Comics of the week #284

http://ift.tt/1HCmblT

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…

Will it fit?

We’re consistent

 

It’s not all about skills

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

LIFETIME ACCESS: 95+ Premium Responsive WordPress Themes – $27!

Source

Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1bqTNXD

Introducing WebdesignerNews.com

http://ift.tt/1PubHHZ

Nothing matters more in this industry than keeping your finger on the pulse. The challenge is separating the wheat from the chaff: with hundreds of blogs, countless social media accounts, and thousands of design sites, how do you keep on top of it all without spending hours hunting through RSS feeds? Well, we have the solution…

After months of rigorous testing, iterative builds, and a few late nights, our sister-site, WebdesignerNews, has launched.

We have just as much trouble wading through the irrelevant news stories as you do, so we created WebdesignerNews as a one stop site for daily web design news.

WebdesignerNews covers a range of topics, from vanilla web design to code demos, from branding to brand new apps. If it matters to our industry you’ll find it here in bite sized chunks.

What makes WebdesignerNews different from other design news sites is that it is curated by humans. We shortlist stories through social media response and then every single story is reviewed by industry experts. When you read WebdesignerNews you can be confident that the stories you read are the ones that matter.

But WebdesignerNews isn’t about us dictating what’s newsworthy, it’s about the webdesign community, so we want to hear from you. WebdesignerNews is being curated especially to benefit the design community, and every blog no matter how large, or small, has the same chance of being featured; just use the “Submit News” link at the top of the site to tip us off about stories that matter to you, tools you can’t design without, or even your latest project.

For those that are too busy to check the site daily, we’ve set up a newsletter to deliver the most shared stories daily. When you read a story on the site that you think deserves attention, you can up-vote it, and have your say in which stories are featured in the newsletter. And if you want to save stories to read later you can create an account to save your favourites.

So take a moment to check out WebdesignerNews.com, we think it will save you hours every week, by bringing you the vital stories of the day, every day.

Elegant Gentleman Font Family with 10 Weights – only $17!

Source

Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1PubFA1

3 responsive design disasters (and how to avoid them)

http://ift.tt/1IM35Zg

Responsive design methods are very helpful to developers because they allow us to serve content to the widest range of devices without having to maintain separate versions of the site and without some of the negative drawbacks to other methods such as scaling and fluid layouts.

This article will highlight the top 3 mistakes designers encounter with responsive designs, and will provide some strategies for avoiding these mistakes.

Scaling vs. fluid vs. responsive

There is a lot of confusion over these terms and designers often incorrectly use them interchangeably. In truth, each of these are distinct evolutionary steps in layout technique that have emerged over time in line with advances in technology.

Scaling layouts are designed to scale every element relative to every other element. They are responsive in the sense that they will scale the content dynamically in response to changes in the size of the viewport. The layout itself remains static, changing the size of every element to maintain a consistent appearance.

Above: example of a scaling layout at different resolutions: the design sacrifices readability for consistency.

Fluid layouts are different because they scale container elements relative to the size of the viewport. This is achieved by using relative units such as ems to overcome the problem of shrinking text. The design can be broken by the user scaling it.

Above: example of a fluid layout at different resolutions: the design sacrifices consistency for readability.

Responsive layouts don’t scale anything. Instead, they change what is displayed depending on the size of the viewport.

Above: an example of a responsive layout at different resolutions.

Disaster 1) Wrapping menus

If you use a navbar at the top of your page, a responsive design is supposed to “snap” it to a more compact format when the page is displayed on a small screen. But this does not always work perfectly if the display area is wider than the break point, but too small to display all the menu items in a single line. The result is a menu that wraps.

There are several ways to solve this problem. The first is to reduce the number of items displayed horizontally on the navbar by sorting them into categories and sub-categories. You can then use drop-down items to display the sub-categories when a category is selected.

The second way is to change the break point to a lower value. The actual number to use is the width at which your navbar starts to fail, not a specific device size.

The third way is to use a different menu for devices, such as a sliding drawer.

Disaster 2) Using fixed width images

Content areas are usually set to a size relative to the viewport. So when a fixed-width image is wider than the size of the area, image cropping occurs.

Above: example of a bad fixed-width image that is too large: now it has scroll bars and content is pushed off-screen.

You can avoid this problem by using relative units to set the width of the image, or if you use a framework that supports it (such as Bootstrap) you can use a responsive image class (eg: class=”img-responsive”).

Above: The same element with a responsive image class approach: now scroll bar is gone.

Disaster 3) Element distortion

This one is a bit more obscure, but essentially what happens when your layout is displayed on a small viewport is that any unhandled columns behave like rows. This is a problem because the distortion of the content unintentionally changes the hierarchy of your design.

Above: column becomes a row, distorting content.

The solution is obvious, yet it is surprising how many people struggle with it: simply set the height, width, and padding of the element explicitly. If it moves out of position and covers other elements, you can force it to be where you want by wrapping it in a div and setting margins.

Planning helps avoid mistakes

This article has discussed only the 3 most commonly encountered responsive design disasters, but there are plenty of other ways for a good design to go wrong. Preventing errors is not too difficult. Modern browsers have built-in responsive layout testing, so plan your design well and test often.

LAST DAY: Convert PDFs into Interactive Animated Publications – only $9.97!

Source

Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1yWgVsh

Does responsive web design make you more money?

http://ift.tt/1G6mwcp

Getting your website mobile-ready is attracting a lot of attention of late. Just yesterday Google rolled out a hefty algorithm change that will put an increased emphasis on mobile-usability as a key ranking factor.

Most businesses are starting to realize that more customers are visiting them on the web via their mobile devices yet few are acting on that potent piece of information. In a recent study of the top 10000 websites, fewer than 19% were utilizing responsive design, and for the top 100 websites that number is a puny 12%. Some of the largest companies in the world are serving up a very poor user experience to about half the users hitting their site.

Some of the largest companies in the world are serving up a very poor user experience

People don’t have the patience to scroll over, expand the screen and try to determine what the meat of the page is on those tiny smartphone screens. They are just going to click the back button and try out your competitor. For the companies who get it, this is a huge opportunity to add value to their customer experience and win new business in the process. For those who don’t, I hear there are some cool new animated gifs they might want to try out.

Now we know Google hates non-responsive websites on par with cruddy link spam. We’ve also established that your visitors have you on an extremely short leash, but are we asking the right questions? After all if a website converts, shouldn’t that be what truly matters? Its time to ask that critical question — do responsive websites actually translate into higher sales? Let’s dig into the raw data and determine if responsive design really is the hat trick of web development.

Are you providing poor customer service? You’ve got well-trained phone reps. You consistently grade out as one of the top customer service providers in your industry. Yet if you don’t have a mobile-ready website, your customers think you don’t care. 48% of users said just that when faced with a traditional website hopelessly trying to adapt itself to a mobile environment. Who can blame them?

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Can you navigate those tiny drop down menus? What about picking a different shirt pattern from those minute color swatches? Can you even get back to the website once you land on the terms and conditions page? Trying to force a traditional website into a mobile environment puts hurdle after hurdle in front of your potential customer that ultimately leading to abandonment of the sale.

Monetate’s numbers seem to support this. One of their metrics looks at conversion rates by device quarter-over-quarter. In the most recent quarter, traditional desktop environments converted 3.11% of visitors while tablets were not that far behind at 2.59%. Smartphone heavily lagged the pack at a paltry 1.01%. When you consider a responsive adoption rate of 19%, is there really a question why this great divide exists?

62% of companies saw increased sales following a conversion to a mobile-ready website

Econsultancy reported that 62% of companies saw increased sales following a conversion to a mobile-ready website. While that number is nice, it is also painfully vague. It begs the question who are these companies that are seeing results and at what magnitude?

WebUndies specializes in sleepwear for the whole family. This e-commerce retailer took the mobile plunge in 2012 and saw sales rally 169.2% over the year prior. Think Tank Photo provides any accessory a photographer could ask for. When they made the switch to responsive, it translated into a 188% increase in revenue. Not only that, but mobile page views jumped 200% with double the transactions originating from smartphones and tablets.

O’Neill Clothing saw…Transactions…up 112.50% on iPhones and 333.33% on Android.

It turns out even surfers are browsing the world wide web while looking for that perfect wave. O’Neill Clothing saw perhaps the most impressive increases after their conversion to mobile-ready. Transactions went up 112.50% on iPhones and 333.33% on Android. Conversions rang in at 65.71% on the iPhone and 407.32% on Android. Total revenue cleared 101.25% on iPhone and 591.42% on Android. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to wonder what the heck was so different about that Android-optimized platform that resulted in these spectacular gains over iOS…

Still not convinced? Chris Leake captured some random Tweets on Twitter of companies showing off their responsive gains: State Farm saw a conversion rate of 56% post move; Career Builder tweaked their email design and had click through rates run up 20%. While they aren’t the eye popping numbers we saw before, it is still impressive. It also may hint at the fact that responsive design can’t overcome poor design which can blunt your overall results. 

Responsive design doesn’t just boost sales. The Aberdeen Group looked at a bucket of customer engagement metrics including brand awareness, average order value and company revenue. The year-over-year results showed significant improvement across the board. Conversion rates were 8% higher with responsive design (10.9% to 2.7%). Brand awareness increased a whopping 30% (34.7% vs 4.8%). There wasn’t a single category that didn’t see significant gains after the responsive design switch.

With desktop PCs on the decline and mobile devices quickly taking over our lives, people will rely more and more on the convenience of shopping on their mobile devices. Companies that ignore this tidal wave of human behavior will ultimately pay the price in lost revenue and lost market share.

I must admit that I’m oddly curious to witness the aftermath of Google’s mobile algorithm this week. Will massive traffic drops be the lightning strike that forces a change, or will companies continue to go extinct online by not prioritizing their website presentation?

 

Featured image, mobile commerce image via Shutterstock.

1-Year WPMU Dev Membership: 350+ WordPress Plugins and Themes – 83% off!

Source

Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1bu30PJ

The best free WordPress plugins for mobile websites

http://ift.tt/1DbLwhH

If there’s anything that’s been well-established over the past few years, it’s the importance of catering to mobile users. They browse, they buy things, they’re just as important as any other user.

Making a website that works well for all screens large and small is, if not easy, certainly within the realm of possibility for those of us with the know-how. The problem is, not all WordPress users are front-end developers. Many are business owners, hobbyists, or even just regular bloggers — you know, blogging? That thing WordPress was designed for in the first place? Programmers built a tool that almost everyone could use, so people went and used it. Now those same people might need a little help making their site look good on as many screens as possible. Well, help has arrived, in the form of WordPress plugins.

That’s right people, this month’s WordPress plugins article has a real theme: We’re going to talk about how to get your site looking good on phones, tablets, and bigger stuff too, with as little code as possible.

Switch some themes

In an ideal situation, you’ll be able to choose a WordPress theme (or have one made) that works perfectly on all screens. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. A theme might be responsive, but not show your content on large screens the way you want it to. Or maybe the mobile navigation is wonky.

Whatever the problem, you might find another theme that gives you what you the first one is missing. In the world of free themes, the one-size fits all solution almost doesn’t exist.

And here’s where we come to theme switchers. These plugins will switch between themes of your choosing based on the device that the user has. They may not be a perfect solution, but anything, and I do mean anything, is better than ignoring your mobile users.

Any Mobile Theme Switcher

Any Mobile Theme Switcher is one of the simpler solutions out there. It’s free, with a Pro version, but the free features are more than enough for most purposes.

You can set individual theme choices for all of these device and software categories separately: iPhones/iPod Touches, iPads, Android phones, Android tablets, Blackberrys, Windows Mobile devices, Opera Mini, Palm OS, and “Other”.

You can also display a theme switcher to allow mobile users to swith to the “desktop theme” if they so desire.

Mobile Smart

Mobile Smart takes a less specific approach to switching themes. You can choose to enable your mobile-specific theme for phones, and optionally for tablets, and that’s it. It also comes with an optional manual switcher.

What makes it different is a feature called transcoding. Basically, if your WordPress setup is done right, Mobile Smart can automatically resize your images for faster delivery to mobile devices. This feature is currently in development.

If you like this plugin enough that you’d actually spend money on it, the pro version offers the option to deliver mobile-specific page content, mobile-specific menus, and more.

Or make an app, sort of

This option is a bit like switching themes. The design that your mobile users will see is very different from that shown on desktop or laptop screens, but this time, it’s more like an app.

Instead of just switching to another theme, a plugin like the WordPress Mobile Pack will take all of your content and display it as a web app. Your new mobile app can be customized with alternate color schemes, fonts, your own logo, and more.

Sadly, if you want to use a theme other than the default, you’ll have to get (you guessed it), the pro/premium version. But if the default app theme works for you, then the WordPress Mobile Pack is a great way to make sure that your mobile users are taken care of.

Make your content mobile too

Obviously, your content has to adapt to whatever platform it’s on. If you’re just using text and images, your theme can probably handle itself just fine. But, if you want to introduce more complex interface elements elements, or just get more control over how your content looks across all platforms, we’ve got plugins for that too:

Responsive images

You can save yourself and your users some bandwidth by only serving pictures at the size they actually need. This means that using your website literally costs mobile users with limited data plans less to use, and they can use it faster.

For this purpose, you could use Post Script Responsive Images. It automatically creates multiple versions of all images on your site: in your theme, in your content, and your featured images too, including all existing images on your site.

It serves them to the browser with the srcset attribute, and the browser picks which image to download. This method is at least partially supported by the big mobile browsers. It may not benefit everyone yet, so think of this as future-proofing your site.

Buttons, columns, tabs, accordions, and more

Sometimes you just want to add more than plain text to your site. Sometimes, you’d like the choice to organize your content a little better. Sometimes you’ll want to embed a video. Well, you can, and it’ll work on all screen sizes too.

Easy Responsive Shortcodes is a collection of layout options and user interface elements to help you add some extra style/organization to your posts and pages. What’s more, you don’t have to worry about whether they’ll work on small screens, because they do.

Here’s the full list of components:

• Accordions
• Alerts
• Boxes
• Buttons
• Calls-to-action
• Clear floats
• Columns
• Highlights
• Icons (via Font Awesome)
• Tabs
• Toggles

As for embedding video in your posts, check out FV WordPress Flowplayer. It’s an HTML5-based video player with support for embedding videos from Youtube, Vimeo, or raw URLs. It also comes with a Flash-based fallback for older browsers.

It’s also completely free, unless you want to put your own logo on it, and remove the Flowplayer branding. That’ll cost you a pro upgrade, but all of the actual functionality is there for your use.

Fix the navigation

If you like your theme in general, but the theme’s built-in navigation isn’t doing it for you, you might look at these alternatives. After all, your users can’t buy what you’re selling if they can’t find it.

Mobile Navigation will create a full-screen navigation menu that only shows up on small screens. You can customize the breakpoint that makes it show, the colors, the fonts, and more. It’s mostly install-n-go.

WP Responsive Menu, does much the same thing, only it creates a menu that slides in from the side. Again, you can customize the look and feel of the menu to your heart’s content.

See the differences side by side

Want to see what your responsive theme will look like while you work on it? Just install Mobile Previewer. When you browse your site (logged in) you’ll be able to launch a small preview of it at a variety of mobile sizes in the lower right-hand corner of your browser.

This won’t work with the theme switchers listed above, but in any other case, it works just fine.

Fin

So there you have it. There’s a lot you can do to make your WordPress website look good on all devices, even without any coding knowledge. Go forth, and make the mobile Web!

 

Featured image uses mobile image via Shutterstock.

Photoshop Custom Tools: Build your own custom Photoshop panels – only $9!

Source

Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1Ge9o7J

How to transition from web design to your own startup

http://ift.tt/1aKhR7k

As a web designer, you have an enviable skill set for starting a business online. Web designers are exposed to a wide range of product, marketing, brand and interaction design problems every day through their work. For many web designers, the skills you need in today’s environment are pretty broad too. You might be most at home practicing user experience design, or graphic design, or front-end coding; but chances are you can also get by setting up an install of an open source product, creating a social media campaign, stitching together web apps, and generally making stuff online.

Being able to build products, either from scratch, or by pulling together off-the-shelf services, puts you way ahead of many people who think about starting an online business. But that doesn’t make it easy!

Years ago, I made this very jump from freelance web designer to start-up founder. If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend the change as a really exciting and interesting leap to make. You’ll learn heaps, and even if your new business doesn’t make it all the way, it’s still a fascinating experience. But successful or not, this is a very time intensive change to make.

The company I cofounded is called Envato, and it’s now hundreds of people big, and quite far from a little startup. But your aspiration doesn’t need to be that big. An app, publication, or service that brings in enough to pay yourself can be incredibly liberating and a great springboard for other things.

If you’re keen to learn about how to make the switch from web design or development, to start-up, read on!

Side projects: the place to start

Practice is how you get better at literally anything in life. Startups are no different. While being a web designer has given you practice at some of the core product creation skills you’ll need, there are plenty of others to refine.

Side projects offer a way to practice those other skills. I’m talking about skills like selecting an idea to work on, researching it, figuring out if people are interested, launching it, and marketing it. You’ll have to do all these things when you build your own new business, but with one great difference: unlike with a side project, you’ll have the full pressure of needing to make money.

Side projects are things you make in your spare time. You still carry on your job, you still make money the way you have been. But your extra hours go towards practicing for your new start-up life. It’s a big time commitment, but it’s the best way to prepare yourself for a start-up.

Sometimes side projects take off. A great example is Unsplash which used to be just a Tumblog curated on the side by the team at Crew. Today it’s grown a life of its own and become a first-class product with people dedicated to it.

Other times side projects inform your final startup. Before Envato, one of my side projects was to sell stock Flash components. Doing this, I learned a bit about customer demand, pricing, and the business. Even though as a side project, it was only making a few hundred dollars a month, the experience led me to a business idea. What if we made a dedicated marketplace for people selling Flash. That was the very first product we made at Envato.

do something you think is interesting. That way you’ll be motivated to work on it.

I browse through ProductHunt every day and it’s filled with just as many little side projects as it is full blown product startups. If you’re looking for ideas for a side project, start checking out what other people are doing. Think about what’s working for them, what problem they are solving, and why they are or aren’t getting interest. And most importantly, do something you think is interesting. That way you’ll be motivated to work on it.

When thinking about what side projects to make, think about it like you’re considering a new business. What would people want? What problem can you solve? Who’s the target audience? Then build something, and check back on those assumptions.

The more you practice making and releasing side projects, the more ready you will be to start investing even more time and energy into a new startup.

Save up and have income

Unless you’re very lucky, when you do start your new business it probably won’t be a big success right off the bat. When we started Envato we had sales from day one, but it didn’t cover our livelihood for a very long time.

It’s critical to have savings to draw on, or even better a steady income source. I relied on freelance work while working on Envato. It meant effectively doing two jobs for a long time. But I preferred that than the stress of not having enough money to make ends meet!

Another alternative is to set up some kind of passive or semi-passive income source. Some successful product/startup people have written an ebook, or sold stock content, themes, or the like to fund themselves. If you can make this work, it can be awesome. But be warned, sometimes these kinds of projects can be a business and time-sink all of their own!

Whatever the route you take, ensure you have an income source. Unless you’re planning to go down a big investment route, you really want to make sure you have a livelihood to support yourself on your new big endeavour. It takes a lot of the stress out, and ensures you may be exhausted — but you’ll make it through!

Ready to Go For It? Start with an MVP

Once you’ve had a couple of small successful side projects and you’ve figured out your income source, you’re ready to make the jump.

Figuring out what product to build is exactly like making a side project, except with one extra dimension: it needs a business model. There are lots: from selling advertising, to selling products, to selling subscriptions, and everything in between.

Use the same overall criteria to select what you want to work on, but look for something with a proven way of making money. Unless you’re very confident, it’s generally better to go with selling a product or service than advertising. Making money with ads relies on major traffic to get the scale that makes it viable. Selling products and services is generally much more intuitive for first-time founders. You can quickly do the math on how many customers you’ll need to get to make it viable and then think about how to reach and incentivize those customers.

Try to figure out a test that involves receiving actual money. It’s the only way to really be sure that your idea has legs.

When you have an idea for a product business, you need to test it out. Before you commit a lot of time and energy, find a way to test the idea in a small way. In startup lingo, you need a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that lets you figure out if people really do want what you’re planning to sell. Try to figure out a test that involves receiving actual money. It’s the only way to really be sure that your idea has legs.

An MVP often involves faking some of the harder parts of the idea. You might manually do a process that you eventually intend to automate. Or you might spend way more on customer acquisition than is actually profitable just so you avoid having to think through marketing in too much detail. Faking parts of the idea lets you quickly get something up and running so you can put all your assumptions to the test. If you find it’s working, you can then start building it properly. If it’s not working, you test some new assumptions and ideas.

Back when we started Envato, the idea of an MVP was not nearly as prevalent. I look back at our first launch and it was a lot more risky, and almost didn’t make it, because we loaded up the first version of the product with features that ultimately weren’t even very well used. We would have dramatically de-risked our business and probably made a better product at launch, if we’d focused down on the essentials and gotten something to market earlier.

If you haven’t come across the idea of MVPs before, it’s a good idea to read the book The Lean Startup. It’s a modern classic in startups that covers the concept of MVPing an idea as well as lots of other good startup advice.

Once you have an MVP that is showing signs of traction, it’s time to build out the rest of your new startup, and begin marketing and growing it. At this point, you’ve pretty much made the jump!

Keep Learning!

On your startup journey, it’s a great idea to constantly invest time in reading about how other people approach startups. Tune into sites like Hacker News and Inbound to learn about startups and marketing. Eight years into my business, I still read every day about starting and running businesses. There’s always more to learn, experiment with, and practice. Together with your web design skills, these learnings will turn you into a force to be reckoned with!

Here are some resources to get you started: Sacha Greif — Side Projects: From Idea to Launch; Drew Wilson & Josh Long — Execute; Inbound.

Good luck!

Video Course: Learn Version Control with Git

Source

Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1E13Rli

Could Adobe kill your desktop?

http://ift.tt/1BHh654

Designers who use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator regularly, know that they can’t get out of using it on their desktops. This means hour after hour of sitting at their workstations, especially if a big project is due, and deadlines can’t be extended. But sitting for too long isn’t good for your health.

Further, designing in front of a desktop is inherently limiting because it doesn’t account for people’s increasingly mobile lifestyles. What happens if you’re traveling, and you can’t reschedule your very important trip? You obviously can’t lug your desktop with you on the plane, so what do you do? Disappoint your client by failing to deliver before the deadline? Simply ignore the deadline and hope your client is understanding? Unthinkable!

In the past, designers would just have to throw caution to the wind and bear the brunt of sitting for hours on end in front of their desktops—until now, that is.

Transforming design through mobile

Yesterday, Adobe announced that it was releasing a new mobile app that’s meant as a game changer for designers all across the world. Maybe Adobe finally caught on to the fact that designers have active lives that involve traveling for meetings and networking, or maybe it just wants to help designers avoid the negative health effects of too much sitting. In either case, Adobe released Adobe Comp CC, which is a free productivity app that lets users mock up graphics, typefaces and user interfaces.

The man behind this innovative thrust is none other than Scott Belsky, better known as the founder of Behance. These days, he’s in charge of Adobe’s mobile products division, and is he ever ambitious. Over the next year or so, Belsky has plans to transform Adobe’s mobile apps into impactful multitasking tools that allow users to engage in faster workflows than what’s traditionally been possible on your desktop. So, yeah, Adobe has plans to make desktops obsolete—at least where designers are concerned.

What sets apart Adobe Comp CC is the tremendous amount of control that it empowers designers to have and use. One way this immediately becomes clear is through how its mock ups work. The app gives designers a choice of various styles of preset canvas sizes. Examples include business card, HD resolution website and iPhone screen sizes.

Then, users are free to make their own text, pictures and gridded shapes, all through a sequence of basic taps and pinches. Think of it as incorporating the simplicity and straightforwardness of using an iPhone…into Photoshop or Illustrator.

Belsky says that Adobe’s going to market the mobile app as “the first-mile app” for all of Adobe’s desktop products. In essence, designers can for the first time skip the daunting step of opening up a project in either Photoshop or Illustrator and just seeing the blank page…with no prompts on what to do next. With Adobe Comp CC, though, things get much, much simpler as designers only have to open the app and then can start working right out of the gate.

Touchscreen controls make designing intuitive

The mobile app’s easy-to-use, touchscreen controls make all the difference in the world. Tactile and intuitive, they offer users a level of instant gratification that has been a foreign concept on the Adobe desktop versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. With instant gratification comes increased productivity and efficiency.

Picture this: you need to draw a circle for a wireframe, yet your finger isn’t the steadiest in the world, so your circle becomes a rough-shaped circle. The app intelligently and automatically improves this to a perfect circle. You have further options, too: You can stretch the circle to customize it as you want for your design needs, with just a simple tap. When you draw three, basic lines beside the circle, you’re looking at a handy placeholder for text as well.

Want filler copy instead? Not a problem. By just tapping the app’s text tool, you can take the filler copy and make it paragraph, headline or subhead size. Without any friction, the text just appears where you want it, and if you want to resize it, that’s as easy as resizing the bounding box.

Here’s a nice bonus: you’re free to use any Typekit font that you want on said text. Adobe Comp CC holds the distinction for being the first mobile app to allow you to do that.

Extra features sweeten the deal

Yet that’s not all. Additional features take this mobile app from good to great.

A slider allows designers to swiftly move through layers; this replaces the more unwieldy outline format that’s prevalent on Adobe’s desktop versions. A simple three-finger swipe—think your iMac’s touchpad, here—lets you quickly see the whole history of your entire composition.

Then there’s also the Creative Cloud Market. It features all kinds of frequently necessary graphics, such as iOS navigation UI, that you can incorporate into your creations. This frees you up to grab all kinds of required media quickly without doing a Google search. (As of the time of publication, the Market is free, yet this is always subject to change.)

While all this sounds very promising, the innovation doesn’t stop there. Perhaps the mobile app’s most attractive hook is its connectivity, which couldn’t be more important these days with workflows occurring both on desktop and mobile.

Introducing the 360-degree workflow and CDF

Never before attempted, Adobe will introduce something called the “360-degree Workflow” later in 2015. This will empower designers to smoothly use media from app to app without missing a beat. To achieve this, Adobe created a file type named Compound Document Format or CDF. CDF is a universal language that both Adobe’s desktop and mobile apps share.

Here’s what this means for designers: you can easily export anything you create in the mobile app to either Photoshop or Illustrator on your desktop. Your creation will appear as a vector file, complete with intact layers and 1:1 pixel accuracy. Finally, you’ll also be able to import files in all third party-supported Creative Cloud apps.

In the next few, to several months, designers should look forward to the integration of CDF sharing with the tool interfaces themselves. Various creative apps will be linked together as one, cohesive unit.

It’ll work like this. A designer taps an image he’s been working on in Adobe Comp CC that sits beside the app’s stock-sizing options. He’ll be able to open it in something like Photo Editor, which is a third-party photo app by Aviary. With one tap, the image can open up in Photo Editor and permit filter application and thorough color correction. After another tap, said image could be sent back to Comp in a jiffy.

One reason that CDF works and is immensely appealing is because all of Photoshop’s features and capabilities will never properly translate to mobile. After all, Photoshop’s designed for larger monitors and precision-driven mouse movements. Yet by utilizing deep linking like in the Photo Editor example above, Adobe can handily bypass building all of Photoshop’s features into just one app. The company doesn’t need to—any number of apps (third-party or otherwise) could prove to be the best solution for any given project.

User response

So how will this ambitious mobile project by Adobe be received by the design community? It’s much too early to tell, of course, but early signs are indeed promising. Adobe Comp CC has already netted a perfect, five-star score from user reviews and ratings on iTunes. Not bad for an app that’s barely been available for 24 hours.

Earlier this year, we told you about Serif’s push to take market share away from Photoshop by releasing a graphics editor to directly compete against Photoshop. With Adobe’s very ambitious objective to make Photoshop easier than ever to use and its app-integration plans, however, Adobe won’t be going anywhere for quite a while.

SEO Bundle: Content Strategy Course + Website Auditor Pro – 81% off!

Source



Vía Webdesigner Depot http://ift.tt/1Fdidy1