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Talent, discipline, and creativity just might constitute a triple threat in the world of design; and if it does, 21-year-old Peter Tarka easily meets the definition.
Each month, the ambitious Poland-based creative produces a collection of mesmerizing 3D typographic art. Currently a graphic designer and illustrator with Grate Studio in Wroclaw, Tarka’s digital artwork has been featured on Behance, PSDTuts, and Abduzeedo, as well as in several publications. With ten collections under his belt, this gifted designer has sought to bring language to life through his exercises in typography.
“The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning).” — Peter Tarka
His precise approach is coupled with off-the-charts ingenuity and an eye for color, texture, and space. If typography is a discipline that makes language visible, Tarka’s work has it leaping off the page. Enjoy!
Which of Peter Tarka’s portfolio is your favorite? Is his work about design, or style? Share your thoughts in the comments.
| 20+ Cutting-Edge Photo Slideshow Templates – only $19! |
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Rule number one for designers of all kinds: use a contract. Sometimes, this is easier said than done. Should I use a service agreement? A retainer? A licensing contract? With the help of Docracy, we collected the experience of many designers to provide a wide range of starting points for less experienced creative professionals, and to start a permanent free legal resource for the community.
Below you’ll find a collection of legal documents curated by our fantastic community. We are looking for your feedback and contribution to grow this collection. Suggest more items or add the contract you use for your own work. You might also want to have a look at our already published set of 10 basic agreements for designers.
Important notice: free sample documents and commentary are never a substitute to legal advice. Because every situation can be different, only a lawyer can answer your legal questions and assist you with a contract. The contracts below are useful examples, but they are sourced from a community of people and come without any guarantee, so treat them as general information. Smashing Magazine and the respective contributors of the documents disclaim all liability in connection to the use of these documents.
If you created an icon set:
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If you are building a responsive website:
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If you are starting a graphic design project:
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If you’re doing a small project with design and code:
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If you’re doing a BIG project with design and code:
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If you’re doing UX work:
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If you’re creating an infographic:
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If a third party wants to use your work:
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If you’re redesigning a website:
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If you’re hiring a developer/designer to work on a project:
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If you’re hired as a freelance developer:
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If you’re making a mobile application:
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If things go wrong:
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Other helpful documents:
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Eager to share your own experiences on documents? Please leave a comment, question or suggestion. Also, we’d love to include more documents in this article! Feel free to add yours! We’ll look at all documents which we receive and add the best ones to this guide!
You like the icons in this guide? Alvaro Casanova, designer for Docracy.com, offers you to download the set for free (retina and standard).
Credits of image on front page: storebukkebruse.
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© Veronica Picciafuoco for Smashing Magazine, 2013.
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If you live in a major city, chances are, your buses, trains, and trams are accessible to people with physical disabilities and special needs. Your elevators and sidewalks, too. What about your website?
According to Forbes Magazine, people with disabilities represent the largest minority group there is — a $1 trillion market worldwide.
To provide a comparative perspective, consider that the total market for cloud services in 2011 is only $91 billion according to Gartner. The overall market for consumer packaged goods (CPG) in the US, according to McKinsey, is only twice Forbes’ estimate, at $2 trillion; that’s every CPG in the entire country — mouthwash, paper towels, Tide, everything.
People with disabilities use the Web in ways I call "smarter than the average bear." There are myriad assistive technologies out there that help solve this challenge.
Before we look at usability testing for web accessibility, let’s first discuss how user testing is normally done so that you can have a better view of how user testing for accessibility is unique.
If you have no experience in usability testing, I’ll give you a crash course now.
In a usability test, the researchers watch as a user interacts with a product or website in order to find areas that aren’t user friendly.
What you’re trying to understand in a basic usability test is this: Given a task, how many participants can efficiently and successfully complete them?
For example, if a university wants to learn whether potential students can easily submit a request for a brochure on graduate programs, they might start by conducting usability tests to learn, quantitatively, how many potential students will be able to complete the task efficiently and successfully. Qualitatively, you can study the results for things you can do to optimize the potential student’s experience of finding a way on the website to accomplish this task.
There are several different types of usability testing.
Remote User Testing
Remote user testing is a form of usability testing where the tester moderates the test via phone, webcam, or an online tool, rather than being on-site with the user.
This is often done with the users scattered across the country (or the world), and budget constraints dictate that the tester find alternatives to conducting in-person tests.
Moderated or Unmoderated User Testing
Moderated user testing refers to research studies where there’s a live moderator spelling out the tasks the visitors needs to complete. In a face-to-face, moderated test scenario, the tester is typically monitored by a webcam or by live observers.
Unmoderated user testing usually gives the user a simple prompt, leaving it up to them to figure out how to do what is prompted.
Online User Testing
Online user testing describes the use of a web-based tool (as compared to test participants sitting in a room that’s set up just for the test).
Say you’re a usability tester. You might see a screen like the one below. This interface is specific to Loop11, my own user testing SaaS company.
In this case, the usability testers were given three distinct tasks to complete:
Say you’re conducting this usability test. Here’s the data you’re ultimately looking for:
You can read more about this experiment here.
Now that you know the basics on how user testing works, you’ll have a better appreciation of the unique set of barriers people with physical disabilities face when they are browsing the Web — a set of difficulties most of us probably haven’t thought much about.
Below are some disabilities that can affect a person from experiencing the Web the way most people do.
For children and adults with autism, one familiar tool is TalkingTILES. It’s a touch-based application — what’s called an "Augmentative & Alternative Communication" (AAC) app — that runs on any major platform and any computer.
The idea is to empower people with speech or language disorders to communicate with the world around them, and with computers, using symbols and visual words.
When it comes to user testing, there are a few simple steps we can take to ensure that our site is, at the minimum, able to hook up with assistive technologies. This, in turn, removes common issues from our websites and allows us to focus our tests on things that we would normally have a difficult time discovering without user testing.
If a visitor is using a screen-reading assistive technology that interprets what’s being displayed on the computer screen (designed for visually impaired people), your web forms will be hard, if not impossible, for the person to interact with.
Below is an example of an <input> element with a good, descriptive <label>:
<label for="username">Name:</label>
<input id="username" type="text" name="textfield" />
Notice that the for attribute is important because it "links" the <label> element to the appropriate <input> element.
Every component of your site must be navigable using only the keyboard. Some site visitors won’t have access to a mouse or touchpad, so your site should be accessible via keyboard-only navigation if needed.
A rudimentary test: Use the Tab key to see if you can get to all hyperlinks and interactive elements such as links in drop-down menus, <input> elements, buttons, and so forth.
Also, check to see if the currently active interactable element is highlighted and visible. Below is the Google search page showing how good Tab key navigation works.
The active/focused element is styled using CSS so that it is presented with a blue border.
When you press the Tab key, it goes to the next HTML element. The blue border is removed from the previously active element and is transferred in the currently active HTML element.
The styling and expected behavior is consistent.
Images on your website that are critical to understanding the content being presented must have a useful alt attribute value to assist people that can’t see images.
Of course, there’s always more you can do as a site owner and the above tips are only a few basic steps you can take to make your website more accessible for people.
When we talk about accessibility user testing, we refer to a set of usability studies focused on users who rely on assistive technologies to access web content.
The objective is usually to determine whether everyone, regardless of physical or cognitive impairments, can use a website.
For a recent project, Knowbility, a non-profit dedicated to increasing technology accessibility, ran an accessibility assessment using our software.
A screenshot of the Knowbility website home page.
They recruited participants with special needs for accessing websites so that the researchers can determine what barriers the participants might face in browsing a particular university’s website.
The participants consisted of:
Some participants used assistive technologies like screen readers, screen magnifiers, and adaptive technology for motor impairments.
Overall, the site tested could benefit from several improvements, though 6 of the 9 participants concluded the site was easy to use. Not a single participant thought it was difficult to keep track of their current location in the website. They all found navigation, on the whole, logical and well presented.
The three main accessibility problems encountered had to do with keyboard use and screen-reader-accessibility.
<h1>, <h2>, and <h3>) made navigation tedious and time-consuming for those with audio screen readers. Instead of being able to skip sections of content that weren’t relevant, the participants’ only choice was to listen through entire pages of content until they heard the relevant item come up on the screen reader.These findings are often difficult to find without actual user testing. Because it’s one thing to know how to create accessible websites, but it’s another thing to actually witness how people with different abilities use a website.
There certainly are a lot of considerations in the world of accessibility testing, though this shouldn’t deter web designers and user experience professionals from ensuring websites are built with universal design in mind.
In 2012, I ran a joint webinar with the good people at Knowbility. You can view the webinar on YouTube and it’s embedded here below.
To learn more about broader questions usability testers face, you can also check out my 7-series video called: Online Usability Testing 101. It’s free, but you’ll need to enter your email address.
Some other resources and articles on the Web to read:
Toby Biddle is a website usability expert and CEO of Loop11, a tool for unmoderated online usability testing.