The day’s best and most important design- and design business-focused articles, tutorials, and resources hand-picked by Pariah Burke.
- Why Sketching Is An Important Part of The Design Process
“Nice drawings!“ This is a typical comment I hear when a team member sees my sketches spread across my desk. What my coworkers may not realize is that these sketches are an important part of the design and development process. Sketches help to convey ideas, demonstrate functionality, visualize user flow, and illustrate anything that requires human interaction.
- 9 Multimedia Resources for Information Design
If you want to learn how to design user-friendly websites, create interactive infographics, redesign your navigation, visualize a dataset or simply brush up on visual communications and information architecture, the resources below can help you…
- Eddy Cue reveals why Apple is fighting Justice Department on ebooks
In a rare interview, Cue sat down with Fortune to talk about the ebook controversythat has embroiled Apple and the six top book publishers ever since the iPad launched with the iBookstore in 2011.
Apple was found guilty of conspiring to raise ebook prices in 2011, after the launch of the iBookstore saw price of ebook new releases spike 17% overnight. Apple has maintained its innocence through the entire ordeal, and though the company has been criticized for its litigious nature, Cue says the company has to “fight for the truth,” no matter what.
- Typography Terms 101: Everything You Need to Know
Barbs, beaks, brackets, bowls.
Baffled by typography terms? You’re not alone.
One of the most common questions we field at Print is what the heck typography’s various terms all mean. We called in Denise Bosler, author of Mastering Type: The Essential Guide to Typography for Print and Web Design, to serve as our official translator. Here, Denise shares a selection from her book breaking it all down:
- The Definitive Guide To Getting Paid As A Freelancer
Most freelancers, myself included, tend to be optimists. We expect that things will work in our favor. Don’t we all love that high you get after signing a new client? When you realize that over the next few weeks or months a bunch of brand new money will be sent your way?
But that sense of accomplishment and optimism can fade pretty quickly. And it usually fades around money. Late invoices. Stubborn clients. Squabbling over payment terms. The stress that naturally comes around when you realize that you live in a world of fixed expenses and variable income.
- TOR For Newbies: When Should You Use It?
Savvy users should already know whether using TOR is right for their needs, but what about the newbies out there? How are they to decide if they want to take the plunge into the world of TOR? This infographic will show you everything you need to know about how TOR works, when you should use it, and how to get started.
- How to Beat the Freelancer’s Dreaded Nemesis: Unbillable Time
In this post, I’ll identify seven culprits (including the administrative tasks I discussed in the earlier post) behind unbillable time. I’ll also explain how to minimize the amount of time you spend on those unbillable tasks so that you can earn more money.
- “Productive People Are Never ‘Free’”
Productive people are never “free.” They don’t have 15 minutes on their lunch break to “have a quick call.” They don’t “kill time”—a terrible phrase. You can always put a window of time to good use if you work for it. Productive people schedule their priorities—not always their time, but always their priorities. When they don’t have something to do, they find something to do.
- Where’ve you been? Your smartphone’s Wi-Fi is telling everyone.
Wi-Fi is everywhere. And because of its ubiquity, Wi-Fi access points have become the navigational beacons of the 21st century, allowing location-based services on mobile devices to know exactly where you are. But thanks to the way Wi-Fi protocols work, mapping using Wi-Fi is a two-way street—just as your phone listens for information about networks around it to help you find your way, it is shouting out the name of every network it remembers you connecting to as long as it remains unconnected.