MotoCMS Design Digest: 28 Best Articles for April 2015

MotoCMS Editorial

10 years ago

It’s high time for our traditional MotoCMS Design Digest. This issue contains, as usual, the best articles and researches about web design and related topics. You’ll get some inspiration from our cool roundup of the most interesting and unique website designs. You’ll also find some answers to the most up-to-date web design and usability questions. And, of course, will check out loads of the coolest freebies for web design projects.

Web Design and Development
UX Issues
Tips and Tricks for Web Designers
Best Freebies
Design Inspiration

Web Design and Development

Since Google announced its algorithm update on April, 21 that will be focused on mobile-friendliness, responsive and mobile-oriented design became one of the most discussed topics for all web-related blogs and websites. Here you’ll get a few insights on the issue and find out some more info about the future of web design.

A List Apart – Content-First Design

This brilliant article from A List Apart takes video game storytelling experience and discusses how it can be used in content-first design. Here you’ll find some cool suggestions about the advantages of creating a conversation design instead of focusing on a structure-first design.

Vandelay Design – The Top Tips & Trends for Contact Page Design

Contact Page is one of the essential parts of the website design structure. It’s your way of communicating to users so Contact Page, its design and all its elements should be perfectly thought-out.

SitePoint – New Web Layout Ideas for 2015

Trends are still one of the coolest topics for now. A SitePoint article discusses the coolest and the most popular trends in layout design for 2015.

Inspired Magazine – Who are you Designing the Website For?

Website for business should not only be beautiful and useful. It should help you achieving the main goal in turning your visitors into your customers. So think carefully, who are you creating your website for?

Web Design Ledger – Google Wants Your Website To Be Responsive

As we already mentioned above, Google requires all websites to be mobile-friendly. This article should help you to understand if your website is ready for new requirements and what you need to focus to become closer to users.

Smashing Magazine – Design Principles: Compositional Flow And Rhythm

It’s a part Six of the Smashing Magazine projects for Design Principles. This article will teach you about website layout composition and how you can control its flow.

UX Issues

Usability is one of the main topics for any website owner and creator. User-oriented design is a cornerstone of a good website. This section offers the best UX articles to give you the idea of what you need to make your website more user-friendly.

Vandelay Design – Communicating UX Goals Through Interface Design

This post will give you some proven methods of creating a good interface design. Once you’ll get the idea of creating a good website interactive elements you’ll achieve a clear path to creating better user experience.

Usabilla – Why Designing for Usability Just Isn’t Enough

This article from Usabilla Blog shows why user-focused design is not all that you need. Creating an emotional connection with a visitor is as vital as making a website easy to use.

Web Designer Depot – How to Perfect Your UX with Persona Scenarios

Predicting how various types of users behave on a website is really helpful for testing the future website performance. This post gives you three persona scenarios that you can use for testing usability of any website and find out a problem on an early stage.

Tips and Tricks for Web Designers

This section showcases the best articles with the coolest tips you can use in your everyday design routine. You’ll find advice on creating lettering and backgrounds for websites as well as get practical recommendations on transforming your design into code with some great tools.

Web Designer Depot – 3 Responsive Design Disasters and How to Avoid Them

In this article any web designer will find the most common mistakes that happen when creating responsive design and get practical advice on how to fix or avoid those disasters.

TutsPlus – How to Create a Vivid Video Game Background in CorelDRAW

A cool practical post from Tuts+ that gives step-by-step recommendation on creating a popular video game background.

TutsPlus – Hand Lettering: How to Stylize Your Letters

Another cool post from Tuts+ is focused on 9 most common types of letter stylization you can use for adding zest to the website design.

Designmodo – How to Use Size & Space in Interaction Design

Size of website elements and spacing between them can also be great means of design. Using them wisely you can add focus to certain website sections that need more users’ attention.

SitePoint – The Web Designer’s Guide To Programming

It’s an old-time discussion whether a web designer should know coding. This article from SitePoint proves that learning code gives many advantages to a web designer and offers some recommendations on where to start.

Hongkiat – 10+ Services & Tools To Convert Designs To Codes

Continuing with the code topic, this article offers you a collection of awesome tools and services that will help you easily transform your designs into clean code.

Onextrapixel – Improve Your Work with These Wonderful Web Applications and Resources

Another collection of great resources that should help web designers and developers in their work. It showcases platforms for website building, coding and debugging tools.

Best Freebies

Free stuff section this month includes tons of fresh UI kits and mockups as well as traditional collections of icons, fonts and textures. Here you will also find roundups of the best free tools for web design projects.

Web Designer Depot – 50+ Incredible Freebies for Web Designers, April 2015

This post contains the huge collection of free icons, mockups, fonts and UI kits issued in April. Most of them are created in flat style or with a use of trendy vintage effects.

Web Designer Depot – Free Download: Sketch UI Kit

This free UI kit incorporates the now popular Google Material Design principles. Despite that fact it doesn’t looks like a Gmail clone at all.

Spoon Graphics – 10 Free Detailed Vector Halftone Texture Backgrounds

10 Halftone textures from Spoongraphics can be used for backgrounds and in various other projects adding a cool retro effect to design.

Hongkiat – 15 Free Ebooks for Designers & Developers in 2015

This collection offers you the best and latest free eBooks on web design and development. Those books touch upon various design topics – from SVG and typography to adaptive design peculiarities, JavaScript, HTML, PHP techniques and apps design.

Hongkiat – 20 Free Brochure PSDs You Can Download

This collection offers you free brochure mockups in PSD format that you can easily customize and use for your needs.

Hongkiat – 20 Fresh and Free UI Kits For 2015

UI kits are a handy solution for novice web designers as well as for experienced ones who don’t want to waste their time on building interface from scratch. This collection contains the freshest UI kits that will fit different kinds of design.

Inspired Mag – Get These Amazing Freebies for Designers: April 2015

Inspired Mag also collected various April-edition freebies that include mockups, textures, icons UI kits and fonts for any web design project.

Inspired Mag – Freebie: 300+ Free Flat Color Icons

Here you’ll find a whole bunch of free icons in Flat style that save you a lot of time and money.

Design Inspiration

Inspiration can be found in almost any website design. This section includes cool posts that will give you inspiration in terms of color, layout or navigation use.