This week's Designer News (N.361) includes Web Design Time-Savers, Emoji Guide for GitHub, Print Style Sheets, Bootstrap Grids, Free Web Templates, Email Design, Mobile Design, and more. The post Weekly News for Designers (N.361) appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Have you ever read a post and were in awe of the writer's skills, from the flow of their content to their beautiful use of imagery? Well, most of us have! I bet the question running through your mind right now is how did these blogging gurus come to be? Truth is, everyone starts from...

Design has a large impact on content visibility — so does SEO. However, there are some key SEO concepts that experts in the field struggle to communicate clearly to designers. This can create friction and the impression that most well-designed websites are very poorly optimized for SEO. Here is an overview of what we will be covering in this article: Design mobile first for Google, Structure content for organic visibility, Focus on user intent (not keywords), Send the right signals with internal linking, A crash course on image SEO, Penalties for pop-ups, Say it like you mean it: voice search and assistants.

Matthias Noback has continued his series about "mocking the edges" in your unit testing with this new post. In it, he talks about mocking "the network", those places where your application reaches out to external services to access data or perform other operations. In this series, we've discussed several topics already. We talked about persistence and time, the filesystem and randomness. The conclusion for all these areas: whenever you want to "mock" these things, you may look for a solution at the level of programming tools used (use database or filesystem abstraction library, replace built-in PHP functions, etc.). But the better solution is always: add your own abstraction. [...] The same really is true for the network. You don't want your unit tests to rely on a network connection, or a specific web service to be up and running. [...] The smarter solution again is to introduce your own interface, with its own implementation, and its own integration test. [...] Though this solution would be quite far from traditional mocking I thought it would be interesting to write a bit more about it, since there's also a lot to say. In his example he shows the use of a file_get_contents call to fetch stock information. He introduces a ExchangeRateService interface with a getFor method to provide structure for the "wrapper" around the network call. He then covers the idea of an "anti-corruption layer" to change up the interface to use models instead of just a string value (code included). He ends the post talking about the inversion of the dependency - the option to have a job pull the value out-of-band and then have the application use that value.

Prototyping can be perfected, specified, exaggerated. If you simply need a functional, clickable mockup, the open source project ,,Pencil" could be entirely sufficient for you. In late summer, the RC of the new version 3 [...]

Icons are an important design component, contributing both aesthetically and functionally. Here are eight of the best icon sets to spice up your website or app.

Email marketing is one of the most important disciplines in e-commerce. Online shops, that don’t use the email medium outside of order and shipping confirmation throw away a huge potential to gain new customers, bind [...]

A study from Payoneer found that the average freelancer makes $39,000. That’s… not great, if we’re being honest. It’s lower than most salaries in major U.S. cities for design, development,... The post The Lies People Tell You About Landing Freelance Gigs Online appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.

Here are the best courses & tutorials for programming iOS 10, Swift 3 and Xcode 8 for beginners. Read More

Content is the core commodity of the digital economy. It is the gold we fashion into luxury experience, the diamond we encase in loyalty programs and upsells. Yet, as designers, we often plug it in after the fact. We prototype our interaction and visual design to exhaustion, but accept that the "real words" can just be dropped in later. There is a better way. More and more, the digital goods we create operate within a dynamic system of content, functionality, code and intent. Our products and services drift and spill into partner websites, social media feeds and myriad electronic aggregators, all seeking to shape visitor behavior and understanding. Systems build on systems, and, in short order, we've cobbled together a colossus the breadth of which sends minds a-boggling. The post Content-First Prototyping appeared first on Smashing Magazine.