The Year on Designmodo: Best Articles, Freebies and Products

• 5 minutes READ

In 2013, several important web design and development techniques emerged.

Here at Designmodo, we work to publish only the best articles and resources, and we’ve decided to prepare a list of the top articles and resources for 2013 on Designmodo. Of course, many topics remained uncovered, and we hope to guide design in right direction in the coming year.

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In 2013, 17,800,000 people visited our website and we are sure that we helped many designers and developers along the way.

We’ve gathered the best articles, freebies and products that became most popular in terms of views and shares in the social media.

Best articles for 2013

Principles of Flat Design (180,000 reads and 6,400 shares)

Principles of Flat Design

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Designmodo was one of the first resources to start writing articles on Flat Design, thus we tried to explain to our readers what flat design is and what its advantages are as compared with other design techniques. In this article, you will learn the basic principles of Flat Design.

The Next Big Thing: Responsive Icons (120,000 reads and 4,000 shares)

The Next Big Thing: Responsive Icons

Impress your audience with animated web presentations.

With Slides, we don’t make you start from an empty slate. All you have to do is to pick the elements you like best and combine them. Each slide has been carefully crafted to satisfy three key criteria: aesthetic, function and usability. That way you know every element works together seamlessly while enhancing the impact of your content.

Create a Website

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This article focused on the idea of responsive iconography in web design. The topic proved to be very interesting, and received quite a bit of positive feedback. We hope that this topic will become a practice for all developers in 2014.

Making it Work: Flat Design and Color Trends (150,000 reads and 2,500 shares)

Making it Work: Flat Design and Color Trends

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Having explored the topic of flat design, we decided to publish an article dedicated to colors which are most widely used and suitable for this design technique. Of course, nobody creates any limits for designs, but let it be your first experience in flat design creation.

Design Trend: Long Shadows (140,000 reads and 3,500 shares)

Design Trend: Long Shadows

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Another trend, which became very popular among designers, is long Shadow design. Following the topic of flat design, we presented this new icon creation technique, as it is mainly used for them.

What’s the Difference Between a Web Designer and Web Developer? (60,000 reads and 1,700 shares)

What’s the Difference Between a Web Designer and Web Developer?

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Many people asked this question, but now, there is an answer, and it was described in detail in this excellent article. We advise you to read and share it with your employers or clients.

The Ultimate UX Design of: the Credit Card Payment Form (50,000 reads and 1,100 shares)

The Ultimate UX Design of: the Credit Card Payment Form

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This article describes several thoughts and the practice of creating a form for credit card payment. This article is useful for everyone who deals with financial transactions and online payments.

Typography in Mobile Design: Important Aspects and Examples (55,000 reads and 1,100 shares)

Typography in Mobile Design: Important Aspects and Examples

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In general, typography and quality of reading on mobile devices is weak. This article gathers a couple of good examples of what do to for your website to be more readable.

Designing Mobile Apps, Where to Start? (45,000 reads and 1,100 shares)

Designing Mobile Apps, Where to Start?

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How do you start creating design for applications? What tools are there, and how do they work? You will learn all this and many other things from this article.

Collective .PSD: Tips for Working in Photoshop for Teams (38,000 reads and 1,000 shares)

Collective .PSD: Tips for Working in Photoshop for Teams

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For all those who work in a team, it is obligatory to read this article. Proper work habits in PSD can accelerate the design process in browsers and on users’ devices. Respect your work, and the work of others.

How to Create a CSS3 Mega Drop-Down Menu (65,000 reads and 900 shares)

How to Create a CSS3 Mega Drop-Down Menu

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You’ve always wanted to make a large menu for your site, but never knew how to do it? This article will teach you to do it, and you will even be able to download the code for this menu free.

Other Articles:

10 Wireframing and Prototyping Tools for 2013
Designers Workspace: Creative and Inspirational Examples
Grids and Icons for Creating iOS 7 Templates
Vertical Navigation Implementation of Side Menu in Mobile Apps
Beautiful Examples of Login Forms for Websites and Apps
LESS – The Dynamic Stylesheet
Everyday Design: 10 Sources of Web Design Inspiration
How to Choose a Typeface
Using the Parallax Trend to Create Visual Interest and Surprise
Trends: Going Bigger with Typography
A Simple Guide to Creating iOS7 Style Icons
Free PSD Perspective App Mockups
Use of Flat Design in Mobile App Interfaces, Best Examples
Flat Design and Fonts
Cool Tools are a Must-Have for Web Designers

Best Freebies for 2013

Flat UI Free (365,000 reads and 9,000 shares)

Flat UI Free

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Probably our most popular UI Kit (framework). After the release of Flat UI Free, the largest Internet magazines such as Mashable, TheNextWeb, SmashingMagazine, Venture Beat etc… started writing to us. Thanks to everyone for your support and promotion of this product.

Square UI Free (140,000 reads and 27,000 shares)

Square UI Free

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Square UI Free is the first UI Kit that was created in the style of Flat Design, and is still very successful.

Linecons (85,000 reads and 1,500 shares)

Linecons

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A marvelous set of icons in the veins of minimalism, that has rounded edges. Download them for free and use in your projects.

Best Premium Products for 2013

Startup Design Framework

Startup Design Framework

Presentation Page

Currently, Startup Design Framework is our flagship product and we are proud of it! This comprehensive Framework was created with a beautiful design, and very good code. All you need is to change design blocks in the code, to create new and nice projects. We look forward to your suggestions for developing this product in the coming year.

Flat UI

Flat UI

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For a long time, this used to be our main product, which of course had appeared following the trend. We couldn’t leave Flat Design unattended, and decided to create a comprehensive framework in the Flat style. We continue to develop this project, and each month we release new updates and adjustments.

To our readers

The Designmodo team is grateful to all those who read and shared our articles throughout the year. Thanks to our customers, without whom we wouldn’t make such beautiful and advanced products.

Andrian

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