Grab 25% off GraphicStock’s annual subscription

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If you’ve ever done any kind of design work, especially on the web, you’ll know that a great source of stock images is an essential component in your toolbox. Very few clients can afford all-bespoke photography; nearly all companies need to use stock images at some point. So it’s essential that as a designer you have a reliable source of quality stock images to offer your clients.

And once you use a stock site, you’ll find that downloading one good image quickly leads to downloading a second, then a third, and then more. Whether you’re using photographs, illustrations, or just icons, the cost of many stock sites quickly mounts up.

A great source of high-quality images, that won’t weigh heavily on your budget, is GraphicStock. GraphicStock runs a subscription model, which means you can download as many files as you like, without paying more than the low subscription fee.

It’s essential that as a designer you have a reliable source of quality stock images to offer your clients.

Once you sign up for a GraphicStock subscription, you’ll have instant access to the entire graphicstock.com archive. You can download an unlimited number images per day, all royalty free, for personal and commercial projects. There are no hidden fees, the low subscription price is all you’ll ever pay.

Graphic Stock are so confident that you’ll love their service that they’ll allow you to cancel your subscription at any time. However, if you do decide to cancel, anything you’ve downloaded to date, is yours to keep, and use forever.

GraphicStock has a library of over 300,000 files, so you might think you’d struggle to find the perfect file, but they’ve introduced an advanced search feature that allows you to filter by orientation, and even by color. Further advanced search features allow you to find images with transparent backgrounds, or those that are supplied as a PSD, ensuring that the assets you download are easy to integrate with your project. What’s more GraphicStock’s library is divided into usable categories, like business, travel & transportation, and design elements. And when you’ve found a file you like, you can find complementary images by browsing based on the color palette of the file.

GraphicStock also provides project folders to keep your assets organized. You can create folders for different clients, along themes, to download later, and for any other breakdown. You can even share folders with clients or colleagues. It’s a great feature for making the most of your subscription.

With over 300,000 files at your disposal, if you download 10 files per day, every day of the year, you still won’t have exhausted the library until sometime around 2098—and of course, they’re still adding new files.

With art direction being one of the most in-demand skills on the web, and images helping designs stand out from the crowd, can you afford not to check it out?

For freelancers and design agencies, Graphic Stock is an amazing resource, because you never need to check the budget before downloading the image you need to finish up your design work; if you need it, just download it, without worrying about the extra fees, license options, and tie-ins that many other stock sites impose.

Whether you’re looking to illustrate a concept, tell a story, reinforce brand values, or just engage users, GraphicStock’s library gives you fast access to the assets you need. To experience GraphicStock for yourself sign up for a free seven day trial, during which you can download up to 20 images per day; that’s 140 premium stock images absolutely free.

To further sweeten the deal, GraphicStock are offering WebdesignerDepot readers 25% off their annual subscription. To take advantage of the offer, just click here.

If you’re looking for a source of high-quality images that won’t blow a hole in your wallet, you need to check out graphicstock.com.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of GraphicStock –]

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Essential design trends, May 2016

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Nothing catches your attention like a high-drama design. Big images, unusual use of common elements or whitespace and adventure-based gameplay are different ways to introduce users to a project. Each of these techniques has an over-the-top feel that makes a strong first impression and encourages user interaction.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month:

1) One big photo

While collage style websites with plenty of photos or video headers are popular options, one big photo is making a comeback in homepage design. Characterized by one striking image without a lot of other effects, one large photo can carry a lot of weight and introduce users to the site content.

But the photo has to be of the highest quality and very interesting to entice users to keep clicking.

This can be a tough formula to solve.

Here are a few solutions:

• Start with a defining photo. It needs to be interesting and somewhat different. (Avoid the hand holding a phone images for app launches or a person on a solid color background shots.)
• Crop it tight.
• Edit and play with color settings. Go for something a little more extreme, such as black and white.
• Showcase your product or brand.
• Keep other elements to a minimum. Consider only using a brand identifier, such as a logo, and short headline.
• Move navigation out of the way.
• Provide a clue for users so they know what action to take next, such as the arrow encouraging a scroll.
• Make a dramatic photograph with the help of lighting, interesting backgrounds or stellar environments. (A professional photographer is likely required for this one.)
• Play up the drama with typography is that oversized, undersized or uses a novelty typeface. But only use one of these techniques.

2) Sidebar navigation

While the most common placement for navigational elements is along the top of a website, that’s not a requirement. As long as it is clear to users as to how to use a site, navigation can live in a number of different places.

Sidebar-style navigation, often on the left side of the screen, is one such popular option.

This is a trend that’s come on quite quickly and is on a number of sites. From thin, almost not there styles to wider, almost oversized navigational elements in a sidebar arrangement, this placement makes a lot of sense because users read from left to right. So, left-hand navigation elements could be the first thing users actually read on the screen after they glance at the main headline or other large copy.

The trend stems from mobile navigation styles and is a logical step for desktop websites as well. For a while, we’ve experienced pop-out navigation from the side on small-screen devices. Seeking out navigation from the side has become a pretty commonly accepted user pattern for this reason.

As part of a broader picture, we are likely to see even more techniques that were mobile-based solutions make their way to screens of all sizes. Extending a small screen solution to all devices can save time and provide greater consistency in the look of a project. It’s also part of the mobile-first design strategy.

When it comes to sidebar navigation on larger screens, there are a few specific elements to consider.

• Navigation needs to be somewhat obvious to users, which is why many sites still use the hamburger icon as a notation.
• Navigation can pop-out from the left or right, but it can also be a distinct design element with a static placement.
• Sidebar navigation can be part of the overall design rather than an aside to it. Note how the Quecha website integrates sidebar style navigation elements into the overall design.
• Provide plenty of space so that navigational elements are clear and easy to read. Users should know what these words or icons are and that they are a path to getting around the website.
• Be cautious of changing navigational styles between pages, unless you go back to a more standard top of the screen option on interior pages.

3) Interactive adventure

Designers are taking video, animation and storytelling to the next level with fun websites that take users on an interactive adventure. These story-based websites are for brands and businesses of all kinds, as well as for sites that are simply informative.

Each interactive adventure site tends to look quite different and can use any number of techniques to engage users. The common thread is a storyline where the user controls the action on the screen. This works with clicks, typing in commands and scrolling to engage the user in the story and help determine outcomes.

This interactive story type of website design is good for users and good for you. A good story can keep users on your site longer and clicking through links, engaging with content. This will help you establish a better connection with your audience.

Users like interactive stories because they can be fun and interesting. The trick is keeping the story short enough that a user can play and complete the game in a sitting. If they have to turn away, you might lose them.

Also consider the outcome of the interactive experience. What happens at the end of the interaction? Is it only related to the game? Or are you highlighting a product or service that users will want to come back to? If the answer is the latter, make sure to include a bypass option for users who have already played (or don’t want to play) the game but still want access to the content.

Conclusion

The theme in trending design this month is big drama. It takes great art, a good story and plenty of planning to pull off one of these techniques because they are so singularly focused on grabbing users with a quick impression. Is it a style that you would consider?

What trends are you loving (or hating) right now? I’d love to see some of the websites that you are fascinated with. Drop me a link on Twitter; I’d love to hear from you.

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Popular design news of the week: May 23, 2016 – May 29, 2016

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Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

24 Clever 404 Error Page Designs

 

Walt Disney’s 16 Unconventional Rules for Winning Clients

 

Simple CSS Agree Button

 

3 Secrets Behind the Best Websites in the World

 

It’s Time to Bring Some Creativity Back to Web Design

 

Picking a Color for your Brand

 

Site Design: Pleasure to Burn

 

What to A/B Test When Building your Website

 

Google Aims to Kill Passwords by the End of this Year

 

The Start-to-Finish Designer

 

Let’s Reverse Engineer the Instagram Design Brief

 

The 100 Best Free Fonts for Designers

 

Tachyon: Design New UI Components Without Writing CSS

 

Bideo.js – Easy Background Videos in HTML5

 

How UX Designers Think and Work

 

Never Use Papyrus (AKA the New Comic Sans), Plus Alternatives

 

Infographic: Star Wars, a New Hope

 

New French Law Makes it Illegal to Email Employees After Work Hours

 

Why We Need the Humanities in Tech

 

OnTheGrid — Designer Curated City Guides

 

Stop Trying to Be Somebody

 

The Principles of UX Choreography

 

Building a Visual Language

 

Facebook Begins Tracking Non-users Around the Internet

 

Solving a Century-Old Typographical Mystery

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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Comics of the week #341

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Back end

Website redesign

 

Not strong enough

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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Major redesign unveiled for Google Search

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Perhaps in a nod to the popularity of card-based design, Google has begun to roll out a new look to its mobile Search results. Dubbed “rich cards” in a post on Google’s blog, this new design is a direct successor to the company’s rich snippets feature.

But that’s not all, Google is also experimenting with its desktop Search results, creating a new design layout there.

Rich snippets, searchers will know, are the search results that feature both small pictures and a brief preview of the webpage’s text. Interestingly, the rollout of rich cards isn’t meant to replace rich snippets—merely build on and complement them.

Rich cards will be displayed to searchers in a carousel format, making them easy to navigate via a simple swipe to the left or right. These carousels will show cards from either the same site or from different sites.

Website owners should be pleased with the redesign of Search since it’ll help them stand out in search results more effectively, thereby helping their organic traffic. Google is rolling out this new layout for two content categories in particular: recipes and movies.

Both categories are ideal for this change based on the visual nature of recipes and movie posters. For instance, food site owners can create a richer preview of their content by featuring a standout image for every recipe and dish. Movie sites can do the same with movie posters and graphics.

The key difference between the original rich snippets feature and this upgrade is the number of images featured. Whereas site owners could previously feature just one image in rich snippet results—which debuted six years ago—they can now see a series of images per results, thanks to the carousel.

As of right now, it’s only possible for searchers to see this change if they’re using the English mobile version of Google. Of course, as with all things that Google is still experimenting with, this won’t last long. The company has said that it’s already exploring new options to provide additional content publishers with richer previews of their content, so it won’t be surprising to soon see new content categories being able to use rich cards.

The company also provides integration with Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, so site owners can see relevant data pertaining to their inclusion of rich cards. For example, they can see which images can be further enhanced if they mark up additional fields. They can also see both clicks and impressions for their rich cards, enabling them to monitor search performance.

For a neat preview of how these new rich cards will work in Search, see Google’s Search Gallery to see screen shots of cards and markup type samples.

On the desktop Search front, the company is taking its cues from its mobile Search redesign. Search results are now placed into individual cards. Interestingly enough, the new desktop Search layout only shows up when one is logged out of Google.

Another big change involves Google’s Knowledge Graph. This is the company’s system that retains facts about people, places and general things, to understand how they all connect. In Search, the Knowledge Graph comes into play when, sometimes, boxes are shown in search results to offer direct answers.

It appears as though Knowledge Graph cards will be placed inline, thus prioritizing them in the view over other, competing websites. From a purely visual standpoint, this new look is much cleaner and more simplified. Contrast that to the usual way Google used to display results, which is in the sidebar, making for a more cluttered design that tended to cramp info together in one place on the page.

The new desktop design has practical implications for users, too. Now, they would have to scroll down further to see more actual results; previously, it wouldn’t be uncommon for Knowledge Graph cards for locations to take up the entire length of the page. As a result, pages would now be twice as long.

Here’s a roundup of the other design changes on desktop Search:

• Wider tabs for the All, Images and News tabs
• Sub-links showing up under a main result grouped with the same cards
• Stories from the “In the News” list appearing in just one card
• The “People also search for” list shows up at the bottom of the page as opposed to in the sidebar

It will be interesting to see if Google’s new visual experiment will indeed help site owners get more easily noticed in mobile search results and receive more organic traffic. The move to richer images suggests search simplification as the carousels replace more written text, but time will tell.

Overall, it appears as though the company wants to keep the design between mobile and desktop more consistent for its Search feature.

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How WebGL is reinventing Flash’s legacy

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Do you remember all those projects with outstanding interactions, mind-blowing animations, and thrilling accompanying sound effects that resulted in an intensely immersive user experience? Yep, chances are those were created with the help of Flash.

However I hate to admit it, the era of this rich multimedia platform has come to an end. Flash is finally dead. But fear not! As often happens when one door closes, another opens, and Flash is slowly being replaced by a fresher, more vigorous successor. Technologies like WebGL, and accompanying JavaScript libraries like Three.js are rapidly growing—enabling developers to build Flash-like projects, without the accompanying security issues.

Today we’re going to focus on WebGL and Three.js. This pairing is powerful option for immersive UX.

WebGL and Three.js

WebGL serves as a foundation that provides instruments for manipulating with interactive 3D and 2D computer graphics. It gives you an opportunity to mix and match its elements with HTML elements and combine them with other constituents of the page or background.

Three.js is a Javascript library with a list of high-end features that let you operate with scenes, cameras, lights, geometry, and more. It is intended to unlock the potential of WebGL by adding extra functionality to the platform. It makes it simple to create GPU-accelerated 3D animations without relying on browser plugins.

Compatibility issues

With the modern technologies, you are always caught in a dilemma: either create a “one size fits all” project that will run on various devices and offer consistent user experience, or put everything on the line and instantly impress the audience that you can reach.

With WebGL and Three.js it is the same story. Safari, Opera and the majority of mobile browsers (and that’s to say nothing about Internet Explorer) are like a fly in your Chardonnay. Unfortunately, a great deal of users are stuck with legacy browsers, so compatibility is quite an obstacle—but support is growing (which is more than can be said for Flash) and provided you don’t use it for anything mission critical, WebGL and Three.js are excellent options.

Examples

Void

Void is an experiment by Hi-ReS!, a creative studio based in London. The developers wanted to abstract from the limitations inherent to modern platforms and browsers and test the limits of current technologies. It seems that they nailed it.

It is a purely desktop application that is powered by WebGL and Web Audio features. Along with Howler.js, GSAP, and Coffee Collider, Three.js took part in producing this outstanding playground that inexorably draws online visitors into a journey that looks much like a digital book.

Reshaping Excellence

This interactive campaign dedicated to Sennheiser’s anniversary is an epic odyssey that combines not only dramatic sci-fi landscapes but also numerous cutting-edge features and details. It is a pure Chrome experiment that allows visitors to participate in forming and shaping a monument of sound. Although the phase of formation has been completed—one million people all over the Globe participated in the event—it sill rocks. You are welcome to make your own contribution, examine this massive sound-sculpture, and enjoy the intro video and top-notch execution.

Bruno Quintela

The personal portfolio of Bruno Quintela is a real-time rendered WebGL experiment that demonstrates the potential of the artist and possibilities of the current web technologies. Use your mouse to examine the scene thoroughly. Drag it in different directions to see what is hidden inside this bulk of accurately placed together 3d polygons with glossy surfaces. The idea serves as an excellent opening for the website that leaves a strong, lasting first impression. 

Particle Test

This project exhibits a whirlwind of more less ordered and organized tubes of particles that radiates of high-tech vibe. There is a control center that encourages you to play with such attributes as the radius of a cylindrical-shaped cloud, the density of tubes, height, scale, and more. The concept is mesmerizing.

Water Shader

This artist has managed to imitate a water surface by mimicking the natural behavior of liquid. The convex shape and undulating surface with sun reflections as finishing touches recreate a truly realistic scene that catches the eye from the first second. 

WebGL Particle Head

As they were when Flash was successful, particles are all the rage nowadays. Animations of various size and type can be seen in numerous projects, and this work is one such. The subtle version of a head that is vaguely reminiscent of an intelligent human-like robot from Isaac Asimov’s novels is a true masterpiece. Not only does the realization surprise, but also its behavior. It reacts to mouse movements, naturally tilting head to the right, left, up and down.

Dynamic 3D Confetti Text

Text effect is one of the ways to spice up boring interfaces with a note of playfulness and coolness as well as emphasize the required lettering. Rachel Smith’s confetti-inspired solution will certainly help to enrich the design with bright emotions and place the title to the center stage. Type a word in the input field below to see the whole magic. Vibrant and vivid 3D geometric pieces will shape the request and make the result prettily interactive.

3D Panorama Viewer

Three.js comes in handy in common projects as Max Chuhryaev proves. His solution easily transforms panoramic images into an essential detail of the user experience. It has a pleasant perspective and slowly moving camera: together they make you feel a part of the composition. It goes well with the landscapes, cityscapes, and interiors, allowing users to enjoy the beauty of static multimedia.

Triangle Pattern Generator

This experiment gives you a fantastic polygonal background with a lovely 3D feeling. It also acts as a playground where you can make some areas brighter and others dimmer: just use your mouse. The panel of options enables you to tune up a bulk of details of the canvas including light, mesh, render and even export settings.

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