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SaaS products largely look the same irrespective of functionality.

I’ve made a conscious effort since starting this notes section at the turn of the year to work on some design improvements.

Spoiler: not in code contexts When you write in your text editor or messaging app, it will likely change the quote to the correct one and do this for you across the OS.

By no means a unique thought, but something I’m feeling that many are experiencing too.

A pattern I've noticed is what feels like pages within pages.

I’ve had this website quite a while in a flat file system now.

Traffic has been in steady decline on this website.

It’s been on my mind for a little while if it’s worth just having an open stream of consciousness to ‘blog’.

I want to write about my experience adding an analytics script back to this website with Simple Analytics.

When writing or typesetting a design, I have things I follow in terms of creating a good flow to the article or balance within a page.

Bento grids are an interesting layout pattern, and CSS grid handles them well.

I had been wanting to redesign for a while—it’s been more than enough time.

With this version there was little to no visual change.

If I think back to the first time I saw a typeface with ink traps, it was Retina by Frere-Jones.

Have you found yourself thinking: ‘how many times have I set this font size?’

Finding and settling on a way to use colour within your illustrations is a fun challenge.

Images play a large part in the reason why websites continue to grow in page size.

This year I decided to take it at a slower pace with articles.

One of the things you may face with applying a stroke to an object in Illustrator, is which of the three alignments should you use?

Search is a common function of a website, app, etc.

When designing there are techniques for applying colour, typography, spacing, you can rely upon regardless of the situation.

When starting out on a new project or being newer to design, getting your ideas to be what you visualise can be difficult.

In Illustrator it seems to be more difficult than it needs to be to export a colour palette to hex values.

Patterns and textures were popular before flat design came along.

When using kerning or tracking on your type it can help with legibility or correct the way type looks for a specific situation.

2016 was the second year I’ve written a post every week.

Making anything in Illustrator involves using the shape tools more often than not.

Icon fonts are used for their convenience, which generally can’t be matched by SVG.

The second in a monthly series where I roundup some of the best things in design I found over the course of the previous month.

As it’s the festive time of year, I thought I would add to the lists of gifts that people are writing.

I’ve been working on a recent branding project for a company called Go2Golf.

With horizontal scrolling, submenus are quite challenging to make work.

Maintenance weeks are where detail website tasks, instead of a regular post.

This is the start of a monthly series of a roundup of well designed websites, and articles I found helpful.

Memorising shortcuts of any application improves efficiency.

The redesign of this website has been needed for some time.

Circular is very much in the spotlight at the moment.

In the last post the basis for the visual style was set.

Last in the series completed the wireframes.

Maintenance weeks are where detail website tasks, instead of a regular post.

Continuing from the last post, which looked at the initial sketching and wireframe.

Filtering is a huge part of online shops, it’s an effective form of navigation.

Illustrator being a vector application means it can be easy to overlook the export process and making things pixel perfect.

I’ve finally done the redesign of this website!

It’s likely you know how to align things in Illustrator, but you can never remember how to distribute space between things equally, so you resort to the tedious way of spacing them individually.

It’s been proven as apps have shifted away from the ‘hamburger’ navigation, to a bottom bar, engagement and browsing metrics have increased.

Maintenance weeks are where detail website tasks, instead of a regular post.

Headroom.js is a popular plugin for providing additional functionality in having a fixed header.

Following up from the design in Illustrator post, it’s time to code the design.

Since they appeared in iOS it’s been a trend to recreate these using CSS only.