching? Or is your current business card just not at the quality level you’d like? Is it not representing you well anymore or does it have outdated info on it?  You don’t want a wrong phone number, changed… Continue reading 15 Premium Business Card Templates (In Photoshop, Illustrator, & InDesign Formats)

Professional WordPress Plugin Development for 2016

Course Description Have you ever wanted to know the secrets behind all the cool things that WordPress plugins and themes can do? This course is offered by an instructor who has developed over 250 WordPress plugins for major corporations and can now teach these skills to you. For Those Developers Who Would Like To Know… Continue reading Professional WordPress Plugin Development for 2016

10 Mistakes to Avoid While Designing an App

Every good app developer constantly learns how to create the best apps avoiding the common pitfalls. How can you be up to date with the current methodologies and ensure that the app is bug free? There are two ways to learn. One is from the experience of developing an app and the other from other… Continue reading 10 Mistakes to Avoid While Designing an App

How to Use Swift on Linux

1. State of the Union As with any new and emerging technology or language, it is always important to stay on top of the latest news and updates. Swift as a language is no different. Apple has released many new updates and enhancements in the short time that Swift has been in existence. So you first… Continue reading How to Use Swift on Linux

Build a Custom Photo Widget for Your Desktop with Node.js

The first thing I do on any new device is customize the home screen. This has been a tradition of mine since my first non-DOS computer, when I used my Mario Paint manual to help me make some Legend of Zelda pixel art in MS Paint, and set it as the Desktop wallpaper. Now that… Continue reading Build a Custom Photo Widget for Your Desktop with Node.js