donderdag 24 november 2016
dinsdag 15 november 2016
zondag 24 januari 2016
woensdag 17 september 2014
The end of the pretentious designer
There’s a problem in the design world. It’s not a problem of the magnitude of wage inequality, discrimination in the workplace, or child labor, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
It’s the epidemic of pretentious designers. Some are just a little bit pretentious, and do so in a hipster sort of ironic way. And others seem to take themselves entirely seriously, and are apparently unaware of their pretentious nature.
In either case, it’s time for this to end. That’s right, I’m calling for an end of the pretentious designer.
This isn’t cancer research
Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat. For 99% of web designers, the things we create aren’t going to change the world. At least not directly.
On its most basic level, our job is to make pretty things that are useful. Sure, sometimes those useful things can make a huge impact. But we’re not curing cancer here.
Even if you work for a non-profit and they’re working on curing cancer, your design isn’t doing that. It’s still just a website.
Now, that’s not to say that good web design isn’t important at all, or that it can’t affect change. Of course it can. But at the end of the day, we’re still just pushing pixels around on a screen.
Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but it’s going to be the case for 99% of designers.
Contributing to the problem
While there are a lot of things that contribute to the pretension problem in design, one of the biggest factors is the language we’ve started to use surrounding our jobs and our work.
Ten years ago, a web designer was a web designer. Maybe you were a UI or UX designer, but most likely, you were a web designer. Someone managing a team might have been an art director, creative director, or project manager, but these were all accurate job titles that reflected what the person actually did.
Now, we have titles like these:
- Digital Marketing Magician
- Social Media Badass
- Brand Warrior
- Digital Overlord
- Mobile Sensei
- Chief Visionary Officer
- Digital Prophet
- Dream Alchemist
- Happiness Heroes
- Innovation Sherpa
- Genius
Also commonly found are Gurus, Jedis, Evangelists, and the like.
You’re not a magician, you’re likely not a badass, warrior, overlord, sensei, prophet, alchemist, sherpa, or hero. You might be a genius, but it’s more than a little pretentious to use that as your job title.
A magician is a person with magical powers. A warrior is a soldier or fighter (or a yoga pose). An overlord is a ruler or feudal lord. A sensei is a teacher (generally in martial arts). A prophet proclaims the will of God. An alchemist transmutes base metals into gold. A sherpa is a mountaineer who’s only going to be found in the Himalayas. A guru is a spiritual leader or teacher. A Jedi can use the force. And an evangelist is looking to convert others to Christianity. In all likelihood, you are none of these in your role as a designer (or in other roles in your life).
This is a sherpa. You are not a sherpa.
You’re a designer. You might be an art director, design director, creative director, UI designer, UX designer, information architect, mobile designer or designer/developer. But you are not a magician, warrior, badass, overlord, sensei, prophet, alchemist, guru, sherpa, Jedi, evangelist, or hero. In fact, you’re not even a ninja or rockstar, either.
Part of this also has to do with the level of expertise that a lot of those using these titles have. If your biggest web design project to date was for your cousin’s band and they paid you in waived cover charges and free domestic beer, then you’re not a guru. Sorry to break it to you.
On the other hand, if you’re someone like Jeffrey Zeldman, Adelle Charles, or Jakob Nielsen, and you want to call yourself a guru, then who am I to tell you not to? Although you might notice that none of those people use wacky job titles (they use Founder & Chairman, Visual Designer, and Principal and User Advocate, respectively).
Why it’s bad
The issue with pretentious designers is that they can alienate others. Design is already looked at in many circles as an uncomplicated position, and one that almost anyone can do.
By creating titles that basically sound like jokes, we’re reinforcing that view. But beyond that, it makes us sound arrogant and alienates people.
Alienates clients
Clients are looking for a web designer. They’re not looking for a guru, or a sensei, or a warrior, or an overlord. They just want a designer. Preferably one who isn’t going to make them feel stupid if they don’t understand the difference between rhythm and hierarchy or they if they need it explained why a red and black color scheme might not be the best idea for a daycare website.
Alienates the public
Beyond just your clients, the public at large already has an often dim view of designers. It’s not always taken seriously. We’re looked at as pixel pushers, or a bunch of computer nerds living in our parents’ basements.
Cutesy, artificial-sounding job titles do not improve our public image. “Design director” is a title that elicits at least a bit of respect. “Dream Alchemist” does not. And doesn’t even really say what it is that you might do.
Alienates other designers
While some designers have jumped on the bandwagon, not everyone has. You can make those who choose to use standard job titles and describe their work in accessible language feel like you’re looking down on them or won’t take them seriously.
Beyond the job titles
But beyond the job titles, a lot of designers come across as pretentious in all of their language. It’s using pretentious, hard-to-understand terms in your portfolio, correspondence, contracts, and other work that will make it hard for potential clients to relate to you.
Is it really worth appealing to the tiny percentage of people who respond positively to a pretentious image at the expense of the majority who don’t?
An 8-step program to stop!
Pretentiousness can be like an addiction. So here are some steps to help you stop. Originally this was going to be a 12-step program, but it’s not that complicated, so forcing 12 steps in itself seemed very pretentious.
1. Admit you’re pretentious
The first step in overcoming your pretentious designer tendencies is to identify them and admit to them.
2. Look to those who inspire you
Take a good look at the designers you admire and look up to. You’ll probably find that most of the best designers out there don’t use pretentious titles, but instead use titles that accurately describe what they do. Even those who do use fun titles generally do so in a very tongue-in-cheek way and do so in limited quantities.
Take your cues from those who have already gained the success you hope to achieve.
3. Use a title that describes what you actually do
If you’re a web designer, call yourself a web designer. If you’re an art director, call yourself an art director. The same goes for creative directors, project managers, design directors, and every other design-related position out there.
4. Rewrite your copy
Think about how you’d write the copy on your website if your grandmother was reading it. Or someone whose idea of high-tech is their flip phone. In any case, the goal here is to write copy that’s accessible and user-friendly.
5. Apologize for being pretentious
While this one isn’t necessarily something you have to do, realizing that you may have pissed people off or annoyed them is a positive step.
6. Keep tabs on your pretension
Just because you’ve banished pretentiousness from your life for now doesn’t mean it won’t creep back in. So make sure you remain ever-vigilant against it.
7. Educate others
When someone on your design team is proposing using titles like “sherpa” or “guru”, educate them. Tell them why it might not be the best idea for anything beyond internal use.
8. Laugh about it
Above all, be willing to laugh at this kind of thing. Again, people, this isn’t curing cancer. If you really want to use titles like “Jedi”, go for it. Realize that you may alienate some people, and try to keep in mind just how ridiculous it’s going to sound to some, but if it makes you happy and you’re willing to risk it, then do it.
Featured image by Ryan McGuire, Gratisography.
| Eveleth Letterpress Font Family (all 16 fonts) – only $9! |  |
The end of the pretentious designer
20 Greatest Health, Fitness and Beauty WordPress Themes
More and more health and beauty websites started appearing each day, as the beauty and health industries are growing fast! There are so many spas, salons, fitness or medical centers businesses, and all of them need well designed websites in order to attract more clients. Sometimes, a custom design also means higher costs, that is why business owners can always choose a pre-made theme and pay only for the customization of the theme.
Here we featured 20 health and beauty WordPress themes for spas, salons, fitness centers and even hospitals. Check them out and let us know which ones you think are the best!
Sportify – Gym WordPress Theme
This WordPress theme is best for gym, fitness, training centers and other similar businesses. Additional pages can be easily created with the existing elements; there are predefined template pages already created!
Hercules | Gym Fitness WordPress Theme
Hercules theme has the most wanted features for a fitness and gym site. This theme has an extensive documentation with easy setup instructions!
Young Fitness – Spa & Fitness WordPress Theme
Young Fitness is a responsive WordPress theme, best used for health problems, gymnasium, spa and other purposes websites. This is the best theme to introduce your website to everyone!
BeautyBlog | Fashion, Beauty & Health Magazine
BeautyBlog is a super flexible, multifunctional and fully responsive professional WordPress Theme. It is designed towards for beauty sites like spa, salon, health care, beauty store and other blogs and magazines. It comes with WooCommerce store, Multilignual support, Visual Composer and many more features.
DreamSpa – Responsive Beauty Salon WordPress Theme
Spa theme with tons of potential features for Spa Business.Whether you create a fresh website for your salon or need a feel good refreshing style for your existing web presence, Dream Spa will be the best choice.
LifeCare – Responsive Medical WordPress Theme
LifeCare is a powerful and responsive Multipurpose WordPress Theme with pretty much advanced features. It has all the features what you need for a medical and clinical or health or fitness related theme with appointments functionality
Healther – Medical & Health WordPress Theme
Healther WordPress Business Theme is perfectly suitable either for medical or business websites. Healther comes with the whole bunch of useful modules which give you a great opportunity to customize this theme to your needs.
BeautySpot – WordPress Theme for Beauty Salons
Theme comes with the complete package of templates, widgets, short-codes, custom posts to showcase your treatments / services. This is a versatile health care business theme suitable for spa, therapy, massage, yoga, wellness treatments, Ayurvedic cure, beauty salon websites.
Ospedale Responsive WordPress Theme
Ospedale Responsive WordPress Theme was designed for Medical sites and other appropriate categories sites. The template is adaptive and very easy to customize.
FitPro- Events Fitness Gym Sports WordPress Theme
FitPro is an modern Fitness Gym WordPress theme handcrafted to meet the needs of gymnasiums, fitness/sports clubs and related small businesses. The theme comes with plethora of features aimed at making this the most modern and most complete theme in the Fitness category.
MedicalPress – Health and Medical WordPress Theme
MedicalPress is a premium WordPress theme for Health and Medical websites. It is a highly suitable theme for doctors, dentists, hospitals, health clinics, surgeons and other type of health and medical related institutions.
Fitness WordPress Theme eCommerce
Fitness is a gym WordPress Theme designed in a minimalist style. It has a responsive layout that looks great on mobile and tablet devices. Fitness WordPress Theme is WordPress and eCommerce for Fitness, Gym and Sport Clubs.
PharmaPlus | Medical & Fitness Theme
Every function that is desired for spa, gym, health & medical practice management has been included in it: appointment booking, time table, opening hours, department management. It includes price table, price plan and much more that makes it a great multi-purpose health & medical theme.
Medicom – Medical & Health WordPress Theme
Medicom is a fully responsive premium WordPress theme that suits to every medical & health websites. It is built with Bootstrap 3 and includes lots of awesome features.
Gimnasio Responsive WordPress Theme
Gimnasio Responsive WordPress Theme is the best way to build a site, designed mainly for fitness and gym websites. It can also be used for any other type of website, especially for sports, spa, events etc.
Dr. Doe – Responsive One-Page Wordpres Theme
JD WordPress theme is a responsive and retina-ready one page wordpress theme with grid system layout. Mobile Touch optimized.
Fitness – Premium Gym WordPress Theme
Fitness is a powerful responsive Gym premium WordPress theme , built on the Bootstrap Framework, jam-packed with features. It is SEO optimized and it follows the latest trends and best practices in onsite optimization.
Health Medical Center – Responsive Theme
The theme is built for medical practices, dentists, doctors, surgeons, hospitals, health clinics, paediatrics, psychiatrist, psychiatry, stomatology, chiropractor, veterinary clinics and other medical related practices. It has purpose oriented design.
Medicals Health & Medical WordPress Theme
Medicals is a responsive premium WordPress Theme especially created for medicals and hospital/healthcare industry. This theme gives a corporate feel which also suitable for business purposes.
BeautyFit – Health & Beauty Multipurpose Theme
It comes with WooCommerce store, Multilignual support, Page Builder and 3D Layer slider. Theme is suitable for websites that need a feature rich yet beautiful presence online.
The post 20 Greatest Health, Fitness and Beauty WordPress Themes appeared first on Web Design Blog | Magazine for Designers.
20 Greatest Health, Fitness and Beauty WordPress Themes
Cute File Browser with jQuery and PHP
Today we want to share a cool experiment with you. It is a cute file browser, which you can upload to a folder somewhere on your site and share documents, pictures and other files with the world. The app is built with PHP and jQuery and uses CSS3 extensively – no images or icons were used in the design, and the animations are smooth and work well even on smartphones.
How to use it on your site
Go ahead and grab the zip file from the download button above. Unzip it, then upload it to your server. The folder files is where you should place everything that you wish to share. No further set up necessary – the script doesn’t use a database and no configuration is needed.
Cute file browser
The idea
If you wish to learn more about how it works, here is a high-level overview of the functionality:
- A PHP script – scan.php – scans the files folder and returns all files and folders as a single JSON object.
- Our JavaScript code, with the help of jQuery, takes this JSON, and turns it into a grid of files and folders. Clicking a folder re-renders the view with its contents.
Because there is only one request to the backend involved, browsing through the file list and searching is instantaneous. We also update the URL and use the hashchange event to monitor for navigation using the back/forward buttons.
We invite you to play with the code – it has lots of comments and is relatively easy to follow.
Forcing files to download
Browsers open text files instead of downloading them. If you wish to force all files to download, place this .htaccess file in the files folder:
<Files *.*>
ForceType application/octet-stream
</Files>
It should be called .htaccess (with a leading dot). This file is only supported on Apache web servers.
The design
The PSD for the design is available for free to all of our newsletter subscribers! Join or login from here to download it.
We hope that you find our file manager useful! There are lots of cool things that can be added to it, like browsing photos in a lightbox, playing back audio and video, and even enhancing it with file management features and uploads. We’d love to see what you come up with!
Cute File Browser with jQuery and PHP
Acer K272HUL Display
Budget Widescreen Monitor
The Acer 27″ widescreen K272HUL display offers lots of room with an impressive, sharp, native resolution of 2560×1440 in a 16:9 aspect ratio. It has abundant connectivity, built-in speakers, and a great price for people on a budget; however, a few conventional ergonomic features are missing.
A 3/4″ shiny black bezel frames the 27″ display. It has a five-button control panel at the bottom right, which is difficult to see because the black buttons are indistinguishable from the rest of the frame. The screen has a sturdy base; however, it only tilts back and forth. There’s no swivel, no height adjustment, or ability to change orientation from landscape to portrait.
The control panel has some good basic features, such as sliders for adjusting brightness, contrast, and individual colors by saturation and hue; but none for adjusting color temperature. Instead, factory presets allow standard viewing of graphics and movies. Using DataColor’s Spyder4 to calibrate the display, I got a decent response, but could only achieve 80% of the Adobe RGB color space. (This might be a deal breaker for demanding photographers and graphic artists who need a wider color space.)
Still, its large, LED backlit, non-glare screen has an impressive viewing angle of approximately 170°, making it ideal for viewing multiple documents or movies with friends. Its modest 60-Hz refresh rate should be fast enough for economic-minded gamers, as well. The display has most of the ports you’ll need: two HDMI ports, two DisplayPorts, a DVI port, and audio jack.
The Acer K272HUL might not be ideal for photo editing but it’s a terrific display for all-around use.
Company: Acer Inc.
Price: $399.99
Web: www.acer.com
Rating: 3.5
Hot: Inexpensive; wide screen
Not: Tilt-only screen; narrow color space; no USB ports
Acer K272HUL Display
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