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Graphic Design
The ability to edit images and photographs directly from your web browser is a wonderful thing, whether the ability serves as a simple alternative to more costly desktop software or a solution for when you’re away from your computer. There are a number of different apps available with a variety of specialties. This review will focus on Sumo Paint, a browser based image and photo editing tool.
Sumo Paint provides a great feature set with tools ranging from basic shapes to advanced painting tools. Unlike most other other online graphics editing apps, Sumo Paint also has a burgeoning online community. It’s far from a new app, but it’s one of the internet standbys that come up in every list of great web apps. Whether you’ve never used it before or have tried it out in the past but haven’t used all of its features, it’s a great web app to learn more about. Keep reading to see why Sumo Paint is a web app you should try out.
No matter what you’re designing, you won’t get it right the first time. Odds are, you won’t get it right the 20th time either. Design is an iterative process. You’ll have to come up with your basic idea, then you’ll have to pick the best way to approach it. Then, you may have several different design ideas for each approach to the app, site, newsletter, or whatever else you’re designing. And then you’ll have different ideas from each of those ideas once you start integrating feedback.
Starting to feel like you need something to pull it all together? That’s where Zurb’s newest app, Influence, comes in.
When building a website, it’s important to have a different set of eyes take a look and let you know if you’re on the right track, particularly because there are so many moving parts and so many doubts that can arise. Are the buttons on my site easy to find? Is the banner large enough? How about legibility? Is there a logical flow in my registration process? Which of these two header graphics should I use?
While there are some questions you can answer yourself, sometimes you might need an outside opinion. There are a ton of tools available including OpenHallway, Usabilia, and Silverback that do the job and then some, but what if your needs are simpler?
BagelHint is a little app with which you can create easy usability surveys quickly. Developed by a compact UK-based team called EpicBagel, this service is great for designers and developers looking to get started with UX feedback and testing, with projects that need just pointers and not deep analytics. There’s nothing to install and your results are displayed in real-time. All you need to use it are some screenshots and a few minutes of your time. Let’s set up a trial account and see how we go, shall we?
There’s a never-ending debate over whether tablets can be productive devices, perhaps even substitutes for full computers, or if they’re simply to be relegated to the status of a nice tech toy. Despite the many brilliant productive tools that have been designed for the iPad, one of the best examples of areas that tablets break productivity is web apps. While some web apps work great on the iPad, many are much more difficult to use.
Gmail Mobile presents a nice change to this trend, with a beautiful iPad-style web app. LucidChart is another example of an app that includes extra features designed just for the iPad. Today, we’re featuring another great app that’s been designed just for tablet browsers: Axe. This new free app from ZURB joins the ranks of their other great apps as an easy way to quickly markup a website with your feedback. It’s easier than ever on a touchscreen, so let’s take a look at how this app might make your iPad a bit more productive.
Most people who spend any time at all reading blogs on the Internet are familiar with the concept of the tag cloud. It’s an often amorphous pile of post tags where words that occur more often are displayed with more prominence. Wordle is a web-based Java applet that generates similar clouds based on text that you input.
It’d take forever to get your text looking perfect for a Word Cloud in Photoshop or another graphics tool. Wordle does the heavy lifting for you, so you can get the word cloud you want quickly. So how do you create your own Wordle?
Everyone loves a good infographic. It is such an easy way to digest statistics instead of having to read endless lists of boring and confusing figures, and it certainly makes the lunch break browse of the ‘Net a lot more interesting. Websites such as Mashable publish plenty of infographics and visualisations on their website, and the useful thing about visualisations is that they can virtually be published on any topic, as long as there’s some degree of statistics involved (my particular favourite is this one on Angry Birds users).
But, what happens if you are searching for a particular visualisation, either for your article or just out of general interest? Yes, there’s the old-fashioned way of searching via Google or trawling through hundreds of sites, but surely you just want a site like Flickr where you can browse through infographics, without having to waste time searching for them?
This is exactly what Visual.ly is. Think of it as Flickr for infographics and visualisations. Signing up is completely free and there’s some exciting features built into it (with a couple more in the pipeline).
Over the past several years, there was an avalanche of photo sharing and showcasing web apps. Interestingly, though, most of these have been aimed at letting you quickly share simple pictures, rather than being designed around professional photography like Flickr. Facebook usage exploded and it turned into the World’s largest photo sharing site, while services like Instagram and Twitpic picked up where Twitter dropped the ball on photo sharing. Flickr and Photobucket stayed around, but there’s been much less innovation on professional photo sharing.
500px is a great photo community with a rating system, editorial selections, and professional portfolios. With a great selection of beautiful photographs, and the tools to make your work shine, it seems much more like a Flickr competitor than many of the newer sites aimed at quickly sharing photos. But is it awesome enough to take on established players, each with their own breed of loyal followers? Let us go find out.
Our contest is now closed, and the winner is James Eisenlohr. Congrats! Thanks for commenting, and stay tuned for more giveaways in the future!
Conventional wisdom would say that web apps generally are less feature-full than their native app counterparts. Google Docs is less polished than iWork or Microsoft Office 2010, but that’s just to be expected. And on mobile browsers and tablets, many web apps are much harder to use than native apps, but hey, it’s just a web app. You can’t expect so much, right?
LucidChart is one app that’s proving the conventional wisdom wrong. They’ve created a web app that runs faster and smoother than many desktop apps. Visio can drive you insane after using it for a few minutes, but we were very impressed at how nice LucidChart was at creating diagrams and more when we first reviewed it. Since then, the developers haven’t rested on their laurals. Instead, they’ve added a Visio file importer, offline support, and amazing integration with the iPad that lets you draw intricate diagrams quicker than ever.
Keep reading for a peek at the new features, and a chance to win a free year of LucidChart Professional! (more…)
Many online businesses and websites operate in the same vertical. Often, their services and design could be strikingly similar, making it difficult to stand out. Then there are situations when, even after lengthy brainstorming sessions with experts, a clear idea of the feature-set isn’t be formulated. Two questions always linger in the minds of developers and entrepreneurs — how do you decide which features to include or omit and how do you increase conversions?
Once you have answers for the two questions, you can sit back and start counting the money. Tools and talent that can help get usable feedback are exorbitantly costly — at least up until now. Verify allows you to quickly test concepts with users to get immediate feedback. Keep reading to find how you can save time and money with Verify by testing pages before you start redoing everything.
Design is more of a collaborative process than we often realize. In the process of designing a new site, logo, promotional flyer, and more, you’ll often end up emailing dozens of files back and forth with your coworkers and clients to see what they think about the changes. Adding to that, you’ll usually end up emailing copies of PSD or AI files, links to similar designs that inspired you, or reminders for when parts of the project are due. Before you know it, you’re struggling to find the right file among dozens of similar emails.
Your team needs a better way to collaborate on the design process. Today we’re going to look at Draftboard, a new webapp that lets you compare and annotate design drafts, send ideas and inspirational links to your team, and store your important project files together. It’s a light project management app that’s solely focused on design drafts and your team’s feedback. Let’s see if this is the app that can make your creative process flow smoother.
