Posts Categorized: Articles
Articles containing opinion and advice on responsive web design, freelancing, and Bootstrap.
What is Visual Hierarchy in Web Design and Why is it Important?
When designing a page layout it is important to consider the overall visual hierarchy of the page. In other words, what grabs your eye first, second, third? What are the goals of the page and how can you make those goals easier to achieve? Your design can use size, color, position, and proximity to define… Read more »
Category: Articles
What Are the Pros and Cons of Using Bootstrap in Web Development?
Is a CSS Framework Like Bootstrap Even Necessary? If you are new to CSS frameworks, you are probably wondering what the benefits are of using Bootstrap in your project. Prior to using Bootstrap, I used a boilerplate I wrote myself that consisted of a reset, basic grid, typography, utilities, and media queries. Below are the benefits I… Read more »
Category: Articles
5 Important Things to Keep in Mind When Making a Responsive Web Design?
1. Write your CSS mobile first Write as though you are only targeting a mobile device. 2. Work in gradual stages Once the mobile device looks good add styles in media queries for larger viewports in stages working your way to larger sizes. 3. Keep your media queries grouped by component and not in a… Read more »
Category: Articles
What Is the Best Way to Learn Bootstrap 4 and Responsive Design Basics?
Compare Learning Responsive Web Design to Learning How to Paint a Picture If you were an absolute beginner, how would you feel if your first painting ever looked like the one below? You would probably feel really proud and want to share it with someone. The person you share it with would say… Wow! You painted… Read more »
Category: Articles
Design Trends, the Power of Influence, and Appropriate Design
Design Trends Think about all of the things you look at everyday: websites, movies, billboards, menus, youtube videos… Your eyes and brain are constantly absorbing information. All of this visual content is influencing your frame of reference. Some streams of images are more powerful and persistent than others. Take for example your computer, you could… Read more »
Category: Articles
Going from Print Design to Web Design – My Learning Story
Early in my career I worked as a graphic designer for an advertising agency. I mostly designed brochures and sales flyers but on one project we discussed building a website to get leads. After I had the design ready we met with the development team to discuss the project. Half way through the meeting I… Read more »
Category: Articles
The Four Stages of Learning
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” – Socrates The four stages of learning Earlier this month I received an email from Henry who shared his experience learning Java and web programming. It was so inspiring I decided to interview him to learn more about his motivation and learning path…. Read more »
Category: Articles
How Setting Goals and Losing Sleep Can Help You Learn Programming
In this post I will be interviewing Henry Grammy who who has learned the basics of HTML, CSS, C++, C#, and PHP in just 4-5 months. His story is motivational because it shows what can be accomplished when you set goals and challenge yourself to achieve them. If you are just starting out as a… Read more »
Category: Articles
Style Guides are Important but Often Ignored
“We began to refer to this living document as “a toolkit built in style guide form.” This achieved our goal to communicate our work…” – Mark Otto, creator of Bootstrap Framework Style Guides are Important but Often Ignored Recently at work, one of our websites was redesigned to be mobile responsive. It was developed by… Read more »
Category: Articles
Sparky Bootstrap 3 Sass Starter Project and Tutorial
It was a challenge for me to understand Grunt, Sass, and GitHub. So I decided to share a starter project I use for each Bootstrap 3 Sass project as well as a video tutorial series to help you learn the workflow.. Sparky: A Bootstrap 3 Sass starter project I created a starter project that provides… Read more »
Category: Articles
Starting Front-end Development with Bootstrap Sass
“It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.” – Paula Scher, designer Good Reads Ways to Make Bootstrap Columns the Same Height JavaScipt for Web Designers: DOM Scripting [tool] I just heard about Adobe XD which looks like a great way to build prototypes other than… Read more »
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Bootstrap 3 PSD Grid Template – Photoshop Download
Do you design websites in Adobe Photoshop or in the browser? Personally, I recommend designing websites in Photoshop because it removes the design imposed by default styling of browser CSS and frameworks like Bootstrap. This will help websites look less like Bootstrap and more customized. The templates I created contain the minimum information you need… Read more »
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5 Common Problems Web Developer Beginners Face and How to Fix Them
When I began learning web design, I built websites using Adobe Dreamweaver because I could see a visual output of what I was building. This was familiar to me because I was used to designing in Illustrator and Photoshop. However, when the site wasn’t working I had no choice but to use the source code tab and… Read more »
Category: Articles
10 Things Every Etsy Shop Owner Should Have
Have you noticed a drop in your listing views on Etsy? Competition on these marketplaces have made it extremely difficult to receive listing views and exposure of your products. Your listings might be perfectly optimized for SEO with the proper use of keywords and tags but it still receives little to no views. You might… Read more »
Category: Articles