-
Allan Cole, Christy Nyiri
High Quality, Free, Open Source Design Assets – 2022 Edition
When I first started learning web design, every type of creative software I used was proprietary. These tools often came at a cost, and there was no way to customize them beyond what was originally intended. Later, I discovered WordPress, which exposed me to the idea of open source software, and I instantly became fascinated…
-
Allan Cole
Challenging our Empathetic Assumptions
Earlier this summer, the Dotcom Design team performed a quantitative segmentation study on a collection of small business to gain a better understanding of their needs and expectations as it relates to having a web presence. Before joining a8c, I ran a small business offering contract web design and development services. The majority of my…
-
Allan Cole
Trust is Consistency over Time
Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of people who use websites for all kinds of different things — fashion blogs, online portfolios, e-commerce stores, etc. Regardless of the type or purpose, there’s one common thing amongst all successful websites —TRUST. In business, trust can take many different forms and the more efficient you…
-
Allan Cole
Empathetically Challenging Gutenberg
For this challenge I dug up an interesting article from Longreads called “Welcome to the Center of the Universe” and tried to recreate it using our Gutenberg plugin. Here’s a screen capture of how it went: It took about 26min to complete which is pretty quick by my standards. Much of the article’s content in…
-
Allan Cole
Don’t Forget to Eat Your Accessibilitables!
Earlier this year I designed and developed a new free theme for WordPress called TextBook. It is intended to be used by people and organizations who have a focus on education. After launching a new theme on WordPress.com, we typically follow it up by submitting it to WordPress.org so it can also be used in…
-
Allan Cole
Capturing Your Ideas
There’s nothing in the world like having one of those elusive “ah-ha!” moments, when that great idea lightbulb appears right above your head. It’s like you struck gold but the fleeting nature of any idea means you now have to quickly capture this thing before it gets lost or forgotten. When I have those moments,…
-
Allan Cole
A Padding Pet Peeve
One thing that I commonly see on websites that really gets under my skin is links that don’t have a enough padding to making them reasonably clickable. Here’s an example of what I mean: In the GOOD column, you can see how since the clickable area spans the entire width and height of the button,…
-
Allan Cole
Mobile design or the lack thereof
Before the era of WordPress there was a time when Macromedia Flash was the industry-leading web design solution. Today, that sounds like madness but back then, the world of Flash offered design possibilities that were simply not possible with just HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I studied web design in college under one of the founding…
-
Allan Cole
Designing for Speed: WordPress + AMP
Speed is extremely important on the web these days, largely because mobile devices are becoming (and in some cases already are) the primary entry point for websites. This will increase in the future. With that in mind, building websites in a way that allows for rapid loading becomes an essential for every one. Succeeding on…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
You can search for an article, designer, event…
Automattic Design 