Design

Dos and Don'ts of UX Design

Learn from Ethan Parry what UX is and how to successfully use it to improve your product or service If you do an online search, you’ll probably find a few different definitions of UX, but at its core its mission is simple: designing a product or service that resonates with the user and their needs. While a successful UX design might look simple because it’s so intuitive, there’s a large amount of research, prototyping, and preparation that goes on behind the scenes. In this video, UX designer Ethan Parry (@ethanparry) shares three dos for how to create a powerful UX design, and 3 don’ts which represent common mistakes.

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Why You Should Use Dreamweaver

This Adobe application simplifies the design process of a website. Learn why programmers and designers love it If you are interested in web design, you have most likely heard of Dreamweaver, a program created in 1997 by Macromedia but now part of Adobe's Creative Suite. It is one of the most famous website editors on the market and an essential tool for creating a modern and functional looking website. Web Designer and Domestika teacher Arturo Servín (@monkylab) knows it inside out, and here he will explain why it is the tool you should consider if you are thinking about building a website, even if you have no prior coding skills. First things first, Dreamweaver is not the only Adobe web design tool. The company also offers Adobe Muse, a somewhat more limited program in functions but very easy to use. Adobe, however, has stopped supporting Muse. The application can still be used, but it will not be updated. Over time, it will not be able to keep up with changes in the specifications of the different languages ​​that exist to create web pages, so web designers need to familiarize themselves with Dreamweaver as an alternative. For some designers, opening Dreamweaver for the first time can be overwhelming. The tools and interface can be very different from the design programs we are used to. But using it is easier than it seems and dramatically simplifies the task of programming the code of a website.

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The Importance of Stationery in the Digital Age

Find out why it is essential to design stationery for your company or brand

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Photoshop Tutorial: Rendering Hair and Eyes

2. Using a textured brush, begin adding streaks of hair to this lower area. If you’d like to make the brush more opaque simply open the brush settings, go to Transfer and under Opacity Jitter turn off the control using the drop down menu.

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How and Why You Should Integrate Instagram in Your Digital Portfolio

Instagram has become the biggest shop window on the internet, giving us a unique opportunity to show our work in a clear and simple way

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How to Improve Your Creative Portfolio

Your portfolio should convey your essence and your creative identity. That's why it's so important to know what to include and how to show your work Almost two decades of experience have made Colombian graphic designer Arutza Rico Onzaga (@arutzarico) a specialist in putting together a visual portfolio. Throughout their career, they have built and deconstructed the way they show their work in order to take their professional career to ever higher levels and overcome new challenges. In a recent lecture (which you can see in full at the end of this article), Arutza spoke about the "psychology of the portfolio" and gave some key tips to shape our creative CV based on examples from their own portfolio and their professional and personal projects.

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Early Concept Sketches by 5 of the World’s Most Famous Architects

5 of the world’s most famous architects’ sketchbooks and napkin sketches, from Frank Gehry to Zaha Hadid The first time most people see an architect’s work, it’s in glass and steel, brick and mortar, or digitally rendered. There is nothing quite like seeing the hand-drawn rough sketches that capture the raw imagination and inspiration of great minds before the arrival of practical adjustments and new opinions. Different architects will use their sketches differently: to define the details of their designs; situate themselves in the location; identify key elements; and capture their moods and inspirations; and logging cultural and emotional references. These drawings and notes can take many forms too, spanning from specific structural designs and elemental analyses to abstract illustration and more conventional visual art. Here is a collection of the raw concept drawings, from wild sketches that capture the energy and shape of the artist’s thoughts to annotated scribbles that mark the different considerations they had in mind. Renzo Piano Napkin sketches are notorious in the world of architecture, one architecture school even funded scholarships through the sale of those of famous architects. Perhaps one of the most legendary pieces is that of Renzo Piano, the designer of London’s tallest building, the Shard, who apparently came up with the original sketch of the building on the back of a napkin while eating out with the property developer Irvine Sellar. "He saw the beauty of the river and the railways and the way their energy blended and began to sketch in green felt pen on a napkin what he saw as a giant sail or an iceberg," recalls Sellar who keeps the drawing in his offices.

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Tips for Creating a Botanical Nook in Your Home

Discover how to create incredible DIY botanical spaces and make the most of them Interior design is not only about color, shapes, accessories, and spaces, plants can play a leading role: having green spaces in our daily lives is of the utmost importance. Meena and Ceci from Compañía Botánica (@ciabotanica)–a brand dedicated to the design of gardens, balconies, and green walls–are experts in combining plants and design. Together they create botanical pieces such as living paintings of cactus and succulents, which can be adapted to any environment. Here, they sharesome tips for incorporating plants into the design and decoration of spaces. Why is it important to have natural spaces inside the house? Creating living pictures and spaces is a way of having nature present in our homes or offices. They have a great impact, dazzle with their colors and shapes, and attract a lot of attention. That's why, if you don't have enough space in your house for big flowerpots, you can use bright pictures on the walls and small flowerpots that complement the small spaces: having plants on vertical surfaces can really catch the eye.

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Rock Posters: Three Design Approaches

Be playful and create impactful compositions that reflect your passion for music and design

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Movies Reimagined as Vintage Books

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6 Tips For Designing Packaging For The Perfect Unboxing Experience

Discover everything you should keep in mind when designing packaging for your product and the unboxing experience One of the greatest visual and tactile experiences when buying something, especially when it’s an online purchase, is the moment of unboxing. That’s why packaging has become an important pillar of the branding of many businesses: you’ve got to know where to source the materials and how to balance functionality and aesthetics to create exciting packaging that suitable protects what’s inside. Tatabi Studio (@tatabi) takes care of every detail of the packaging and unboxing experience and has developed this six-point guide that will help you plan your own product’s perfect design.

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Editorial Illustration Tutorial: How to Adapt to Different Layouts

Learn how to approach a magazine layout and how to adapt your illustration concept from Emma Hanquist From the pages of magazines to the headers of online articles, editorial illustration is everywhere, using striking imagery to create engaging interpretations of body text. Beyond the creative challenge of creating images that compliment written pieces, editorial illustrators also deal with a unique set of constraints depending on each project, as formatting and page layout can vary greatly even within the same print publication. Knowing how to look at a mockup is crucial to creating impactful editorial and cover illustrations, and requires more than just scaling a drawing down to size. In this tutorial, editorial illustrator Emma Hanquist (@emmahan) explains how to adapt your illustration concepts to different types of page layouts and cover mockups, and warns against common mistakes.

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Brand Personality: How To Be Authentic

Brands, there are a lot of them. Brands with personality, not so many. How do you create a brand that stands out? There’s a phrase that I love and with which I couldn’t agree more: “Beauty attracts attention, personality makes you unforgettable.” I don’t know who said it first. We heard it from a client and it’s been stuck in our heads ever since. It’s said that our role as designers is, among other things, to create visual identities that are different and attractive; that turn heads and cause people to pick the products they represent off of shelves crammed with shapes, colors, and endless options; visual identities that people want to follow on Instagram; that they fall in love with. But we should never limit ourselves to only creating aesthetic solutions. Content defines form. The concept comes first. If you learn to define a brand’s personality, then you will understand its sense of style instead of trying to dress it up in something it doesn’t feel comfortable wearing.

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How to Use Guides and Grids in Adobe XD

Ethan Parry explains how to use guides and grids to create successful prototypes when designing UX interfaces using Adobe XD As UX grows to play an even larger role in the way designers, developers, and businesses serve the needs of their users, the ability to easily iterate and test new solutions has become invaluable. As a leading design software for UX interfaces, Adobe XD makes it easy and fast to prototype and test different UX designs. Beyond mastering its basic functions, understanding how to use the software’s guides and grids is crucial to creating prototypes that are effective, aesthetically pleasing, and consistent across the entire user experience. Ethan Parry (@ethanparry), a service designer and UX research consultant, regularly uses Adobe XD in his own work. Here he explains the different functions of guides and grids, and how to use them to get the most out of your work.

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Illustration Tutorial: How to Export Your Artwork Step by Step

Learn the basic steps to export a finished illustration project with Silvio Díaz Labrador in three different ways Exporting a piece of artwork correctly is a vital step in any graphic design or digital illustration project. There is no point in spending hours preparing and polishing a piece in Adobe Illustrator, if afterwards its print or the resulting file loses quality and detracts from your work. That is why graphic designer and art director Silvio Díaz Labrador gives us these key tips to create our projects' final artworks in three different ways according to our needs. Learn how to do it without sacrificing the quality of your work with the following tutorial:

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Challenge: Create a Low Cost Still Life Set

Daniela and Mara, AKA the Flaminguettes, are a duo of creative directors who have worked with clients such as Sony, Adidas, and Nike Finding a good design proposal requires a lot of work, making it original and fun is even harder. But, Daniela and Mara, the creative director duo known as Flaminguettes (@flaminguettes), have the energy to take on any creative challenge, designing sets for brands like Air France, Cirque du Soleil, Nike, Adidas, and Sony. This is why we took advantage of the last Domestika Cup in Colombia to propose a Domestika Challenge: would you be able to conceive a low-cost still life, using only materials and objects within everyone's reach? See how they did in the video below:

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What Is a Pattern Design?

Learn how to create a pattern with pattern design specialist Juan Díaz-Faes

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Mood Boards for Brand Identity Design

Design studio The Negra teaches you how to conceptualize a visual universe Mood boards are among the best starting points that any creative can use before embarking on a new project. In identity and brand design, they l help you share your vision with your client and make sure that they agree on the general path the design will take. For creative studio The Negra (@thenegra), the mood board is a way of understanding the graphic universe in which a brand develops. Learn their method of searching for visual references, building boards, and visualizing a concept.

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Domestika Diary: COVL

The multidisciplinary self-taught artist talks about her process and why creative exploration is so important to her. Just like there are no limits to a person’s creativity, there are seemingly no limits on the number of mediums available to experiment with. In fact, dabbling in new techniques and trying new tools can be a way of expanding your own skill set and discovering different forms of creative output. For multidisciplinary artist COVL, whose clients include Nike, Netflix, Instagram, and Cadillac, experimenting with mediums outside her comfort zone is the key to improving her craft. In this Domestika Diary, she talks about her process, her experience working from home, and how the diversity in her work helps her see and find creative opportunities everywhere she looks.

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Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design

Delima pays tribute to the work of Dieter Rams with an illustration series Dieter Rams (Germany, 1932) is a universal reference in the world of industrial designers. A key representative of the functionalist movement, his work stands out for its minimalism and adherence to the philosophy, “less, but better”.

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Norman Foster brings another sustainable landmark to Madrid

See the incredible plans of iconic architect Norman Foster to turn a 115-year-old warehouse into an ultra-sustainable office complex in Madrid The epitome of the international modern architect, Norman Foster is famous worldwide. The British designer has always had a soft spot for the Iberian peninsula however and, in 2017, he even built a foundation that carries his name in the Spanish capital. The center has served as a hub for design, debate, and innovation ever since. The foundation isn’t the only thing keeping him busy in the city: Foster+Partners is already hard at work on the development of the old Barclays Bank building in Plaza de Colón, the famous Cepsa Tower, and even the reforms to the 1912 palace in Chamberi that houses the Norman Foster Foundation itself.

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How To Combine Colors in Interior Design

Learn to create harmony and impact with these simple tips for combining colors in interior design from Miriam Alía Miriam Alía’s (@miriamalia) designs have featured in editorials like Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Interiores and more. Here she shares basic rules for combining colors that you can play with and can help you establish what works best for you.

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Branding Tutorial: How to Design a Logo

Basic tips for approaching a logo design from The Negra A logo can be the icing on the cake in a graphic project. Or its starting point. Either way, it must be distinguishable, unique and memorable. And that's where the fixed rules end, because even one of the most intuitive imperatives–legibility–does not always apply, it depends on what the brand is looking for. This is what the three partners of the Argentine studio The Negra (@thenegra), designers Diego, Lio and Pancho, teach us. In this tutorial, we learn basic premises to create a good logo, taking into account the message we want to convey, the brand to which it is applied, and the graphic options we have.

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How to Ignite an Idea for a Foldable Picture Book

How to kickstart a foldable book project and what you will need to bring it to life Roger Ycaza (@rogerycaza) is an award-winning illustrator, author, and musician from Ecuador, specializing in children’s books. One of his favorite formats is the foldable book, given that it allows illustration to take center stage and requires the author to explore unique ways to connect their visual language with the story being told through text. Here, Roger takes us through his process for coming up with an initial idea that ignites a new book, as well as showing us some different foldable formats and the materials he recommends using to bring them to life.

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Adobe XD Tutorial: Basic Design Functions

Learn with Ethan Parry how to draw shapes, edit colors, and add text using UX design software Adobe XD. User experience has become an increasingly important part of design—bringing together designers, developers, and other stakeholders to create websites and digital products that users can easily and intuitively navigate. Implementing a successful UX design can result in more sales, improved branding, and better conversion, making it a necessary design principle regardless of the industry or audience being targeted. That’s why Adobe XD is such an important tool. A leading vector-based UX design software for web and mobile apps, it can be used to design and prototype wireframes and layouts that can then be implemented and tested. Ethan Parry (@ethanparry) is a service designer and UX research consultant who regularly uses Adobe XD in his own work. In this tutorial, he explains the software’s basic design functions, which are the building blocks you’ll need before you can begin building your own app.

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What is Collage, And How Has It Evolved?

Learn about the origins and current use of collage, an artistic technique that can awaken our creativity Collage is a technique that has evolved as the number of its collage artists has multiplied. It allows the use of virtually any material and, over time, it has become a versatile art form, with many exponents and styles. Origins of collage Although similar artistic techniques have existed since the Middle Ages, many critics, art historians, and museum institutions consider that collage itself was born in the 20th century. Others, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, recognize earlier photo-collage works as part of this technique. In the example below, from the mid-19th century, Georgina Louisa Berkeley created a watercolor photo-collage with albumen print photographs. She and other Victorian artists who explored the technique depict themselves and other women in an independent context, far removed from the domestic life to which they were confined.

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How Social Changes Influence Spaces

Learn how interior design is impacted by social changes and the lifestyle of each user

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Free Resources and Tools for Web Design

A selection of websites with brilliant tools to improve your app and web design

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Vega Hernando Talks Her First Book, "Eat!"

Vega Hernando, the founder of Eating Patterns, talks us through publishing her first recipe book After Vega Hernando launched Eating Patterns in 2016, the Barcelona-based designer and cook always dreamed of publishing her own book. Four years later, we’re celebrating the arrival of “Eat!”, Vega’s first recipe book dedicated to seasonal ingredients.

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Postmortem Project Evaluation: What Is It and How Do You Do It?

Improve your skills, assess the progress you’ve made, and become a better creative through self-critique When you finish a project, it’s very important to carry out a post-mortem evaluation. This will convert your self-critique into a powerful tool that pushes you to be better. The biggest challenge is having to separate yourself from a project you’ve spent so much time on, stand back, and analyze it objectively. Designer, illustrator, director, and conceptual artist Nathan Jurevicius (@nathanjurevicius) shares his top tips for productively critiquing your work.

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