The Best Resources For UI Designers
There are several things that you need to know about design for the web. Web design doesn’t just look at how you set up websites. It also focuses on the world of interface design and user flow. This is often talked about as the simple acronym, UI. It stands for user interface. This is a solution that will help you gain either a lot of followers or it’s going to absolutely drop you out of the internet. Why? UI is the backbone of design on a larger scale. If your website doesn’t have a good interface, people will leave. Your website has to be focused, and it has to be used properly. If you have a great deal of options in the backend, but your front end design doesn’t really focus on interface that is easy to work with, you will end up getting a minimal amount of interest overall. There are a few websites that you can use right now that will help you gain the upper hand in regards to UI. UI designers will need to focus on a few sites that could streamline interface design and balance programming on the back end as well.
IconFinder.com
This is a simple website that will help you get a lot of graphics. Icon Finder has thousands of icons, and various graphics that can give a plain looking website, a little pop. This is a simple site to use, and get into the framework of good colorful, and black and white images. This is more along the side of graphics, rather than just stock photography. However, there are a lot of elements that you can use to spice up your overall interface. You can add bells and whistles later, but this will definitely give you points of visual design flow.
IconFinder offers free icons and also has a paid plan system so you can download unlimited icons for your UI design. The offer glyph, outline, flat, 3D, hand drawn, cartoon, pixel and smooth icon styles.
Uifaces.com
This is a unique website that will help you get something that most people take for granted. This is a solution that allows for easier avatars. It can create samples and more to help with interface design flow. If you are going to need avatars for any number of reasons, this is going to make the process a lot easier overall. With an easy to use site, simple instructions, and a few clicks here and there, you can have custom sample avatars for testing and launch.
DollarPhotoClub.com
One of the most important aspects of UI design and graphic design as a whole relates to how you showcase images. Photographs that are not your own must be sourced without stepping on copyright. Copyright is important. You cannot just pull images from Google. You will need to have stock images, and that’s where this site comes in handy. This is a site that has thousands upon thousands of images that you can utilize for your projects. The image collection here goes into nearly any niche, and the cost? Well, the cost is only one dollar. That’s right, just one dollar and you can have solid, high resolution images for your web and print projects. As far as UI design, images can really flesh out nice design notes, that’s for sure.
Patternify.com
One of the most important things that you need within a good overall design is background. Your background should not just have one color. As far as UI is concerned, you shouldn’t just stick to the standards of 1999. You will need to have a good CSS pattern in place, and a good header and footer background as well. Don’t just rely on 1 x 1 pixel images to come across the screen. Instead, this site will help you gain a little more design savvy with a simple pattern implementation. Implementing patterns help create a more “professional” look and feel. The look and feel that you will get here will definitely change things up for you, so test out this site to allow for unique patterns that you can implement with CSS.
Right now there are a lot of different websites that you can use for UI design. The thing that you will need to remember, however, is that you have to learn how to use the tools properly. Don’t rely solely on one thing. Make sure that you balance every option and see how they fit in your larger design flow. Web design, graphic design, and much more is very important, and can be streamlined with the right tools in place. Iconfinder.com, uifaces.com, dollarphotoclub.com, and patternify.com are just a few of the major UI design options that can help streamline UI and graphic design for print, web, and much more.
