MotoCMS Design Digest: 31 Best Articles for February 2015

MotoCMS Editorial

10 years ago

It’s time for our monthly roundup of the best and the most useful articles, tools and resources on web design, UX and development for February 2015. As usual, we surfed the web looking for the coolest info that can be helpful for graphic and web designers, developers and website owners.

This time it’s full of various tips and tutorials on website and logo redesign, Photoshop lessons and color combination guides. Here you will find a few awesome posts on UX and its testing. February has brought us a lot of nice free web design stuff, so grab it faster! And don’t forget about getting some inspiration for your future projects.

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

Web Design and Development

This time Web design category features articles on different topics e.g. logo design, information architecture and mobile typography. Here you will also find a cool roundup of web design tools as well as a helpful guide on choosing a website builder.

Vandelay Design – Ultimate Guide to Designing Brand Guidelines

Branding guidelines are vital features of a company’s identity that define the company’s style and helps employees choose the best ways of organizing their work and planning new campaigns. This “Ultimate Guide” should help any company to establishtheir own branding guidelines that will work for all employees.

Noupe – Six eCommerce Design Trends for 2015 to Level up Your Online Shop

And again, a post about 2015 trends. This article contains web design trends that should help eCommerce website to gain more traffic and raise conversions in 2015.

It’s Nice That – Logo Book Author Michael Evamy on What Makes Great Logo Design

This article features a cool interview with a Logo Design book author, Michael Envamy, on what makes a great logo and how to create a logo that will work for your company.

Design Shack – Google Material Design: Everything You Need to Know

Google introduced its Material Design concept last year. This style has quickly gained its fans and today not only app developers, but many web designers use its basic principles for creating websites. This post is a quick guide to basic features and characteristics of Material Design.

Line25 – 8 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Website Builder

Choosing a website builder is like choosing a company for building your house. Your should carefully examine all offers and select the one that has the best characteristic and meets your own requirements. This article from Julia Blake gives high-quality recommendations on what questions you should ask yourself before selecting a website builder.

Web Designer Depot – The Ultimate Guide to Information Architecture

Information architecture is both art and science. You should build a layout that presents your info the best, and design it to offer people the best UX. Here are a complete guide to IA for any website designer, developer and UX specialist.

Web Designer Depot – 7 Simple Rules for Mobile Typography

High-quality typography makes a good design even better. It helps to convey information and may influence on users’ actions. In our days mobile typography should be used carefully to improve text readability to mobile devices users.

Onextrapixel – 10 Excellent Time-Saving Tools for Developers

Developing a website is a time-consuming process. That’s why using tools and programs that help easing the process is not forbidden. This article features a collection of the coolest time-saving tools for creating a website.

UX Issues

User experience today deserves even more attention than web design. One of the main questions here: how to combine cool-looking design with great UX. With a growing popularity of mobile devices use this question becomes more and more important.

Boag World – User Experience Design: How Far Will You Go?

We live in a world where everything changes extremely fast. User experience requirements are not unbreakable rules too. Paul Boag displays his own approach to the UX.

Smashing Magazine – An Exploration Of Carousel Usage On Mobile E-Commerce Websites

A current argument about carousel sliders seems to tend to believe that this element is anti-pattern and doesn’t pay to the UX. This article is to break all arguments about carousels point by point and show that carousels may be really good for users.

Web Designer Depot – How to Test the Usability of Prototypes like a Pro

Usability testing is an inherent part of a web design and development process. Learn when, what and how you should test to get a perfect UX of your prototype.

SitePoint – Mobile UX Design and All the Ways It Could Go Wrong

UX design for mobile devices is a specific process that may not make use of standard usability techniques. Here are the most common mistakes that can be made when designing mobile websites and recommendations on how they can be avoided.

Tips and Tricks for Web Designers

Cool web design and development tutorials appear on the Internet everyday. Here you will get fine tips on color combinations use, prototyping and wireframing guides and a great bundle of Photoshop tutorials for everyone.

Tuts+ – Celebrate Adobe Photoshop’s 25th Birthday With 25 Inspiring Resources

Tut+ offers an incredible collection of various tutorials for Photoshop to celebrate this unique software’s 25th anniversary.

Noupe – Opposites Attract: Tips for Designing a Clean Yet Colorful Website

Mostly we imagine a clean website design in a monochrome or pastel color palette. This article shows how to create a clean design with a splash of color.

You The Designer – 9 Color Combinations To Try This 2015

Sometimes it’s hard to find new and cool color combinations that really work for design. This short guide displays color combinations that will be trendy this year in web design, fashion and interior design.

Web Design Ledger – Getting Started with Low-Fidelity Wireframe Sketches

Low-fidelity design is considered to be a bare-bones design when you just define your future design. This post offers simple tips for creating lo-fi wireframe sketches.

Six Revisions – 10 Tips for Prototyping Your Designs

Another post on design prototyping that includes the best practices from various specialists.

PixelCrayons – All Aboard with Ruby On Rails

This post features a nice infographic about the popular design framework called Ruby on Rails.

Best Freebies

There were tons of free stuff in February. Icons, UI kits, Photoshop actions and even bundles of various freebies – here you can find almost any kind of web design elements you need.

Web Designer Depot – The Best Free UI Kits, February 2015

Web Designer Depot offers an awesome collection of free UI kits that will be useful for any web design application.

Vandelay Design – 45 Amazing and Free Photoshop Actions

Photoshop actions allow performing a complex set of manipulations they usually perform to achieve a certain effect with one click. This collection of the coolest Photoshop actions will be helpful for web designers and photographers.

Just Creative – Free Vector EPS Pack of Flat Office Icons

This set of 36 flat office icons includes PNG and PSD files as well as AI formats and EPS files.

Web Designer Depot – Free Download: 59 Flat-Style Illustrations

This collection will be a perfect gift for web designers for creating hero images in horizontal projection. The archive features 59 individual images in PNG, PSD, ESP and SVG formats.

Inspired Magazine – Get 284 Premium Design Resources worth $511 for FREE

This exclusive set features a whole bunch of cool web design stuff like vector illustrations and images, Hi-Res textures, text styles and stock images. You should just subscribe to get all this stuff for free.

Web Designer Depot – 50 Incredible Freebies for Web Designers

This post contains a collection of freebies that includes best February editions of icons, mockups, templates, UI kits, fonts and wireframes.

Inspired Mag – Freebies for Designers: February 2015

Another post with a set of the best and latest free stuff for web design projects including fonts, UI kits, PSD files, mockups and many more.

Hongkiat – 40+ Freebies & Goodies For Web Designers

This collection of free design elements includes mostly icons, fonts templates and a few cool plugins that can be helpful for your next design project.

Design Inspiration

Inspirational posts were really popular this month. They offer roundups of websites with the trendiest features like parallax scrolling effects, error pages and color gradients.