Post pobrano z: Daniela Forti Creates Incredible Glass Jellyfish Tables

If your house or appartment is small and you have children, then you probably don’t want to get one of Daniela Forti’s tables. Obviously, these are not the most practical tables you’ll find, but they are truly work of beauty.

Created using a glass-fusion technique, Forti’s tables litteraly look like jellyfish, dripping with glass tentacles. With the shiny colors and beautiful transparency, these tables create an ethereal athmosphere anywhere you put them. To learn more about it, check Daniela Forti’s portfolio site.

Post pobrano z: Typography and lettering inspiration collection

A round-up of inspiring typographic designs by various designers.

Above: an ambigram with the word USA, designed by Sergey Yakovenko.

A stunning illustrated poster for the Wizard of Oz, a project by Kyle Letendre.

SevenSeven, a gorgeous typographic logo by Miklos Kiss.

A nice digital sketch by Jordan Metcalf.

Wahoo’s Fish Taco, mosaic typography by Sean O’Connor.

Misery Loves Company.

Zaha Hadid, a cool typographic paper cutout by Patrick Cabral.

A Cage of Roots, a book cover with deep rooted typography by Matt Griffin.

Typographic poster by Kingdom Industry.

Trust your Gut, a typographic layout with roads for a magazine, design by Lorena G.

Post pobrano z: The Role of Web Hosting in a Visitor’s Experience with your Website

Each website element has a specific role to create a good user experience. It is important that you give equal dedication to each. However, most articles will talk about design, SEO, user experience that leaves readers feeling these are somewhat technical. As a result, businesses continue to focus on design and underestimate the role of the backend.

Perhaps, the only eye opener was when Google announced that it would take speed as one of the bases for search ranking. This might have happened way back in 2009 but as relevant as ever. In independent researches by Google, Bing, AOL, and Shopzilla:

• A 2-second slowdown changed queries by -1.8% and revenue/user by -4.3% – Bing
• A 400-millisecond delay resulted in -0.59% change in searches/user – Google
• Even after the delay was rectified, these users still had a -0.21% fewer searches, indicating that their slow experience affects long term behaviour.
• A year-long performance redesign resulted in 5 second speed up, which eventually led to a 25% in page views, 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware costs.

The key takeaway here is that a faster website loading experience results in a significant positive experience, both for users/prospects and website owners or businesses.

Speed and the User’s Experience

There are quite a few reasons why your site is slow, some of which can be rectified quick, such as resizing images & utilizing a CDN, rechecking your codes, text graphics, unnecessary plugins, and the lot. However, a good web design plan always considers the backend, such as your servers.

When a browser pings your website for all the information and data, your site should be able to respond fast. In a user’s experience, the expectation is 2 seconds or less. Some pressure this is! This might be troublesome back in 2009, when web hosting providers had the opportunity to jack up prices and cheap means less in quality. But nowadays, you can find competent and yet still, affordable web hosting. The upsurge in the number of hosting providers, has caused a drop off in prices. LCN for example, offers a cheap web hosting package with just $3.33 a month for a 5GB webspace setup, including a £75 Adwords voucher to boot.

Source: LCN.com

Platform specific hosting, such as WordPress-centric hosting services, have also seen a certain price reduction, with lots of widely available coupons for many WordPress hosting providers. Picking out a hosting service shouldn’t be a split second decision, and yet it shouldn’t take much work to find a reasonable priced hosting solution for your site/brand.

Given the percentages in drop-offs, user expectations, and industry standards, these can all be met as long as you give ample attention to your backend as well. In addition, future-proofing your website by following some webhosting advice on security and performance is also a wise move.

More often than not, visitors go to your website because they think you can help them accomplish their goals. This might be a query about your products/services, research for information, buy a product, and many more. All in all, think about what you want your users/prospects/customers to experience when they are on your website. This does not necessarily mean just the aesthetics. The most important experience is when you help them accomplish their goals, their reason for going to your website. The faster you help them complete their goals, the better the experience. And with luck (and proper design and web performance), they will be back to your site in no time!

Web Hosting and its Crucial Role

While some would downplay the role of web hosting, it’s one of the most crucial factors of an exceptional website. Other than load time, security, caching, and email are just some of the important factors that affect user experience, overall website performance, and business results.

In an age where online presence is a non-negotiable part of a business, it is even more imperative that your website represents your business in the best way possible by aiming to help users, prospects and customers. Your brand should aim not just to create a good first impression, but more importantly, a lasting one.

Post pobrano z: Design deals for the week

Every week, we’ll give you an overview of the best deals for designers, make sure you don’t miss any by subscribing to our deals feed. You can also follow the recently launched website Type Deals if you are looking for free fonts or font deals.

30+ Professional Font Families

Here’s a chance to instantly beef up your typeface toolbox. With this Mighty Deal, you’ll get more than 30 professional full font families at one crazy low price. That’s a wide variety of styles to work with, meaning you can deliver pure success to any of your clients, as well as attract plenty of new ones.

$18 instead of $90 – Get it now!

250+ Smoke Effects Including Shapes, Brushes, Patterns and More

There’s nothing like a misty, smoky effect to set the mood. With this Smoke Toolkit from Cruzine, you’ll get everything you could possibly need to set the tone! Smoke shapes, brushes, patterns, effects, backgrounds and more, are all at your fingertips. That’s more than 250 smoky tools, provided in fully customizable, layered PSD files. Remember, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And where there’s fire… there’s a red hot deal!

$14 instead of $59 – Get it now!

109 in 1 Best Font Bundle

A value of $1800+ Now get 109 fonts with super low price for $18 only. Do not miss, get today! Also includes many alternative characters.Is coded with PUA Unicode, which allows full access to all the extra characters without having special designing software. Mac users can use Font Book. Windows users can use Character Map to view and copy any of the extra characters to paste into your favourite text editor. For folks who have opentype capable software : The alternates are accessible by turning on “Stylistic Alternates” and “Ligatures” buttons on in Photoshop’s Character panel, or via any software with a glyphs panel, e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop CC, Inkscape.

$18 – Get it now!

The Mila Script Pro Font Family: Script, Sans & Ornaments

It’s time to meet the Mila Script Pro Font Family! This amazing collection of handmade script and sans typefaces includes a handmade brush script with round and soft letterforms, as well as a sans style for easy reading. Besides a slew of helpful OpenType features to really create flexibility in your work, you’ll get an Ornaments style of more than 50 useful swashes and symbols to tie it all together.

$9 instead of $89 – Get it now!