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Graphic Designer Joined over 9 years ago
"Hate" is a harsh way of thinking about this, so I'll just say that the kind of developer I enjoy working with is one who works hard to respect the design they've been asked to implement. They are conscious of design details and work to get as close to what they've been shown and they ask questions when they need more info. They're open and willing to go over their work in order to fine tune and they don't get annoyed when you want to tweak things to get it just right.
Working with a dev who just sort of speeds through in order to get it done without showing much concern for how closely they've matched type sizes, margins, spacing, etc. is painful. This is where you end up doing countless rounds of review because they overlook minute details and don't take much care in doing a precise job. You eventually start holding their hand through the whole thing and everybody ends up frustrated. Usually the end result is far from perfect.
I'm sure this is where a lot of developers should not pretend to be front-end devs, because if you really can't be bothered to care about how something looks or behaves visually then you really shouldn't be in charge of that task. One giveaway for this is when a developer says they hate CSS, good luck in that scenario.
Completely agree. I appreciate the desire to improve things, but they never go beyond speculation and personal preference.
Great work, but I can't help but want to see some description or title for each piece. At the very least on hover you should display a title. It's a bit of mystery meat right now and comes across more like an image gallery than a link to a portfolio entry.
I came across this approach a while ago: https://uxdesign.cc/form-field-required-vs-optional-9b4d7cdbf400
Their solution was to only mark the optional fields which I prefer because it naturally implies that unmarked fields are required and cuts down on repetitive details.
It is probably important to consider the ratio of required to optional choices, because if a good portion of your form is optional, the noise level goes way up and you have the same issue. But that scenario suggests there are some bigger problems at play with the form.
When it comes to consumer forms, like account registration etc., I personally feel that optional questions should not be included. If you want users information then actively seek out users and engage with them or send out surveys to get them to offer their details. Optional fields are lazy, bothersome, and often marketing related.
At first glance this comes off as ok but looking closely there are a number of significant design and usability issues.
The layout is clean and looks fairly modern, typography is ok, but overall just sort of vanilla looking for a design company.
Generally speaking I don't get a strong sense of a brand here. Color is a big issue. Using #000 for blacks, green buttons, blue links, darkish blue-purple accent colors, halfway down the page those bright pastel tiles, interior pages using hot pink. You're all over the place.
Another problem are the homepage illustrations. Those are quite crude. Imperfect shapes, inelegant curves, straggling corners. Not to mention your illustration style is different on the inner pages. Pick a style and make sure it matches throughout the entire site. Hire a different illustrator.
Clicking through the pages, the usability is pretty bad. Loading bar is very awkward, sometimes cycling through 4x before the page loads, the nav doesn't seem to close when loading a new page, lack of hover states. Quite poor UI/interaction design.
The more you look, the more mistakes you find.
Easy, don't offer the option to pay for "just a logo".
From my experience, it's usually just a lack of awareness on the clients part. Most people don't even know what a brand is, all they know is that they need a logo. So if you present an option to pay for just the logo, you're communicating that its perfectly fine for them to do so.
Show them what a basic brand identity involves, give them examples of work you've done that showcase exactly what goes into it. It will show them how a logo is just one piece of the puzzle.
For myself, the basic package includes a logo, colors, and typeface. Most companies barely know how to work with anything beyond those three basic elements so its best to start there. If you just handoff a logo, the client is guaranteed to pick random typefaces and colors and they'll almost surely make some dreadful choices.
If the customer STILL tries to haggle you down to only paying for a logo, walk away.
You came in pretty heavy with the snark on that first comment with zero explanation, which is probably why you're feeling those downvotes, but you certainly aren't wrong.
I was thinking the exact same thing: "hey neat, a tutorial that will show me how to export an animation from AE as SVG".
Lottie's been around for a little while now, so was really hoping to see a new approach that didn't require using multiple 3rd party tools. Turns out the only thing they cover is animating a vector image in after effects, that's all.
What really bothered me is they clearly allude to covering the export process (with a link that jumps you to that section, no less) but turns out that step isn't even in this tutorial:
"The solution is an After Effects CC extension called Bodymovin combined with the mobile library Lottie. But you’ll have to wait until Iconfinder’s next blog post ..."
So all in all, SVG's have no nothing to do with this. AE doesn't support them (you need to first convert them using Illustrator), and from what I gather Lottie exports JSON data. I'm just as confused as you are as to why they are highlighting it.
Yep. There are a lot of great points here, but not much to be learned. The amount of time invested into designing the page is unfortunate, could have spent way less gathering examples and posting a basic article on Medium.
I think it's a pretty cool detail. A simple 0.2-0.5s fade-in on the pink would probably help smooth out the jarring flash when you introduce it.
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This article does a great job outlining everything.
I've gotten used to using 8px grids as a fairly firm guideline, and so far it seems like the closest thing to the "golden unit" from my POV. It isn't too limiting as the 10px grid can be, and isn't so fine that you and your team struggle to grasp what the patterns are which a 6px grid starts to suffer from.
I may stray from it here and there but overall its a solid way to simplify sizing and spacing units when multiple teams are involved.