Things Employees Can Do To Make Their Life Better During Lockdown At Home

We’re officially in a coronavirus lockdown, to pass the time and make our lives a bit more organized, we’ve made a list of things that employees, designers, and creatives could do during these days in between working from home, binge-watching, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Netflix, Prime Video, Zee5, etc. and feeling a little confused as to how this has all happened.

UPDATE YOUR SYSTEM (MACBOOK, LAPTOP, DESKTOP, MOBILE)

We all know that we’ve dismissed that notification way too many times, take this time to update your computer or any technological device you have to the latest software. Your device will thank you.

UPDATE YOUR CREATIVE CLOUD (ONE DRIVE, GOOGLE DRIVE, ETC.) AND OTHER SOFTWARE

Again, now is the time to stop ignoring the notifications and just update everything on our computer or mobile to keep our machines working in tip-top condition, especially seeing as they’re probably being used even more frequently than they were before.

CLEAN YOUR SCREEN (TV, LAPTOP, MONITOR, MOBILE, ETC.), KEYBOARD, MOUSE, PROJECTOR, REMOTE, AND ANY OTHER DEVICES

Doing it to the tune of happy birthday is optional. We touch our keyboards and mice a lot, so it’s important we keep our laptops, computers, and any other devices hygienic during this pandemic. Whilst your there give your screen a nice buff too, get rid of any fingerprints and dust that have made a home over the last month.

BACK UP YOUR FILES

Just in case, God forbid, your laptop decides to pack it in (based on how well the year has gone so far, I wouldn’t want to risk it, 2020 is a sassy b*tch), take this time to backup all your important design files onto an external hard drive. If you’re super cautious like we, then back your external hard drive up onto another external hard drive for an inception style fail-safe system. Continue this process for as many times as you deem necessary.

UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE

Now is a good time to go back and see if you could spruce up your website. Is the copyright year correct in your footer? Are you the latest projects up there? Have you linked up to your social media feeds? There are lots of small quick ways that you can give your website a bit of spring clean that doesn't require too much effort.

UPDATE YOUR PORTFOLIO

Following on from checking your website is up to date, have you mocked up your latest designs and written up some accompanying text to support your employment? As employees, we infamously put off the dreaded portfolio update, but now is a better time than any to get rid of that project from 5 years ago that you didn’t even enjoy doing…

ARRANGE A MINI PHOTOSHOOT

I know that getting dressed, washing your hair and applying make-up (if that’s your thing) is now a mammoth task, but if you can pry yourself out of your pajamas then why not use this time to take some quick snaps of yourself and update your profile picture/bio pictures across social and your website. Plus, you’ll feel fabulous afterward and people will look up to you in awe for actually brushing your hair.

WORK ON A PERSONAL PROJECT

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to lose work as a result of COVID-19 (99.9% of the population) then why not exercise your creative freedom without client restraint - don’t get us wrong, we love our clients, but having the luxury of complete creative freedom is glorious. If you’re stuck for ideas you can comment us, definitely, we will provide brief ideas.

CREATE A PERSONAL PROJECT

If you don’t already have a creative project on the go, then why not create one? If you’re stuck for ideas maybe chat with your friends and brainstorm some ideas, or you can comment on us for some inspiration.

START A BLOG

If you’re good with words (or even if you’re not!) why not exercise your creative writing skills and add a blog to your website? Blogs are a great way to drive traffic to your website, whilst also showcasing your expertise and opinions on specialist subjects.

WRITE SOME CONTENT FOR YOUR NEW BLOG

If you’re stuck on how to write a blog, take a look at answer the public to see what people are frequently searching for. You can then create a website based around these topics, alternatively, ask your followers or clients what they’d like to learn more about. A blog doesn't just have to be words, you could also utilize your inner YouTuber and create some killer video content for your blog and socials.

LEARN A NEW DESIGN PROGRAMME

That program that you’ve been wanting to learn? Why not learn it now! There’re tonnes of online courses (free and paid) that can show you how to use different software. You could even skill swap with a friend to teach each other how you use your current programs and compare tips and tricks.

CREATE BULK SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

We schedule our social media using Planoly and bulk create and schedule content for our Instagram and Facebook page. Why not list a couple of ideas that you could post about on social media and find or create some lovely graphics to go along with them. This will save you time and allow you to free up your time to engage with your audience more.

WORK ON YOUR WEBSITES SEO

Everyone’s SEO can be improved. Search for some keywords that you’d like to rank with and create some content around them, whether this is video, blogs, or web pages. Another great way to boost SEO is through backlinks - reach out to fellow freelancers or businesses and see if you can guest blog on their website in exchange for a link back to your site.

PIN ALL YOUR DESIGNS ON PINTEREST

Pinterest is an unutilized traffic source for a lot of designers, go through your old projects, pick out the best bits, and make them Pinterest-able! Take a look at which pins are most successful and replicate that in your Pins.

UPDATE A DRIBBBLE ACCOUNT

Similarly, to Pinterest, Dribbble is a great way to be inspired by and connect with other designers. These platforms are also used by prospective employers, so they are a great way to showcase your design work.

UNSUBSCRIBE FROM ALL YOUR SPAM EMAILS

We’ve been emailed by every single one of our subscriber lists about the COVID-19 update, now is a good time to look through those emails and unsubscribe from those emails that you instantly delete to free up some space in your mailbox.

ORGANIZE YOUR SYSTEM (DESKTOP, LAPTOP, MACBOOK) DESKTOP FILES

Delete all those unnecessary screenshots, rename your files and organize them neatly to give your desktop a bit of a spring clean. It’s also a great time to go through and delete all 1000 screenshots of your home screen you have on your smartphone too…

Hopefully there’s enough stuff there to keep you busy for at least one month of lockdown…

Let us know what you’re doing to keep the boredom at bay, and stay safe and stay home.

Most Popular Website Design Topics For 2020

1. Responsive Design
2. Minimalism
3. Parallax Scrolling
4. Infinite Scrolling
5. Cross-Browser Compatibility
6. Typography
7. CSS Animations

Most Popular Website Design Topics for 2020

Responsive Design

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user's behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images, and intelligent use of CSS media queries.

Minimalism

Minimalist website design is an under-appreciated art. We've all heard the saying 'Less is more', but it's a principle that's often easier said than done. As progressions in technology open up new possibilities in site design, it becomes more and more difficult to resist adding some fancy flourishes. 

Minimalist website design benefits users in the shape of faster loading times and better compatibility between screen sizes. What's more, a simple UI design is attuned to mobile browsing, without harming the desktop or user experience.

The minimalist philosophy centers on the idea that you must design around the content. In web terms, the designer starts with rough content, then builds just enough interface for users to identify their goal and navigate to it easily.

Parallax Scrolling

Parallax scrolling is a web site trend where the background content (i.e. an image) is moved at a different speed than the foreground content while scrolling.

parallax scrolling's been around for a while but it's a web design trend that refuses to go away. Parallax scrolling is when the website layout sees the background of the web page moving at a slower rate to the foreground, creating a 3D effect as you scroll. Used sparingly it can provide a nice, subtle element of depth that results in a distinctive and memorable website. 

To show how it should be done, here are some sites that employ the technique to good effect. In some cases the parallax scrolling is the star of the show; in others it simply adds a touch of depth that makes the foreground seem to pop out a little (if it's a pared-back look you're after, explore our celebration of minimalist website design). 

If you fancy really pushing the boat out, these impressive CSS animation examples showcase another great way to make your website stand out from the crowd. Now, let's take a look at some sites using parallax scrolling in very much the right way.

Infinite Scrolling

Infinite Scroll is a JavaScript plugin that automatically adds the next page, saving users from a full page load. You’ve likely seen it in use all over the web.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

The history of cross-browser is involved with the history of the "browser wars" in the late 1990s between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer as well as with that of JavaScript and JScript, the first scripting languages to be implemented in the web browsers. Netscape Navigator was the most widely used web browser at that time and Microsoft had licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer 1.0. New versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Due to the intense competition in the web browser market, the development of these browsers was fast-paced and new features were added without any coordination between vendors. The introduction of new features often took priority over bug fixes, resulting in unstable browsers, fickle web standards compliance, frequent crashes and many security holes.

Typography

Typography is, in essence, the art and technique of arranging type. It's central to the skills of a designer and is about much more than making the words legible. Your choice of typeface and how it works with your layout, grid, color scheme, and so on will make the difference between a good, bad, and great design.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, and adjusting the space between pairs of letters.

CSS Animations

CSS animations are a proposed module for Cascading Style Sheets that allows the animation of HTML document elements using CSS.

Early on in the development of the CSS animation, it had drawn concern from those who prefer animation via JavaScript[5] or, to a lesser-used extent, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL); others have claimed that it is a move by Apple Inc., the main sponsor of the WebKit project, to sidestep the inclusion of Adobe Flash (and the incumbent Flash animations) on the company's iOS line of mobile devices which use Safari. Furthermore, although Cascading Style Sheets is a relatively easy to use programming language, many programmers still struggle with making animations. With this problem, several individuals and websites have developed and created open-source CSS button animations with code for users to copy. However, even with these previous controversies, CSS animations can be predominately found and widely used across the internet.

What is website design?

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; interface design; authoring, including standardized code and proprietary software; user experience design; and search engine optimization.

Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client-side) design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating markup then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

Evolution of web design

In 1996, Microsoft released its first competitive browser, which was complete with its own features and HTML tags. It was also the first browser to support style sheets, which at the time was seen as an obscure authoring technique and is today an important aspect of web design. The HTML markup for tables was originally intended for displaying tabular data. However designers quickly realized the potential of using HTML tables for creating the complex, multi-column layouts that were otherwise not possible. At this time, as design and good aesthetics seemed to take precedence over good mark-up structure, and little attention was paid to semantics and web accessibility. HTML sites were limited in their design options, even more so with earlier versions of HTML. To create complex designs, many web designers had to use complicated table structures or even use blank spacer .GIF images to stop empty table cells from collapsing. CSS was introduced in December 1996 by the W3C to support presentation and layout. This allowed HTML code to be semantic rather than both semantic and presentational, and improved web accessibility, see tableless web design.

In 1996, Flash (originally known as FutureSplash) was developed. At the time, the Flash content development tool was relatively simple compared to now, using basic layout and drawing tools, a limited precursor to ActionScript, and a timeline, but it enabled web designers to go beyond the point of HTML, animated GIFs and JavaScript. However, because Flash required a plug-in, many web developers avoided using it for fear of limiting their market share due to lack of compatibility. Instead, designers reverted to gif animations (if they didn't forego using motion graphics altogether) and JavaScript for widgets. But the benefits of Flash made it popular enough among specific target markets to eventually work its way to the vast majority of browsers, and powerful enough to be used to develop entire sites.

What is Website?

A website is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com, and amazon.com. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.

All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web. There are also private websites that can only be accessed on a private network, such as a company's internal website for its employees.

Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, commerce, entertainment, or social networking. Hyperlinking between web pages guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with a home page.

Users can access websites on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The software application used on these devices is called a web browser.

What is Design?

A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process, or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product or process. The verb to design expresses the process of developing a design. In some cases, the direct construction of an object without an explicit prior plan (such as in craftwork, some engineering, coding, and graphic design) may also be considered to be a design activity. The design usually has to satisfy certain goals and constraints, may take into account aesthetic, functional, economic, or socio-political considerations, and is expected to interact with a certain environment. Major examples of designs include architectural blueprints, engineering drawings, business processes, circuit diagrams, and sewing patterns.

The traditional role of design has been to improve the visual appearance and function of messages and information. The publishing industry relies on designers for printed and online books, magazines, and newspapers that inform, delight, and support the interests of readers. Designers distinguish businesses from their competitors in the marketplace through innovative approaches to branding, the comprehensive design of messages, products, and services that express the character of a company and define its relationships with consumers. Advertising design promotes the marketable qualities of commercial products and services through a variety of communication media. And information designers translate complicated numerical and textual explanations into visual forms that help people see patterns in data and relationships among the components of complicated ideas. In all these practices, designers use typography, photographs, illustrations, and graphic elements to construct messages that attract attention, cause us to think about their meaning, and stay in our memories over time.

The person who produces a design is called a designer, which is a term generally used for people who work professionally in one of the various design areas—usually specifying which area is being dealt with (such as a textile designer, fashion designer, product designer, concept designer, web designer (website designer) or interior designer), but also others such as architects and engineers. A designer's sequence of activities is called a design process, possibly using design methods. The process of creating a design can be brief (a quick sketch) or lengthy and complicated, involving considerable research, negotiation, reflection, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design.

The rational model

The rational model was independently developed by Herbert A. Simon, an American scientist, and Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang Beitz, two German engineering design theorists. It posits that:

1. Designers attempt to optimize a design candidate for known constraints and objectives.
2. The design process is plan-driven.
3. The design process is understood in terms of a discrete sequence of stages.

The rational model is based on a rationalist philosophy and underlies the waterfall model, systems development life cycle, and much of the engineering design literature. According to the rationalist philosophy, design is informed by research and knowledge in a predictable and controlled manner.

Example sequence of stages

Typical stages consistent with the rational model include the following:

• Pre-production design
  • Design brief or Parti pris – an early (often the beginning) statement of design goals
  • Analysis – analysis of current design goals
  • Research – investigating similar design solutions in the field or related topics
  • Specification – specifying requirements of a design solution for a product (product design specification) or service.
  • Problem solving – conceptualizing and documenting design solutions
  • Presentation – presenting design solutions
• Design during production
  • Development – continuation and improvement of a designed solution
  • Testing – in situ testing of a designed solution
• Post-production design feedback for future designs
  • Implementation – introducing the designed solution into the environment
  • Evaluation and conclusion – summary of process and results, including constructive criticism and suggestions for future improvements
• Redesign – any or all stages in the design process repeated (with corrections made) at any time before, during, or after production.

Each stage has many associated best practices.

Design is all around you

What is your objective when starting a new product, business, or project?

What is your objective when starting a new product, business, or project? In fact, a design refers to the plan for achieving that objective. Color, shape, technology, and function each are means of realizing this objective. It is because people always play a central role in design that it has the power to bring progress to society. We consider good designs to be things that truly enrich people’s lives or have the potential to do so.

Changing definitions of design

The meanings of words change gradually with the times. The word “design” is no exception. It’s said that the word first came into widespread use at the start of the 20th century. Over roughly 100 years since then, the meaning of the word has changed gradually. Another characteristic of the word “design” is the fact that it has different meanings to different people.

For these reasons, the Japan Institute of Design Promotion (JDP), an organization intended to promote design in general and the organizer of the Good Design Award, felt the need to issue guidelines concerning our thinking about design. Accordingly, a brief description of our thinking about design is provided below.

Our thinking about design

It’s said that the word “design” comes from the Latin word designare. Designare is said to have meant to draw a plan. For this reason, it is thought that the word design initially was used in this sense of a plan on paper. In fact, the characters used to write the word for design in Chinese have this meaning.

In light of this historical background, one might think that anything planned on paper could be called design, but this would seem to leave out the most important subject of what is the essence, or the central feature, of contemporary design.

Just what is central to design? After years of working with design, it appeared to us that the answer was “people.” While we may refer to them as “users” or by the lofty term “society,” people always are a central concern when a designer plans something new. The designer asks him or herself the questions “What do people need? What should I design for them?” We consider this to be the core that is of utmost importance to the contemporary definition of design.

We consider design to consist of the series of processes of thinking constantly about people most of all, identifying objectives, and planning ways to achieve them. We believe that what is realized as a result of this process is one design solution.

Design of products and services

One topic that is brought up often these days about design concerns the design of products and services. Since we think of design as we defined it above, the Good Design Award accepts entries for both products and services. But sometimes we are asked if mixing the two does not lead to confusion. We’d like to take this opportunity to spell out our guidelines on this subject.

Products and services often are discussed in binary opposition to each other. This is true not only in design but in other areas as well. This reflects the binary opposition between tangibles and intangibles. But we believe that when talking about design it might be better to think of products and services in a slightly different way. In the case of design, we think that the difference between products and services is a difference of focus. A product is a means of achieving a service, and a service is an objective. We believe that this is the difference between products and services. For example, the Sony Walkman was a big hit around the world at one time. Viewed as a product, the Walkman was a portable music player, but beyond that one could discern the objective of being able to listen to music while walking around. That was the service. Providing the portable music player made it possible to achieve this service. This is how products and services are related.

So what do you think the designers designed in this case? We believe that they designed both a product and a service. Or more accurately, we could interpret this as a case of using a product as a means of designing a service. When considering this example in screening of the Good Design Award, we would look first at the appropriateness of the service and then at the appropriateness of the product in light of that service. In other words, we believe that instead of separating products and services in design we should continue to look constantly at both, without regard for their tangible or intangible status, because the product itself is a means to an end.