Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs that I stumble across during my every day browsing. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Shyp, Bureau Lukas Haider, Telegraph Creative, HEIKOPAIKO and Wallmob.
Designers, as well as everyone else, love bargains. Buying something with a discount gives you an incredible joy especially when you consider that with the remaining money you can buy more apps and online tools that could help you with your work.
Mighty Deals is a website that helped designers and developers a lot, making it possible for them to get a lot more resources than they could have bought without discounts. If you are one of people who are subscribed to their newsletter, it means that you are one of the lucky ones that get their deals on time. Otherwise, you might miss them and if you really need one of the tools who was featured, then you’d have to buy it directly from the author, with no discount.
I’ve featured free WordPress themes on this site over the years, but the truth is that nothing compares to a premium theme. They are created in such a way that there won’t be anything that you would want to do with such a theme and you couldn’t. The level of functionality that a premium theme has is impressive and it is exhilarating that you can get these themes at such a low price.
What you’ll get is a collection of 10 HTML5/CSS3 Bootstrap responsive templates all ready for you to integrate into your glorious website! And you’ll get them for 74% off!
With the Creativo 4.0 theme, you need never search anywhere else for today’s hottest features. This responsive multipurpose theme is the perfect ideal solution. Built with tons of the most popular website options, this easy-to-use (and easy-to-customize) WordPress theme is the answer to all of your problems!
Using a responsive design, your website template will adjust to the screen size of whatever device it’s being displayed on. If you’re extra lucky, you’ve built your site on WordPress already, making things even easier. Whether you need to switch to a responsive theme or already have a responsive WordPress theme and want to change things up, this Mighty Deal from Flashmint is one worth responding to!
Anybody can create a Facebook page. You can easily just add any photo you’d like and set your page up in an instant. But how effective will it be at driving traffic to your website? How professional will it look for your business?
What you need are some Facebook Page Templates, where the heavy lifting has been done for you. Just update the necessary information and images, and you’re ready to go. And with this Mighty Deal from Fan FBML Templates, you’ll save a ton while enticing and impressing potential new users.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just have a mammoth library of your own filled with dozens of quality HTML5 templates to browser through and use anywhere and everywhere you’d like? Yes it would. That’s why this Mighty Deal from DXthemes is exactly what the Web Doctor ordered.
So you’ve got a WordPress website. And it’s full of great content. Cool products, killer photos, and a fabulous blog. It’s all great except… well, your overall template is the poster child for dullsville.
You need a new look. Something that screams cutting edge. A site that visually rocks! In other words, you need this Mighty Deal featuring 3 professional Rockable Themes!
A single-page site means less confusion for the user, key information is just a click or scroll away, and you can put tons of your best work front and center. This Mighty Deal from Flashmint lets you get in on the fun with 20 HTML5 one-page Website templates with the Parallax Effect!
With a crazy-crowded market, it can be extremely difficult to get your app noticed. One way to really help is by creating a great website to promote your app. It not only makes you look more professional, but it gives you a chance to really show off your best features. Building a website can take time and loads of money, though. Good thing you’ve got Mighty Deals on your side! This Android Web Template Bundle from IconNice features 13 unique templates for one low price!
This collection of premium responsive WordPress themes from WPtriumph offers a large selection of high-quality, easy-to-use themes that are sure to give your blog the treatment it deserves.
Now you can now get yourself up and running quickly thanks to Ultimatum. This robust drag-and-drop template builder works with WordPress to create limitless layouts for your site. No need to ever hunt down another template again. With Ultimatum you can easily just create a new one!
Themify is offering a special deal: buy one WordPress theme for $19 and get a second one free. That’s right: you get to choose ANY TWO premium WordPress themes for a huge discount over the regular price of $78!
Rather than spending tons of money getting a completely custom design, grab this bundle of 15 iPhone and iPad web templates from ICONNICE. You get plenty of designs to choose from, and getting them set up is quick and easy. You also get a set of 192 vector icons (in EPS and PSD formats) and a PSD template for a promotional website.
With all the enthusiasm around design and the multitude of blogs that are writing articles for designers, it would seem improbable that a workforce shortage for design jobs would exist, but the reality is quite sad.
I would never have believed this a year ago, but a few months ago I launched a project called Cool Design Jobs, a job board for designers and developers, and noticed this quickly. A lot of companies, especially from Silicon Valley, are advertising their job openings a lot of times until they actually get a good designer to help them with their products. This is quite odd and you would expect them to find a lot of suitable designers from the first job opening advertisement, but most of the designers fail to meet their expectations.
Usually, in a startup there are a lot of developers and a designer or a couple of them, and the coworkers and employers are expecting the one or two designers to do absolutely everything that is design related: UX, UI and information architecture, which isn’t easy at all.
Finding a designer that does all that is like finding a needle in a haystack, mostly because a person who has all that knowledge is usually an experienced designer with 5-10+ years of experience and most likely is already working in a company where he has a pretty well paid position and is not interested in a new so called challenge.
A big problem of recruiting a “great designer” is that companies have unrealistic expectations and are looking for experts in UI and UX design, but also expect them to know jQuery, PHP, MySQL and many other programming languages. They are advertising a job opening that should normally performed well by two distinct individuals: a designer and a developer.
The normal evolution of any designer is: going to design school, getting hired by a company and actually figuring out how things work and, finally, starting your own company or landing a dream job in a creative and well paid environment.
The difficult situation that a company finds itself in is that in order to hire a great designer, it must offer him more than he currently has. That’s logical, but quite the problem considering that most great designers have their own business and are hard to reach. Of course, this “quite hard to reach” problem is only on the company’s behalf, because most of them, especially startups are really cheap when wanting to hire a designer. With this mentality, they can only get what they’re paying for, but they wouldn’t be happy to say this and it’s easier to say that there aren’t qualified individuals to fill their position (for the salary their offering).
So, where are the top notch designers? In well paid jobs, where their work is respected and are not just pixel pushers.
I’ve noticed that most companies avoid hiring designers to do remote work because they feel the need to have them inhouse, rather than at a few hundreds miles away or on the other part of the globe. Limiting yourself to the city where your company is headquarted is silly and will never guarantee that you will get the designer you were looking for even if you are from Silicon Valley or New York.
Working with a company that is not from the same town as you are is not difficult at all. On the contrary, having more silence around you will help in delivering a better result. And regarding the interaction with the rest of the team, there are apps that can make the distance feel insignificant. By simply using Skype, email, hangouts, Basecamp or other collaboration apps, the remote work is no different than the one that is performed inhouse.
Companies need to learn that if they want talent, they should have no problem with remote work. There are so many companies that are collaborating with remote designers and they are doing just great, while other companies want employees from the local area and are complaining that there’s a design workforce shortage.
Most design schools are not doing what they should be doing, adapting to the modern times. At the moment, there is a big demand for UI/UX designers and yet, the design schools are focusing on print design. Print is good and will work even though some people think it will go extinct, but everything moves to web and mobile, even design.
If there are classes that are web oriented, they are taught by people who are in their 50s or 60s and don’t have a direct contact to the design needs of the tech industry or the modern web technologies.
The lack of quality educational programs is affecting the design industry and is creating professionals for a profession (print design) that is demanding less and less specialists.
As long as there won’t be serious programs focused on web design, interface and visual design, the workforce shortage for design jobs will be an issue.
The situation is complex and there can’t be a single entity to blame for the situation that has been described in this article.
On one hand, there are the companies that are asking for demigod designers to fill their job openings and they end up not having who to hire (what a surprise) and on the other hand, there isn’t an educational system to prepare students for the design job opportunities that are available at the moment.
The interesting thing is that even though students aren’t prepared for the design environment, they teach themselves various aspects of design by reading blogs, books, discussing with fellow designers and especially working until they end up great designers. These great designers are not out of reach and it certainly isn’t a shortage of designers that can fill the positions advertised on job boards. Companies will just have to understand the importance of a good designer and its value that they have to pay for.
Adobe InDesign is a program used for creating print designs like album covers and books. A while back I wrote about some easy tutorials for beginners. But in this showcase I want to share 50 powerful InDesign tutorials which offer a whole lot more complicated solutions. The best part is that you don’t need to be an expert with InDesign to understand it all! Check out the gallery and see if any tutorials appear interesting. With a bit of work you can learn how to design this stuff quickly and effortlessly.
