These days, as computing moves more and more into the clouds, for every important (and expensive) design app you have installed on your home computer, chances are there is a free, effective (albeit perhaps slightly simplified) version of it online. These web apps come in particularly useful when you are traveling or away from your own computer. They are convenient, are easily accessible and allow you to road test your designs on the fly. In this article we will suggest five essential web apps that every designer should check out: Loads.in: No matter how beautiful your site design is, you always need to bear in mind how it is going to look through differing browsers and how quickly it is going to load. Compatibility with less popular browsers is crucial and it is absolutely essential that your website is going to be able to render its pages and design perfectly without taking forever to do so. That is what makes Loads.in an indispensable app – it will take your website and analyse its loading speed through a particular browser and from any of fifty worldwide locations. It allows you to check that every possible destination and browser, including tablets and mobile phones, will load your site swiftly and correctly....
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Comments Off on 7 Ways To Avoid Mishaps When Using Stock Photos
Stock images remain a fairly controversial issue in the world of design. There are some who believe that it is lazy to use someone else’s work, even if it is bought fairly. Maybe that is true; certainly, it is the easy way to generate images for a core design. But there are many reasons that we choose to go with stock photos rather than creating our own. The obvious one is the time and effort that are saved, which can then be put toward the design process itself. This can help to improve your finished product more than if you took the step of taking your own photos, which can be an exhaustive and time-consuming process. If you do choose to use stock, you should always go with the highest quality images you can find. Anything else looks cheap and badly created, and you won’t want to present that as the result of your hard work. Especially since a low quality stock image can take what was a brilliant design and ruin the effect. Here are seven tips on how to avoid using stock images the wrong way, and so corrupting the integrity of your design: 1. Know When Using Stock Is Appropriate Guess what? Using stock images are...
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