• Sans serif type is not harder to read than serif.
• Capitalized text isn’t harder to read.
• The idea of 5-9 nav items is false – while not always practical, it should be more about 4.

This book is definitely a must read for any designer, and I’d even recommend it to developers as well. It never hurts to learn as much as possible about every aspect of our industry. You can get it from Amazon for $17.99

A collection of icons I made for a secret project I’m working on, free for you to use! Use as you like, the only thing I ask in return is a nice tweet or share someplace for others to find.
Download the PSD

PSD includes 100x100px icons of:

• Codesnippit
• Dribbble
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Github
• GoodReads
• Instagram
• Lanyrd
• LinkedIn
• Meetup
• Pinterest
• Ravelry
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• WordPress
• Youtube

Want to see other icons or formats? Just leave a comment below and I’ll place some time aside each week to make some

This also gives me the opportunity to see behind the scenes – I don’t deal directly with normal clients, but instead I interact with the designer who then interacts with the client. Sometimes I even interactive with the project manager, who deals with the designer, who deals with the client. Needless to say sometimes things can get quite messy. We developers love you designers, but things aren’t always rosy.

While we devs aren’t perfect when it comes to dealing with the “other side”, there are several things I’d like to point out that would really help us help you better – and ways you can avoid being that stereotypical annoying nerd type.

Be Upfront About The Project

One of the most annoying things that a designer can do is to not be upfront about a particular project. It’s really annoying – and almost a deal breaker – to deal with you as a designer at the beginning of the project, and then all of a sudden you disappear and some project manager from some company you’ve never heard of and never agreed to work with suddenly steps in to be your liaison. If you’re working with other agencies, that’s cool, just let us know up front that’s who we’ll be dealing with.

Your Mockups Look Like A Massacre

Your designs are your babies and we developers want to make sure we take care of them well – but it’s impossible to correctly code a site if we can’t get the resources we need. Handing us over a mockup that takes up half our HD, with hundreds of layers that aren’t named, grouped or in any logical order isn’t going to cut it. And please, don’t get angry if we end up missing all of your rollover states because of this.

Temper Tantrums

Nobody likes it when they can’t get their way – but sometimes the web is going to do what the web is going to do. Yes we’d like get everything pixel perfect, the unicorn animations smooth, parallax working behind jQuery flying wizards…but sometimes it’s just not possible. We’re not here to sabotage your design. We’re here to help you and sometimes you need to trust our judgement when something can’t, or shouldn’t, work.

You Stood Me Up!

Web projects are never precise in any category, and much less so in schedule. What you think is a quick and dirty project really ends up taking months, and something that looks long and daunting is finished in days. So we understand that you can’t always get the project start dates correct. But please, please, if you ask us to schedule you in for a date and realize you’re not going to be ready – please let us know so we can fit someone else in in that time slot. I often have 4-5 projects scheduled in for one week and normally only 2 come through. I end up turning down projects when I could’ve ending up doing them! I’ve contemplating require deposits before I put clients on the schedule, although this isn’t very convenient to you, the designer.

Developers Are Annoying Too

We developers are not without our own shortcomings and I know that it can be difficult dealing with us sometimes. A list of things I think we developers could work on as a whole:

• Communication – we tend to drift off into our own world!
• Pay Attention – especially the backend programmers who tend to skirt the details
• Respect – just because you don’t touch the backend, doesn’t make you any less important or smart in the web world
• Learn – I believe the web would be a prettier place if developers took some time to learn basic design principles and kept up with the trends and new techniques.

Your Thoughts

What are some of your pet peeves when working with designers? How can both sides better communicate?

It’s interesting to see how many freelancers just work wherever they can, be it the local Starbucks, a spare bedroom or even the kitchen table. From my experience though, it’s extremely important to have a nice dedicated space, preferably filled with your favorite things.

While I don’t do any sort of graphic design, interior design is one of my favorite hobbies so I thought I’d share some tips and inspiration with you.

Read the rest of my post on FreelanceFolder »

If you’re planning to go global and expand your business worldwide, the first thing you need to know is that creating a website for a foreign market means more than just translating the text of your English website. Cultural differences play a significant part in your future relationship with clients and visitors.

Although it might look slightly overwhelming at first, creating a website for a foreign market can be successfully done by following a few steps:

Stop, pause and think

Before you choose the website colour or font, you should stop, pause and think for a moment: Which country would benefit from your products or services? Which country has room for yet another online business? There’s nothing more frustrating than launching into a new market and being choked by strong competition. Check the other companies out and come up with a few ideas to outsmart them and win at their game.  After carefully choosing your new market, phase two can begin.

Act local

The first thing you need is an individual Top Level Domain (TLD). This helps twofold – better rankings on local search engines, plus respect and trust from local clients. In case purchasing individual TLDs for you foreign websites proves too expensive, use subdomains for each local site, with their location set in the target country from Google Webmaster Tools.

Cultural background

You should think of a general, unifying design for your websites, regardless of market, in order to create an image for your company. However, this does not mean that you won’t have to adapt and localise the imagery for every foreign market you want to target. For example, websites created for Asian countries should be livelier, full of colours and animations; Western websites should be simple and deliver a clear, straightforward message.
No matter how you change your website, keeping your navigation bars horizontal should save you some trouble when it comes to switching between right-to-left and left-to-right writing/languages.

More than just colours

You might think choosing the right colour is not that much of a problem. Well, think again. Colours play a significant part in day to day culture. Take for example red- it means ‘danger’ or ‘love’ in Western cultures, but it stands for ‘good luck’ and ‘celebration’ in China. For a safe pick, the general consensus is that blue works fine worldwide.

The “right” images

You probably realized by now that it’s a bad choice to use the same images for different markets and cultures. An image of an American family enjoying your product won’t have the same effect in China as in the US.
Also, you shouldn’t forget about Low Context (American, German, British etc) and High Context (Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc) cultures, and the impact the differences between them have on web design. For High Context countries, a website bursting with images, colours and the mandatory dancing animations are really important, but that certainly won’t work in the Western society.

Choose the best tools

If you’re going to create a series of localised sites and you want to quickly switch between languages without starting from scratch, then UTF-8 is your answer. With unique code for every character in over 90 languages, UTF-8 can easily switch between German, Arabic or even simplified Chinese.

Another great tool you should take advantage of is Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. This helps you keep the content separated from images. You won’t have to start from fresh if you need to change the language of your content from one localised site to another. Another great thing about CSS is that the size of the files is small and this helps the pages load faster.

If you’re aiming for fast loading pages, keep in mind that a Flash heavy website will slow everything down. Visitors won’t wait 2 minutes for a home page to load and you might lose potential clients.

Content is the heart of your website

The most important part of your newly localised websites will be its content. Nothing ruins a customer’s desire to buy your products quicker than spelling mistakes, grammar errors or odd phrasing.

While it is cheaper to use machine translation tools, such as Google Translate, or various translation widgets on your website, the safest option is to seek professional help. A native translator will ensure your copy is professionally translated, taking into account everything from abbreviations, jargon and colloquialisms to culture-specific phrases.

Cross cultural web design may seem like a lot to take in at first but the results are more than worth it. Following these simple steps and, more importantly, doing some research before you get started, will surely pave your road to going global.

A free digital cookie to any of you typophiles who can guess this typeface from my rough sketch:

And playing with my first letter drawn in Illustrator (man I miss my Wacom tablet now!)

I love old school serifs. My ‘A’ certainly isn’t perfect or super awesome, but it has been fun drawing this point by point, especially when having to zoom in 6400% (the max!) so I could work on smoothing out the inner curve (still not balanced!). The more I look at it, the more errors I see :0, but I have to remind myself I’m just doing this for fun. Let me be anal about it later if I ever make it to “z”.