Compositional flow determines how the eye is led through a design: where it looks first, where it looks next, where the eye pauses, and how long it stays. You have a lot of control over where people look when they’re viewing a webpage you’ve designed. On a text-heavy and graphic-light page, a visitor’s eye likely follows something like a Z-pattern or F-pattern across and down the page. However, as soon as you design page elements and add graphics, those patterns no longer apply. Your visitor’s eye will follow the flow, movement and rhythm you create.
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The success of your app definitely does not depend solely on its looks: it has to be functional and solve someone’s problem, or enhance a current experience. But, given the human attraction to looks and visual cues, giving app screenshots a good amount of focus cannot be wrong. App store optimization (ASO) has become a handy addition to an app developer’s marketing plan, and promises to help increase visibility and, as a consequence, downloads. In this article, Melanie Haselmayr will take a closer look at app screenshots, one of the two key decision-making helpers for anyone who downloads an app.
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Emphasis is relative. For one element to stand out, another has to serve as the background from which the first is to stand out. Some elements need to dominate others in order for your design to display any sort of visual hierarchy. By varying the visual weight of some elements and the visual direction of others, you can establish different levels of dominance. Three levels is ideal; they’re all that most people can discern. Designing different levels of emphasis or dominance will create a visual hierarchy in your design, with more important information being more visually prominent. It will help you communicate with visitors quickly and efficiently.
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As with everything, it’s all about communication. Many clients expect a visual design up front, because that’s what they’re used to getting. They don’t know any better. Your job is to explain to them why this is impossible. Enlighten them about the millions of different interaction methods and feature sets out there, and help them understand that you cannot capture all of that in a static design. But before we start flipping things around, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane, just so we know where we’ve come from and where we are now.
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The Chinese web is in some ways a different place than the web you’re used to — particularly in two or three crucial respects — and user expectations are not quite the same as they are in the West. In this article, Kendra Schaefer will examine the things all web professionals should know before swan-diving into the Chinese market, including how mobile-only social platforms have become the revolutionary new frontier of Chinese web design, and who’s designing beautiful websites in China today.
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This time we decided to turn our mystery riddle into an exercise of patience and stubbornness — beyond problem solving, of course. To achieve just that, we had to hide the right answers properly and provide subtle hints that attentive readers would need to discover first. So, what if we looked closely at the things around us and introduced a riddle that would reflect those experiences?
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The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf NYC 2015, we’ve prepared a new mystery riddle, and this one will be an exercise in patience and stubborness. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden Twitter hashtag. Your job is to discover those hashtags as fast as possible. If your guess for a hashtag is right, search for that hashtag on Twitter and you’ll find a tweet leading you to the next level. Are you ready? Action!
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Creative thinkers tend to be balls of energy and productivity machines. Creativity is generally perceived to be something external, out of our control, or an inherent talent for a chosen few. But consider that creativity is fundamentally about ideas. Ideas are generated by thinking, and skills for thinking can be learned. Therefore, creativity, thinking and idea generation are skills that can be learned. Learning a variety of thinking skills will have a dramatic impact on your productivity and output. In this article, Shelley Walsh introduces five books that are bound to stimulate your thinking and reflection on creativity, as well as provide valuable, practical exercises that will improve your thinking and problem-solving skills.
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Throughout his 70-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright developed a number of principles and ideals that can inspire us to design digital experiences that better stand the test of time. His views on materials, form, function, space and environment define his iconic works. These ideals and principles are still used in architecture today, and his buildings have stood the test of time, remaining relevant even in today’s digital age. In this article, Kent Eisenhuth will cover six main aspects of Wright’s approach that you can apply to digital design. His effort to create a “new” architecture can inspire us to rethink the way we approach our digital design work and even push the medium into new and exciting territories.
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Visual direction is the perceived direction of forces acting on and exerted by elements. A visually heavy element will attract the eye to it. The direction is a cue to the viewer’s eye to move elsewhere. We refer to this force as visual weight and to the perceived direction of visual forces as visual direction. Both are important concepts to understand if you want to create hierarchy, flow, rhythm and balance in your composition. Many intrinsic characteristics can be modified to make an element visually weightier or lighter.
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