This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

There’s no doubt that “name your own price” bundles are becoming increasingly popular, so we’re bringing one to VentureBeat with The Name Your Own Price Designer Bundle.

Here’s how it works: You pay what you want for 3 different designer assets and if you pay more than the average price, you’ll receive all 10! It’s as simple as that. After purchasing, you’ll get instant access to all of the designer assets included in this bundle. And don’t forget – people have worked hard to build these assets. Pay a price you feel represents their efforts.

Here’s what is included in this tremendous package (Note: Regular pricing is in parentheses):

• The FontPack Pro Master Collection ($300): Never buy another font again because with over 6,200 fonts you’re gong to have a premium fit for any occasion. Each font includes a 10 user, commercial use license so you can use the fonts in a variety of for-profit, commercial or personal projects across your organization. Installed fonts work in all applications including Quark, Adobe, Microsoft, iLife, iWork and more.
• High Quality App Graphics ($32): Need some user-friendly solutions for your sketches of web design, app ideas, or icon designs? This product package comes with a sleek and easy-to-use sketchbook so you can show off all your designs. This great little package includes designer assets that will benefit any designer that works with either iOS/OS X and/or Android based projects on a daily basis.
• WebDesign ($50): When you have to build a website, choose the web developer’s tool that has been trusted by Mac users for over 10 years. WebDesign offers the best balance between website design and HTML authoring, offering over 20 pre-built website templates while still giving you the flexibility to edit your website’s source code. And unlike other tools, WebDesign doesn’t limit you in any way and gives you complete control over your website design and layout.
• Unique Texture Sets ($143): Use these high resolution textures to create super cool effect to use on your templates, in your business, and with your art work. These are highly detailed textures are packed with tons of layers that help give you another dimension to add to your art.
• Minimalistic Website Templates ($75): These easy-to-customize templates are worth the price of this bundle alone so be sure to check out what’s all included on the Deals Hub so you can take advantage of this amazing offer.
• The Photography Actions Bundle ($18): This bundle is filled with 72 actionable edits that will give you the upper edge on all of your photos. There’s a diverse range of photo effects here, all you’ll ever need for your photographs. Take your creative freedom and combine them with these effects to create unique results!
• Flash Decompiler Trillix ($80): SWF Decompiler Trillix Mac (former SWF to FLA Converter) converts Adobe Flash SWF files back into FLA format and SWF files created in Flex back to Flex sources, which can be easily edited in native Flash or Flex environment. Every group of objects such as morphs, shapes, texts, fonts, sounds, scripts, etc., are placed in separate FLA library groups with appropriate names, which makes using and working with the resulting FLA file much easier.
• ButtonDesign For Mac ($20): When you need to add those final touches to your website, ButtonDesign is here to help. Creating professional looking buttons with mouse over and mouse down transitions is simple and appealing. Choose from over 75 included templates, add your unique touch, then export your buttons as standard based Cascading Style Sheets and HTML.
• Beautiful WordPress Themes ($18): Have you been looking for two clean & responsive WP themes to change up your flare? You’re found them. Check out the look and feel of these two themes (Phototopia and Deliciously Simple) at the Deals page.
• CollageFactory Pro ($30): CollageFactory Pro is a powerful combination of photo collage maker and greeting card creator. With CollageFactory, you can make photo collages and holiday e-greeting cards effortlessly.

We’re also giving the chance to help out others while you help yousrself with this iPhone Hacks Deals offer. We’ve chosen three charities (Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons) that we believe make a significant, positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help the charity you chose from the three options available.

So what are you waiting for?Visit the VB Store and pick up The Name Your Own Price Designer Bundle while you still can!

Bootstrap, Twitter’s homebrewed, open-source user interface framework, brings a lot of goodies to the table for busy web developers. But some folks would prefer the kit sans goodies — especially when the goodies include dated-looking gradients and drop shadows.

Today, we got wind of Flat U.I., a gorgeous, Bootstrap-based set of web templates in a very modern style. It features a fresh color palette, a gorgeous sans-serif web font, and a sweet 2D aesthetic that’s classic and fun at the same time.

Check ‘er out:

Flat UI comes from Designmodo, a developer-focused design shop that sells U.I. “packs” to help enterprising hackers outsource the pixels so they can better focus on code and creativity. Typically, these packs are composed of .PSD Photoshop files; this is Designmodo’s first HTML kit. .PSD files for the pack are also available.

The HTML version of Flat UI is based on Twitter Bootstrap and is Retina-ready. It includes custom form components, special CSS3 effects and an object-oriented CSS approach, a customizable color scheme, and the aforementioned web font as well as web font icons.

A publicly available download will launch in two days; you can also subscribe now to get early access.

hat tip: TNW

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Learning how to code – whether at a high or marginal level – is something that is becoming increasingly important. Yet it isn’t something many people put much though into – or even make a priority. That’s because it either seems too time-consuming or takes too much effort to wrap your head around.

This VentureBeat offer won’t just help you up your coding knowledge and expertise, but it will do so in a way that allows you to go at your own pace – and at a fraction of the regular cost.

This bundle contains 6 video courses that cover everything from design to Photoshop to web development, and they can be accessed whenever you want. That means you can learn at your own pace – which is ideal for those of us who are working on this as a side project to start. And The Learn to Code Bundle is priced right as well – just $99 for a course that is valued at over $900!

Here’s what you’ll receive in The Learn to Code Bundle:

• Make iPhone & iPad Games without Programming ($250 value)
• Become a Web Dev From Scratch ($199 value)
• Learn How to Code iOS Apps ($197 value)
• Create Responsive Web Design ($150 value)
• Ruby Programming for Beginners ($99 value)
• Photoshop CS6 Crash Course ($40 value)

There’s a lot to like about this bundle, but the fact that you can access it anytime and anywhere makes it something you can return to over and over again should the need arise.

So head over to the VB Store page now and grab The Learn to Code Bundle – because it is available only for a limited time!

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Want to build a website with ease…whether you have coding experience or not? This VentureBeat offer will help you do that – no matter how much experience you have in that realm.

MacFlux is an advanced HTML5 website design application, capable of creating stunning sites completely from scratch. Although MacFlux includes free website templates to help get you started, this powerful Mac web design software is more a creative design environment rather than a template-based solution. Not only that, but no coding is necessary. The sites you can whip up using this platform will look professional – and you can make them without entering a single line of code.

And we’ve got this powerful web design tool for just $35 for a limited time in the VB Store.

Here are just some of the features of MacFlux:

• Easy Website Creation: You don’t need to be a web developer or have any HTML experience to create and publish your own professional looking website.
• An Interface That Simply Works: The simple interface does not overpower the web design environment so it is easy to navigate through the tools that will make your website great.
• Quick-Start Templates: Create and publish your own website quickly by simply picking a pre-designed template for your blog, business website, online photo scrapbook, video showcase and more.
• Advanced Font Support: Unique fonts can help transform your content into an eye-catching, easy-to-read website. Upload your own font and link to it using CSS3 font code. MacFlux also supports the Google Font API, providing a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page.
• Takes Advantage of The Latest Web Standards with HTML5: HTML5 is simply an evolution of HTML4/XHTML 1.0 with new tags and techniques, and is ideal for those creating content for iPad. Also, most major web browsers already support HTML5, so there is no need to follow older standards when using MacFlux.

MacFlux is an incredibly versatile and robust website creation app, and it can be yours through the VB Store for only $35 for a limited time. So grab it while you can – and start creating exceptional-looking websites today!

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

The race for starting off your new business venture in the new year is well underway. You’re going to need a new logo for that new business idea. You’re going to want to get that web design fleshed out so that you can launch your first website. You figure it’s about time to style up your business cards. The bottom line is that you have a lot design work that needs to get done…now where are you going to go to get it done?

The great thing about 99designs is that no matter what your design needs may be, you can tap into the talent of hundreds of talented artists. And the great thing about this VB Store time-limited promotion is that you can get $140 worth of crowdsourcing credit and upgrades for your next 99designs design contest for only $40.

You can use the credit towards any of your design needs, be it:

• Logo design
• Business card design
• T-shirt design
• Brochure design
• Web page design
• Mobile app design
• …and more!

How does 99designs work? It’s simple, really.

1. Post your design project. Create your detailed project brief and kick-off your own design contest. You set the guidelines…scope, price, timing and all other aspects of the design project. Once completed, designers browsing for projects will find your brief and if they decided to submit an entry, it will be presented to you as they are completed. Depending on the scope of the project, you may receive several, or even dozens, of entries.
2. Give feedback and collaborate. As the designs come in, you can provide continual feedback on the submissions. On the right track but not exactly the right color? Shift the logo to the left? No problem, you can provide as much feedback as you wish in order to help the designers deliver exactly what you had in mind.
3. Choose your favorite and reward your designer. Feedback may be submitted to the designers up until you find a satisfactory design. Once selected, you will pay the designer the predetermined amount and receive the copyright to the original design. Congrats! You crowdsourced your first design job.

If you don’t fall in love with any of the designs, we have a full 30 day money-back guarantee from the date of your purchase. And if you like more than one design, you can declare multiple winners, and pay them each the pre-determined price accordingly.

With a simple and straightforward process, a roster of talented designers, and a money-back guarantee, there is no reason to stick with a single graphic designer again. Now you can crowdsource your design needs with this VB Store promotion for just $40.

So get it while you can!

In going over the good, bad, and super-ugly design trends of 2012, we were struck by a few really big product changes that threw old interfaces to the wind to keep products looking current, fresh, and beautiful.

As the old year closes, we’d like to pay tribute to the biggest facelifts of 2012, ranked from least favorite to most awesome. These apps went under the knife, and the results were not subtle but spectacular. But interestingly enough, all these nips and tucks won’t be enough to keep users coming back to aging apps. In 2013, we’ll see which companies give more than just a pretty face.

10. MySpace’s new space

The truly hated entity known as MySpace has been in a revolving door of design overhauls for the past couple years. So of course we saw big new changes for 2012. And while we called the new look “killer” in our review, we’re still pretty sure the site will be more “Thriller” (read: walking dead) than killer in 2013.

The story: “Designed for artists and their fans, the new MySpace is not a redesign. It’s a new product with a new purpose and a design meant to evoke emotion. MySpace wants to draw people into relationships with creatives and the content they produce.”

9. The New Digg

After many a stumble and many a fall (and many an executive departure), Digg struggled to revitalize its brand and its traffic in 2012. The new site scraps all of old Digg’s algorithms and interfaces, leaving little room for gaming the results and lots of room for questions.

The story: “By contrast, it took Digg’s new owners about six weeks to completely reimagine the site as well as formulate a plan to restore Digg to its former glory. It was completely rebuilt from scratch, which is why the team is calling this the new version 1. … The new Digg is already more inviting than the one I saw over the past two years.”

8. Foursquare’s redesign

Facing increasing competition from place-based features on major social networks, Foursquare pulled out all the stops for a new look and feel in 2012 — one that simplified its interface and encouraged interactions between users.

The story: “Alex Rainert, Foursquare’s head of product, told VentureBeat that the company decided five to six months ago that it wanted to redesign its experience from the ground up. ‘We decided to pull the pieces apart and put them back together again,’ Rainert said. ‘We want to create the richest experience possible.’”

7. Rdio’s double-whammy

One redesign wasn’t good enough for ol’ Rdio. In 2012, the streaming music service had two back-to-back redesigns. The first, announced at SXSW in Austin, Texas, showed off new social features. The second introduced some minor tweaks that made Rdio look more than ever like iTunes.

The story: “The new design takes a healthy amount of influence from Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes player. The left-hand bar features playlists and navigation, and the center shows songs and albums. The right-hand bar, with social activity and connections, appears to borrow from streaming music competitor Spotify. Unlike iTunes, which is steeped in years of minor tweaks and updates, Rdio’s web-based player is probably much faster for many users.”

6. Vimeo blows it up

In 2012, web design in general got an overdose of the high-end magazine aesthetic. Big, full-bleed images and glossy, minimalist interfaces were all the rage. Vimeo took that approach with videos as well. The result was good enough to print.

The story: “Vimeo has essentially had the same design since 2007, and while users of popular sites often protest design changes, this one comes off as much more sophisticated and smooth. Vimeo CEO Dae Mellencamp told us, ‘There were tons of features and functions we wanted to add, so we’re using a new code base. We’ve put video front and center.’”

5. YouTube’s multiple personalities

Not to be outdone, YouTube made some changes in 2012, as well. Overall, it seemed the Google-owned video kingpin finally realized it had two distinct user groups: the content creators and the content watchers. So YouTube gave the creators their very own app while turning the main site’s focus toward the lean-back viewer’s interests.

The story: “I’ll admit that the only time I really scan through my feed/guide of activity on YouTube is when I first log in. Beyond that, I rarely think to scan through it for new stuff to watch. These changes may fix that.”

4. eBay goes Pinterest-y

The Pinterest Grid was one of the trends we identified as leading the pack in 2012. One of the more appropriate and interesting implementations of that retail-friendly aesthetic was the new eBay homepage.

The story: “eBay’s previous design is similar to something you’d recognize from late ’90s websites, with products/auctions arranged into boring vertical lists. The only eye-catching elements were thumbnails for each auction listing. By contrast, the new web interface concentrates much more on product images. The homepage adopts the familiar pinboard-style design used on Pinterest, while the product and profile pages are much less cluttered.”

3. Facebook’s continued Timeline-itization

We did a deep dive on Facebook Timeline back in the fall of 2011 before it had officially launched worldwide. Even then, we knew this aesthetic would mark a huge turning point for the network’s engineer-driven utilitarian look and feel. In 2012, the Timeline look-and-feel marched on, taking over Pages, friendships, and even the company’s mobile apps.

The story: “Facebook design guru Sam Lessin, who captained the Timeline design, said in Tuesday’s show-and-tell session that Timeline ‘wasn’t ever meant to be just about people, just for humans. It’s a phase shift for the company overall and how we think about identity. … We always start with people. We’re Facebook, that’s kind of what we do … and then we do it for other types of organizations that also have a story and want to be able to tell it.’”

2. Twitter’s new profiles

The “new-new Twitter” saw the once-simple site transform into a sleek social network with plenty of bells and whistles to keep easily distracted users entertained. In a nod to universal human vanity, Twitter also rolled out new profile pages, complete with big, glossy photos.

The story: “An all-new header photo — somewhat reminiscent of Facebook’s cover photo — now helps your Twitter profile stand out better. Rather than just a few pixels for a headshot or a logo, the new header photo can display much more: multiple images, a portrait in a setting, or whatever your creativity allows within the limits of about 520-by-260 pixels.”

1. LinkedIn’s seismic shift

LinkedIn had been working with basically the same, stodgy interface for far too long. For the network’s older crowd of professional users, that aesthetic was probably not too much of a stumbling block. But in 2012, new designers and developers started revealing slick new mobile apps, pretty profiles, and a radically more beautiful and more interesting way to read news on the site.

The story: “The new stream is intended to be lightweight, easy to scan, and easy to interact with in a way that doesn’t burn up too much of your own personal CPU. Quick sharing, liking, and commenting now seems more natural from the new homepage. ‘We’re always looking for new ways to make the homepage experience better, more efficient and a place where you can come everyday to get what you need to be productive and successful,’ said LinkedIn exec Caroline Gaffney. ‘This is just the beginning of many more exciting, new features we plan to bring to the Homepage to offer more customization and functionality.’”

Grand Prize: Metro, Windows’ salvation

While users may or may not be confused by Microsoft’s new arrays of flat, colorful panels and ever-changing mosaics, Metro (whatever you want to call it – we’re sticking with Metro) is the toast of the design community. The aesthetic looks good on everything from mobile home screens to old-school desktop email. It’s even inspiring more than a few knockoff looks around the web and mobile apps — a slimy but sincere form of flattery that shows Microsoft still has what it takes to surprise and delight us.

We knew Windows 8 had won when someone ported the design over to the iPhone. But Metro shines brightest in — where else? — the new Windows 8 operating system.

The story: “Windows 8 is vital to the future of Microsoft and the PC market because it blends a touch-centric interface with the Windows we’ve known for years. It’s not for everyone, especially casual Windows 7 users that refuse to relearn Windows. But power users and those who embrace change well will find a lot to like here.”

Top image credit: NinaMalyna, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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As we play taps for 2012, let’s take a look at what developers and designers got into over the past 12 months, aesthetically speaking.

Web (and tablet and smartphone) design this year was more than ever characterized by relatively new technological capabilities. Advances on the dev side made tricks and conventions on the design side simpler, faster, or just plain possible.

Also, in many ways, mobile design, and especially tablet design, had a huge influence over web design. We started seeing more touch interface-friendly navigation, even in situations where touch navigation was unlikely. Which, as you’ll see, drove us freakin’ bonkers.

But hey, at least Comic Sans and Flash sites are on their way out, right?

Most of these trends got their start in years past, but we feel they came into their own in 2012. We’ve organized them into a few groups on a love-to-hate scale. If you disagree with our admittedly subjective analyses, go right ahead and tell us what you think in the comments section. And come on, this is web design; if you don’t disagree with some of it, you might be dead.

The Best

Larger-than-life images

We see this as a subtrend of the magazine aesthetic (see below), but boy, do we ever love how huge images are getting these days. They look great as page backgrounds, in lightboxes, or as full-page masterpieces in a tablet app. If you’re letting pictures go way outside the envelope, we appreciate what you’re doing and hope you’ll keep up the good work.

The Metro grid

Microsofties can call it whatever they want, but we know a Metro mosaic when we see one. For the longest time, we were mimicking Apple and iPhone design. Now it’s Windows’ turn to shine. The flat tiles in vibrant colors, the mosaic of constantly refreshing content, and the slick sans serifs were all the rage this year, whether seen on a Windows phone or on a designery knock-off page.

The print-mag aesthetic

More than ever, the web is starting to feel a lot like the glossy magazines of (what is quickly becoming) another era. Swipe-friendly navigation lets readers flip languidly or rapidly through content. Full-bleed photos take over the page, and elegant serif web font families let running text remain readable.

And speaking of web fonts, with more than 600 specimens in Google’s directory, headlines content have seen a massive upgrade as well. With sexy Didones, aggressive slabs, and retro scripts, typography is finally entering its online heyday. (Want more proof? Check out our list of the best mobile and web fonts of 2012, now with 900 percent more out-of-the-box web compatibility!)

The Good

Responsive design

With champions like Mozilla and Adobe (and to a lesser extent, the behind-the-scenes nerds at Facebook), responsive design* held its own in 2012. Barely. This trend is still emerging, and designers still face many challenges to getting one page to look good on an innumerable cornucopia of devices. We may not have the technology — especially agreed-upon mobile browser standards — just yet, but responsive design looks like it’s shaping up to be the future of how we build for the web, wherever the web is found.

*Responsive design is the practice of designing a site to resize and adapt automatically to function well across multiple screen sizes.

The Pinterest/Timeline grid

A splash of thumbnail images and a smattering of text! Highlight the algorithmically determined “important” stuff by doubling its size. What do you get? Pinterest! Or Facebook’s Timeline. Or something in between

The Pinterest clones and also-rans of 2012 featured this trend to a fault. It’s gorgeous for commercial and retail purposes or for displaying image-heavy content with a diverse array of sources and subjects. And it works great for social content, too, where image quality varies and large image sizes can make programmatically generated pages look cheap.

Rounded typefaces

Museo is sooo 2009, you guys. You know what’s so right now? Rounded sans-serif fonts*.

They’re structured but friendly, lean but distinct, casual without being childlike. If you’re looking for an alternative to the same old slabs and scripts and hand-lettered faces, check out some of the more modern rounded families.

*It is what it sounds like: A sans-serif with rounded edges instead of hard corners at the ends of the letterform.

WordPress Premium

The slider menus, the sticky content, the glossy images prominently displayed. … We know we’ve seen this look somewhere before. From photographers to doctor’s offices to cupcake shops to extreme body modification enthusiasts, everyone is using this design trope around the web. As as an accessible, populist aesthetic goes, the web could do worse (see: Geocities circa 1998).

What we love about the “WordPress Premium” look is that although it’s becoming ubiquitous, it’s the good kind of ubiquitous, like clean drinking water is ubiquitous in the States but no one’s complaining about it. And when the bar is raised for the workaday standard, creating truly standout designs for sites becomes even more of a challenge.

The Meh

Mouseover madness

We will always remember 2012 as the Year of the Mouseover. We just about choked on the panoply of tooltips, thumbnails, and mega-menus that popped up every time our fingers hesitated a little too long over the trackpad. It made us twitchy.

Mouseover tricks are great for a lot of things — quickly offering an explanation, giving a brief preview of content to come, or showing options. But brevity, dear designers, is the soul of your users not hating you and getting frustrated and confused when your belabored tooltip obscures every other bit of content on the page.

Kid stuff: Cowboys, cartoons, and crap

It was cute when GitHub and Forrst did it; now, it’s more likely to be annoying. We get that you’re a 28-year-old, hoodie-wearing genius who still eats Froot Loops on the daily and longs to return the entire adult world to a happier place, but you’ve got to stop shoving this Saturday morning aesthetic down our throats. That goes for the kawaii-illustrated-character logos, the cartoonish fonts, and the “Hi, we’re Super App. We make walking fun” copy.

The Internet is in its 30s. We can take a little elegance, and so can you.

Single-page design of doom

Single-page sites can be amazing, beautiful in their simplicity. But in 2012, we saw a lot of single-pagers that strove too hard to cram too much content into one unnavigable, infinitely scrolling jumble.

Also, the single-page aesthetic isn’t right for every project. If you’re building a site to sell a single product, show a portfolio, or introduce a concept, sure. Go single-page. But if you’re building a website for an enterprise-level business application, give yourself a break and give your end users the information design they expect and deserve.

The Not-So-Good

Modal pop-ups

You know what makes pop-ups less annoying? Rounded corners, lightboxing, and cute fonts! Right?

Wrong. Your jQuery tricks are bad at hiding your annoying navigation flow and/or advertising, Mister Designer Man. At least try to limit your use of modal pop-ups in 2013. The Internet thanks you.

The We Hate You

I can’t get no navigation

Is this a test? Are you seriously testing our rage limits? Or are you just showing off all the neat-o tricks you learned in Internet 410: Stupid Navigational Bullcrap Senior Seminar?

Look, unless we’re browsing your site on a tablet or smartphone — and your site should know whether or not we are — we don’t want swiping-style navigation. There we are, scrolling happily down a page of lovely images and enlightening text, and in one slightly diagonal finger-twitch on the ol’ trackpad, we’re pulled kicking and screaming from the page we were on to the next page in the feed.

And while we’re talking about show-off navigational bullcrap, let’s talk about horizontal scrolling. Are you designing an art gallery website? OK, then, are you showing off some kind of timeline-linked portfolio or info-design case study? Then you do not need horizontal scrolling.

Designers, before you do some complicated, unexpected navigational bullcrap, ask yourselves: “Am I doing this just because I can?” If the answer is anything close to a yes, take the high road of elegant simplicity, and make your users happy. Design isn’t just art, after all; it’s function.

Top image courtesy of Hasloo, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

When you’re trying to get fit, a boot camp is one of the best ways to get started on that path. So we’ve assembled a boot camp that will set you on the right path to becoming a top-notch developer. These 6 video are great in that they cover everything from web development to design to Photoshop (and tons of things in between), and they can be accessed when you want so that you can learn at your own pace.

But the best part about this VB Store offer? You can have it all – valued at over $900 – for just $99 for a limited time.

Here’s what you’ll get in the Learn to Code Bundle:

• Become a Web Dev From Scratch ($199 value)
• Create Responsive Web Design ($150 value)
• Make iPhone & iPad Games w/out Programming ($250 value)
• Learn How to Code iOS Apps ($197 value)
• Ruby Programming for Beginners ($99 value)
• Photoshop CS6 Crash Course ($40 value)

You’ll be able to access all of these courses online at Udemy.com forever. As long as you have internet you’ll be able to access your courses anytime, anywhere. That means you can brush up on your coding and design skills anytime…and anywhere.

But there’s more to this VB Store offer. We have a “Learn to Create a Song in Garageband” freebie that shows you the ins and outs of songwriting, with the end result being your very own song!

You’re getting a lot in this deal – both in value and in knowledge – so take advantage of it while you can. After all, this VB Store offer won’t be around for long!

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

When taking on a new venture or starting up a new business, if you’ve got a chance to give yourself a leg up on the competition…why wouldn’t you? And if you can do it for as little cost to you as possible, even better! We’re giving you such a chance with our latest VB Store offer, as this Learn Everything Tech Giveaway contains 15 eCourses valued at over $2000!

This online education could be all yours by following these two simple steps:

1. Enter the giveaway by connecting with Facebook (button is to the right side of the VB Store offer page).
2. Share the giveaway with the social buttons. The more you share the better the chance you’ll have at winning!

Here are just some of the eLearning courses up for grabs:

• Learn how to Make iPhone & iPad Apps Without Any Programming Knowledge ($497): Learn how to make apps for you and your business without any programming.
• Become a Web Developer From Scratch ($199): Learn all the programming languages needed to become a mastermind web developer.
• Dynamic Web Design ($99): Learn how to build fully functional and scalable websites using powerful coding languages.
• Responsive Web Design Made Easy ($150): Optimize your website for all screen sizes & different platforms.
• Code Camp ($199): Get certified and learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more.
• The Lean Startup ($150): Learn how to apply the method that is transforming how new businesses are built and launched.
• Google Boost Your Business ($90): Learn how to Google boost your business to drive more traffic and to increase your sales.

And that’s not all…you can check out the rest of what’s being offered in this giveaway here!

One lucky winner will be selected on December 10th, 2012 and the more you spread the word, the better the chance you’ll have of winning. (Note: Draw date is subject to change.)

This giveaway is going to give someone a great opportunity to supercharge their tech knowledge and skills. Why shouldn’t it be you? Head over to the VB Store and give yourself a shot while you can!

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

One of the best ways any of us can pursue new ventures is to take the time to learn something new — perhaps even something outside of our comfort zone. The problem with pursing such interests is that there are so many options out there to choose from and as a result we spend more time looking and researching for the right learning tools that we exahust all of the energy that would be better served through actually learning the new skill set.

For a limited time, we have an offering at the VB Store that is ideal for the budding web designer. This deal features a robust set of video training courses that will allow you to pick up the skills needed to take on design projects using several top applications. The great thing about this bundle is that there is something in it for everyone. No matter what area of web design you’d like to work in, this deal — the Learn to Design Bundle — has got you covered.

And it’s got you covered for $99.

Here’s what’s video courses are included in this bundle from Udemy:

• Create Engaging Websites With Twitter Bootstrap ($150)
• Create Responsive Web Design ($150)
• Design Custom WordPress Themes Using Dreamweaver ($99)
• Illustrator CS6 Beginner Course ($99)
• InDesign CS6 MasterClass ($99)
• Learn Audition CS6 The Easy Way ($99)
• Learn To Master Encore CS6 ($99)
• Photoshop CS6 Crash Course ($40)
• Premiere Pro CS6 Bootcamp Course ($45)

(We’re also offering a free “How To Design A Logo” course ($45 value) to the first 1,000 buyers, which is good reason to jump on this VB Store offer right away…)

All of the courses offered in this bundle are online and feature step-by-step lessons that you can work through at your own pace. That’s 10 eLearning courses valued at over $900 for only $99 — 89% off the regular pirce.

However, we’ve got some other goodies to sweeten the deal. We’ll be giving away a $39 dollar eLearning course “Keynote for Startups” for those who tweet it out (and you don’t even have to buy the bundle to get this course), and with our  Learn Everything Tech Giveaway one lucky winner will score 15 eLearning courses, valued at over $2000!

So if you’re looking to venture into the world of web design but didn’t know where to get started….now you do. Grab the Learn to Design Bundle from the VB Store today and get the skills you need for tomorrow starting today.

This morning, we learned that O.G. type giant Monotype has acquired Typecast, a newcomer to the type scene and one that’s been making large waves in the webfont pool.

Typecast, which is currently in a public beta, allows web designers and developers to combine and compare different webfonts directly from the browser. The app also generates CSS and HTML code on the fly for designers’ further convenience.

The acquisition was made specifically to bolster Monotype’s position in the world of web design — to give it a stronger product suite for webfonts and to increase its own talent pool of web-focused creatives. Currently, Monotype offers its Fonts.com webfont service as well as SkyFonts, a cloud-based service.

The deal was worth up to $5.1 million; Monotype bought all outstanding Typecast shares, paying $2.6 million in cash, with the remainder due when certain performance goals are met over the next two years.

Here’s a quick look at what Typecast brings to the table:

“The Web has become a critical publishing platform, where brands need to represent themselves with clarity and consistency across connected devices,” said Monotype president and CEO Doug Shaw in a statement on the news.

“We believe Typecast has the potential to take webfonts to a whole new level of productivity and creative expression.”

Typecast employees will continue to work in their current locations, and the shop’s Belfast office will remain its headquarters under Monotype’s leadership.

Top image courtesy of Hasloo Group Production Studio, Shutterstock

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MOUNTAIN VIEW — Today, LinkedIn is reinventing itself with a new profile design.

We got a small sneak peek at the new design a couple months ago, but today we’re finally getting the full story — including the man-behind-the-curtain mechanics of how it works.

The roll-out to end users will also start today.

Not only is the profile much better-looking than in past iterations; it’s also packed with new kinds of data and visualizations of that data. The company has also worked to make editing your profile a simpler process.

“There’s really only a handful of companies that can connect … billions of people,” said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner at a press event at LinkedIn’s Silicon Valley headquarters this morning.

“We’ve added 50 million users in the last year alone.” And now that the service has reached critical mass, Weiner said, it’s time to unveil some all-new hotness for those 175 million users. He called today’s news one of the biggest changes to a core product the company has ever seen.

Deep Nishar is LinkedIn’s senior vice president for user experience and product design. This morning, he likened the project to the Grand Canyon’s Skywalk, calling it an “insanely brilliant but simple product that changes people’s lives … That is the underpinning of the new LinkedIn.”

Over the past year or so, LinkedIn has started to place a huge emphasis on modern web design and the technology behind it.

In August 2011, the redesign rollouts started with a suite of mobile apps that got a ground-up overhaul and were surprisingly beautiful, considering the rather old-school design language of their origin.

Earlier this year, the company launched a sexy new iPad app and revealed a wildly different and refreshing design for the the LinkedIn homepage. That design is now available to LinkedIn’s users around the globe. And just a couple of weeks ago, the network gave all the companies and organizations new Company pages, too.

But the changes aren’t just sleek and sexy designs. The professional network has also put a lot of effort into making the site a great place for content — finding it, consuming it, creating it, and promoting it. Last year, the company launched LinkedIn Today, a sort of social/professional digital daily newspaper.

Stay tuned as this post is updated through the rest of LinkedIn’s press conference today.

Top image courtesy of Viktor Gladkov, Shutterstock.

Responsive design has become a touchpoint for the mammoth debate between native code champions and mobile web enthusiasts, and Adobe’s just come down clearly on the mobile web side with the announcement of Reflow.

Reflow is Adobe’s Creative Suite-level tool for responsive design. It lets developer/designers pull in images and motion graphics, create HTML divs and CSS styling on the fly, and then quickly adjust sizes and elements for different screen sizes.

Read more Adobe Edge news

Reflow isn’t launching just yet, but we got this sneak peek at the company’s Create the Web event in San Francisco today. Here’s a look at what Reflow can do:

Adobe’s other big bid on responsive design is Adobe Edge Inspect, the magical software that lets you check for and fix cross-platofrm, cross-device design and code issues. You may know Inspect by its old code name, Shadow.

top image courtesy of alphaspirit, Shutterstock

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We’ve just had our first “gee, whiz!” moment at Adobe’s Create the Web event. The company announced Edge, its new suite of tools for web and mobile devs and designers, and one of the coolest tools (that we’ve seen in demos so far) is the open-sourced CSS FilterLab.

Basically, the FilterLab lets you create all kinds of overlays and effects to your web pages on the fly. You bring your page into the FilterLab, select filters from a drop-down menu, pull around some sliders to customize and even animate the effect, then copy/paste the code to apply the CSS effect to your page.

Read more Adobe Edge news

With the existing filters, you can add drop shadows, animated page flips, paper-crumple effects, and more — as long as your browser supports it.

Don’t see the filter you want? That’s ok; you can grab a Gist from GitHub to import another filter of your choosing.

Here’s a quick look at the filters:

FilterLab is still in an experimental stage; if you’d like to contribute to the project, submit a pull request on the GitHub page.

Stay tuned. We’ve got more coming up from Create the Web today.

Top image via olly, Shutterstock

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Today, Adobe is unveiling Edge, a suite of tools for developing and designing modern web and mobile apps and sites.

Basically, Adobe’s been noting the trend of overlap between the design and development professions and between mobile and web work. Edge brings these folks task-focused tools for creating mobile-ready content and mobile apps, with a strong focus on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and increasing productivity.

“We’re building a tool that’s on a cutting edge space, where we’re looking at creating interactivity using web standards,” said Adobe product marketing director Heidi Voltmer. “The content is edgy, and also, we were out there on the edge of the development process … developing in public and inviting feedack.”

Read more Adobe Edge news

The suite includes seven distinct new tools for the modern web or mobile designer/developer. Edge Animate lets you create interactive motion content based on web standards. Edge Inspect was previewed as Shadow; it lets developers and designers find and fix cross-platform and cross-device problems. Edge Web Fonts and Typekit will include hundreds of web fonts from Google, Adobe, and big-name type designers. PhoneGap Build is officially launching today; the service has been in public beta for a while. Build lets devs package mobile apps in the cloud and is used by the likes of Wikipedia, Zynga, BBC, and Salesforce.

Brackets and Edge Code are the big piece for developers. Brackets is Adobe’s open-source code editor, and Code is the company’s distro of the editor. Code, said Voltmer, “is not a full development environment; it’s just focused on the coding as a lightweight tool. … We think of this as a modern code editor, better than a standard text editor. It really understands HTML, JS, and CSS.” Brackets is a code editor for the web and is already open-sourced on GitHub for your downloading and forking pleasure.

(Side note: Adobe has launched a new typeface along with its code editor. Not only is Source Code Pro designed for legibility — duh. It’s also designed specifically for developers and anyone else working in code, with distinctive characters for the capital letter I, the lowercase l, and the number 1. You’re welcome.)

“A lot of the younger developers are interested in the tools that come from that open source space,” said Voltmer. “Brackets is one of the key ones. … We launched Edge back in May, and we started recruiting external contributors for the codebase. Also, the underlying project for PhoneGap is Cordova, which is in one of the phases for the Apache software foundation.”

Edge Reflow is Adobe’s new responsive design tool for the panoply of modern connected devices. Today we’re only getting a sneak peek at Reflow; Voltmer said Adobe isn’t talking release dates yet.

Several bits and pieces of Edge have been available as beta products or trials, and Adobe has built with ample community input, Voltmer said. A big part of the community’s involvement in Edge’s creation has been the fluidity with which creative and technical folks switch between and take on one another’s roles these days, at least to some extent.

“We wanted to make sure our product addressed that change,” said Voltmer. “Our customers will pick one [role, either developer or designer] … But they talk about their tools, and they say, ‘I’ll use a little code,’ or ‘I care what the user experience looks like.’ They’ll pick one name for themselves, but behind that there’s a whole bunch of skills they will pursue.”

We asked Voltmer what the incentive would be for devs and designers to adopt the new suite; she responded that Edge was designed to be a mix-and-match kind of suite, not a full, matchy-matchy set.

“A lot of the tools we offer with Edge can be used in existing toolsets,” she said. “Also, we’re making so many of them available as previews, and some will continue to be free. You can be building one app at a time, and you can really see if this is the tool you want to invest in without making a monetary commitment.”

The Edge software will be available through Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which has tiers for different levels of access. The free Starter Plan includes an introductory offer for Animate, one connected device for Inspect, one private app for PhoneGap Build, one site and two fonts for Typekit, and full access to Code and Web Fonts. Complete membership is $50 per month for unlimited devices in Inspect, 25 apps in Build, and unlimited fonts in Typekit. Standalone subscriptions at a rate of $9.99 per month for Inspect, Build, and Typekit.

While some parts of the Edge suite will run in the browser, Animate, Code, and parts of Inspect will be downloaded onto your machine. “In the foreseeable future there will be a little bit of both [downloaded and cloud-based software],” said Voltmer, “but we’re certainly looking at what makes sense to run in the cloud. We don’t want to make something run in the browser just because.”

Adobe’s Edge-focused Create the Web event is going on all day today in San Francisco; we’ll be on the scene to chat with Adobe folks, the software they’re building, and how it’s being used.

Top image courtesy of AISPIX by Image Source, Shutterstock

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Yesterday morning I read Peter Yared’s provocative article, ‘What’s next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?’ which is based entirely on the misassumption that mobile users don’t scroll. If that were true, the reasoning might be valid, but it’s not. It’s utter nonsense.

As if this misassumption wasn’t bad enough, Peter’s agenda is disproportionately skewed towards the impact on advertising. In fact, you could very easily translate the whole article into: ‘listen, we need to get designers and developers to use pages instead of scrolling, because ads get hidden below the fold in a scrolling scenario, but with pages the ad can actually be a full page itself, which means we can make loads more money from advertisers.’

Okay, let’s not blame Peter for his bias. He is, after all, CTO of a company whose primary revenue stream comes from advertising. Of course he’s going to be concerned about the impact of ads. But I — as both a content creator and a content consumer — take issue with two key points; namely:

• that responsive web design (a term he mistakenly refers to as interchangeable with ‘adaptive’ design) has somehow failed; and
• that it’s somehow possible to judge success of failure of a design methodology by ad revenue alone.

Please allow me to address some claims that are, in one way or another, wrong:

We [...] are learning the hard way that a one-size-fits-all solution delivers a subpar user experience.

Not only does this completely contradict the notion of what responsive design actually is (the core content might be the same, but the design should be flexible enough to allow for multiple adaptations without needing to know specific device details), but saying it delivers a subpar user experience is akin to claiming all oil paintings are inferior to all watercolour paintings. Criticising the tools is a fruitless exercise.

The tablet is essentially a magazine form factor.

Actually, my iPad’s form factor is closer to my chopping board, but I’m hardly going to prepare dinner on it. Tablets may have magazine apps, and ebook apps might also use swipeable pages rather than vertical scrolling, but it’s only one type of interaction. And if we’ve learned anything about tablet-based publishing in the last couple of years, it’s that recycling print-formatted magazines into an app is a bad, bad idea (unfortunately, most of the major publishers have yet to be enlightened). And it’s nothing to do with pages vs. scrolling.

Users are perfectly happy to swipe through an article that is split into several pages.

This behaviour, right here, is the bane of the internet. Do users enjoy reading articles on websites that are split across multiple pages? Hell no, we don’t. The only reason this exists is so ad people can sell more ads.

Users are not perturbed at all to see a full page interstitial ad stuck into the mix while paging through content.

Oh yeah, sure! I just love having my reading experience disrupted by a full-page ad! Actually, I’ll admit that in some scenarios, this is okay. I don’t mind this too much if I’m reading a magazine-like app, and if the ad itself is relevant. But as advertising is very rarely relevant and very frequently infuriating, suggesting this behaviour should become some sort of norm is all kinds of wrong. It is of benefit only to ad execs. See the pattern emerging here?

It is painful for engineers to have to support three different use cases for three different form factors.

And finally, we have it: solid proof that Peter Yared does not understand responsive design. (And I’m sorry, Peter. Perhaps you’re a very nice man, but I’ve got to call you out on this.) The web is not experienced simply through desktop, tablet, and phone; it is experienced in every shape and form imaginable, and some unimaginable. True responsive design is not about catering for specific device pixels — whose dimensions become outdated with every new model that appears on the market — or labelling an experience as ‘this type’ or ‘that type’. It is about creating designs so fluid and adaptable that specifics are not needed; so organic and open that the notions of desktop and mobile and TV and whatever else are blurred. After all, my 11″ MacBook Air is far closer to a tablet than my 24″ iMac, so the ‘desktop’ label no longer applies. Yet my iPad’s pixel dimensions are far closer to my iMac’s, so ‘mobile’ no longer applies. And let’s not forget that browsing the web on Mobile Safari is a wildly different experience to doing so on other, less advanced mobile phones.

Sometimes, sites work well across the board with only minor adjustments. The simpler the design, the less work has to be done. This is certainly the case with my site, Trent’s, Tim’s, or Zeldman’s. And it’s not because we’re lazy designers — our sites are this way because the emphasis is on content; on cutting away the cruft regardless of the platform. (Zeldman said it best.) And yes, of course there is a lot more work involved on some websites and applications. But to tar everyone designing responsively with the same brush shows nothing but a gross misunderstanding of the term itself. And, as Fernando Mateus said to me on Twitter this morning, ‘The last person [who thought] a webpage was like a magazine was a 7 year old child.’

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have a high-profile ad executive at a high-profile company who doesn’t understand the web from anything but an advertiser’s perspective. Who knew?

Responsive design is absolutely the future. Sadly, for many people, it has yet to become the present.

The original version of this article was published on elliotjaystocks.com.

Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer, speaker, and author from England whose portfolio includes work for clients such as Virgin, Microsoft, Brooklyn Beta, Founders Fund, Smashing Magazine, and MailChimp. He is the editor of typography magazine 8 Faces, co-founder of Viewport Industries, and a regular contributor to publications such as Codex: The Journal of Typography, .Net, and Computer Arts. Follow him on Twitter at @elliotjaystocks.

Top photo by Dirk Vorderstraße/Flickr

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Last year’s big fashion trend was the color block, and this year’s tech trend follows suit: It’s the square.

More precisely, it’s the big, colorful rectangle filled with a solid color (like Windows 8) or a photograph (like Pinterest).

Mondrian would have been proud.

What this signals is the triumph of the grid and the disappearance of overt user interface cues like window borders and menu bars.

Designers, take note: When I wrote almost two years ago that the hot new trend was “undesign,” I was attacked by some of the smartest hipsters in Brooklyn. But I was right. My point was not that design had become less important, but rather that it was becoming subtler. Instead of pages crowded with links, buttons, and display type of all different sizes, designers were simplifying their layouts. The smartest designers stripped away the nonessential elements of their designs, leaving clean pages that let the eye focus on whatever images or words had been put there by writers and editors. Why? Because if the designers didn’t simplify their web pages, readers were going to use utilities like Readability and Instapaper to do it for them.

The undesign trend followed the introduction of the iPad, which made web browsing a far more immediate and concrete experience than it is on a desktop. Suddenly you’re holding a web page in your hands, with very little interface getting between you and the page you’ve called up. That makes extraneous design elements look even worse than they used to. Thus: undesign, a minimalist, tablet-friendly approach to website design.

Squares are similar. Like undesign, they come from the mobile world. One of the first apps to embrace this sort of rectangularity was Flipboard, which launched in mid-2010. It transformed the process of browsing RSS feeds into a magazine-like experience by putting stories into a boxy, more readable layout. The app’s home page is a straightforward 3×3 grid of photo squares. The iPhone app (and now the iPad app too) extended that concept with “Cover Stories,” a feature that blows up your channels’ biggest stories into an extra-large image with coverlines superimposed on it, just like a magazine.

Google’s image search has also had a dense, tiled layout since mid-2010.

Instagram made ordinary smartphone photos into precious mini-artworks, not just by adding filters but also by cropping the images down to perfect squares.

Pinterest has a photo-centric layout that stacks up images with a minimal amount of text about each one right below the photo.

Tumblr’s Inspire Well theme offers a flexible grid of tiles that predates Pinterest by about a year.

And now Pingram mashes up Instagram photos with a Pinterest-like layout, completing the circle of hipsterdom.

The above sites are part of what might be called the “visual web,” which is basically just like the web we all know, except more image-centric. But the trend is not limited to websites.

Windows Phone 7 introduced Microsoft’s “live tiles,” a color block layout where each block gets real-time updates with data from the application it represents. Sometimes that data is a photograph, or a grid of photographs, and sometimes it’s a snippet of text. Combined with a large, striking, sans-serif font, this tiled layout is striking and a sharp departure from the icon-centric approach of the two dominant smartphone operating systems, Android and iOS.

Windows 8 extends the live tile metaphor, making it the centerpiece of the next version of Windows and taking the first step towards eliminating the desktop metaphor. Since Windows is the world’s most popular operating system, that’s a significant endorsement of the grid of rectangular tiles approach to laying out information.

A host of iPad and tablet apps now use blocky, image-centric, rectangular or square-grid layouts, including Pulse, Feedly, CNN’s news app, and the BBC’s news app.

What these designs have in common is that they make interfaces recede. Gone are the buttons, but gone too is the chrome: the title bars, scroll bars and window borders that used to be ubiquitous in graphical user interfaces. By the same token, the cruft that piles up on most websites — sidebars, navigation menus, widgets, and more — is stripped out, leaving content and ads front and center.

That makes sense for phone- and tablet-based interfaces, where the interface elements appropriate to mouse cursors are unnecessary or downright difficult to use. Why use scroll bars if you can just tap on the page itself and push it up or down? But it’s increasingly a good way of making your content stand out, regardless of platform.

If you’re designing an app or a website, pay attention to this trend. Big, colorful rectangles are in, and excessive interface is out.

Top image: Kent Wang/Flickr

Fashion and style media company StyleCaster is just a few days away from launching a redesigned site that’s heavily influenced by  social media darling Pinterest and blogging service Tumblr.

StyleCaster’s main website, Stylecaster.com, and its social channels offer news and features related to style, fashion and celebrities, and the company focuses intently on fostering conversations around those topics. Stylecaster.com and sister site Beautyhigh.com attract more than 2.5 million uniques visitors per month, and the company sells ads through other blogs as well. The company also offers proprietary ad platform called Style as a Service that helps offer ad placement advice.

“When I wake up in the morning, I go to ESPN; that’s my homepage for sports,” StyleCaster CEO and co-founder Ari Goldberg told VentureBeat. “There really isn’t anything like that for style. I want StyleCaster to be the homepage for style.”

Now the site will take its next logical step to offer access to curated fashion news stories and products. It’s doing that with a homepage that mimics the design of Pinterest. There will also be a brand-new news page that delivers fresh editorial content daily on beauty, fashion, and pop culture.

Every piece of content on the new StyleCaster site will feature an easy-to-click “Love” button, a feature that already appears on StyleCaster but now will be much more prominent. The Love button will also be available to other publishers and e-commerce services for installing on their own sites in the very near future.

“This is the product we’ve envisioned for the three and a half years we’ve been working on the site,” Goldberg said.

New York-based StyleCaster was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding to date. Its last funding round in November came from the likes of Zynga chief mobile officer David Ko and former MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Finally, let’s compare the looks of the current homepage to the upcoming news page, which share the most similarities. Take a glance below at the current homepage, which does its best to blend news, features, and shopping together:

And now take a look at the new StyleCaster news page, which is essentially a well-designed news blog inspired by the look and features of Tumblr:

What do you think of the upcoming redesign?

The most successful designs are the ones that make the intermediary disappear, or be so unobtrusive or intuitive that we completely fail to notice it.

Think about the brilliance of the hammer as that “bridge” — when you want to hang a picture on the wall, there is no doubt in your mind which tool to use, which side to hold, and how to apply it. The hammer is so easy to use, not only because it is well designed, but because of our cumulative experience with hammers, which creates such a familiarity that the tool is almost universal.

But what about the new technology products that pop up daily, such as mobile devices and apps, for which we have no frame of reference?

Building a bridge in a labyrinth of outcomes (or avoiding UX of a PacMan)

When it comes to software creating an unobtrusive path for the user to realize her intent gets a little more complicated, even the simplest task tend to have many steps.

Imagine that you want to share a photograph with a friend through email. The main means available to user experience designers in order to create this intermediary are visual displays, buttons, and sound. The intent of sharing that photo needs to be translated in a series of button clicks with labels that hopefully align to what the user is currently thinking about.

From finding the picture to selecting it, choosing to share it via email, providing the email address, and sending it out, these steps are not straightforward; rather, they create a labyrinth of multiple paths with different outcomes. And if our goal as designers is to build an unobtrusive bridge between intent and outcome, we must really know every turn and dead end of the labyrinth.

There are many examples of technology products that delivered the same outcome, yet some failed while others were embraced by consumers because the experience was more intuitive. Examples are so numerous that no one questions any more the role of the user experience design to the success of the product.

Understanding intent based only on a succession of clicks is not easy. It works well in situations where it is very clear what you want to do.

For example, when you type and the text editor auto-corrects your typos, very often the right outcome is achieved. In other, more ambiguous scenarios, it is a complex process and science. Furthermore, as consumers raise their expectations about what a product experience should be, the science of intent becomes key to the success of UX designers. Luckily, we have more tools than ever before to study it.

The digitalization of our daily lives and the proliferation of mobile devices give us an unprecedented amount of insight into the context of many scenarios and situations. We are used to GPS devices that sense we are driving and provide us with the exact location, but this type of experience was impossible a few years back.

The second factor is that as we use more natural user interfaces, such as speech or gestures, where much of the tangible interface might not even be present, intent might be clearer because the user literally states it.

Finally, recent advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and anthropology allow us to understand how our brains work and how we make decisions.

As our understanding of intent deepens, UX designers will be able to do more things automatically on the user’s behalf. For UX designers that means that a major aspect of the design becomes the definition of the rules that get activated based on the current context and input, rather than the visual aspects of the user interface.

Apple’s Siri functionality is a good example of this. It derives intent from the user’s natural language and can string together a series of tasks that normally might have taken many steps from the user. Suddenly, creating a calendar appointment with someone at a certain time takes a single Siri command rather than a long sequence of taps.

Finally, as UX design becomes driven by intent and context, we have to come to terms with the fact that we as UX designers will inevitably lose some of the control of the overall experience.

The set of rules will not just be defined by the people creating the device or application, but also by the people providing the context. The same way that a designer at Starbucks aims to design the experience within the store, she will want some control over what happens on peoples devices when they enter the store. For example, will your presence there immediately order your regular drink? Will the payment UI on your phone automatically launch so you can easily confirm it?

On the practical level, design becomes a lot more integrated into the actual code, requiring the developer to understand human behavior better than ever and requiring the designer to understand the code that executes these rules. As a result the designer and developer need to work even closer together. We see this at Artefact all the time — our most successful team members are the ones that design with the developer’s perspective in mind or develop with the designer’s sensibility to the experience of the product.

The age of responsible UX design

Understanding context and behavior are factors for successful UX, but with that, as with any piece of knowledge, comes the responsibility of how to apply it. And the impact of UX design on product adoption, lifestyle, and behavior is so significant that in addition to striving to achieve a certain outcome, we also need to evaluate the impact of the outcome.

It is a sign of our profession’s significance that we need to be thinking ahead about the implications of our efforts. The time has come for us to think about an ethical framework to guide us as we shape the user experience in 2012 and beyond.

Martijn Van Tilburg is Senior Design Director at Artefact, the innovative technology product design firm, whose mission is to utilize the power of design to improve people’s lives.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Ryan Carson, the web design guru behind Carsonified, wants to teach you how to code. And he says he can do it in just five minutes using a web-based game.

Carson’s latest endeavor is Code Racer, a multi-player game designed to teach simple web skills through live-coding.

In an chat with VentureBeat, Carson explained that the game teaches total beginners how to code a basic web site in as little time as five minutes. Players can race each other to finish coding challenges, and along they way, they unlock rewards.

Code Racer joins a new genre of simple, interactive web tools that take novices through the steps of learning how to code.

One startup with a similar premise (though without some of the more obvious game mechanics), is Codecademy, which got its start with Y Combinator before raising a lightning-fast $2.5 million funding round. Codecademy is looking to increase its userbase with Code Year, a weekly program to turn web users into web coders throughout the course of 2012.

But Carson says Code Racer and Treehouse, its parent, are quite different from Codecademy’s offerings.

Treehouse, Carson’s code-and-design-focused startup lets visitors watch videos and learn basic web skills. The more you learn, the more badges you can unlock — and some badges, like the Advanced Node.js badge or the Rails Foundations badge, can earn you interviews with companies like Facebook and WordPress.

Currently, Treehouse employs eight full-time teachers to create videos for the site.

“Code Racer is kind of the next iteration of that,” Carson explained to us. “We can reach you through video, and we can also teach you through interactive gaming.”

In fact, Carson imagines that Code Racer, which itself is simply a weeklong hackathon-type project from Treehouse staff members, will eventually end up as part of the greater Treehouse product.

“We’re going to roll out a group Treehouse product so big companies will have a dashboard of their members, what badges they’re unlocking, how fast they’re learning, rankings,” Carson explains. “Code Racer would be good for groups to challenge each other.”

Carson gives us an example: Disney, he says, already has a rather sizable Treehouse account for its in-house development team. Code Racer “might be the perfect internal tool for group members to challenge one another and also have fun,” Carson concludes.

Late last year, Carson told VentureBeat he had sold the Carsonified events business to focus all his attention on Treehouse.

“We want to help people who can’t afford traditional education, want to change careers [or] don’t have access to cutting edge design/dev training at their school,” he said.

Carson also reveals that although Treehouse received very little initial funding (in the form of an angel round from some prominent Silicon Valley investors), the venture is already profitable.

“We’re doing $2 million [annually] in revenue,” he says. “We’re profitable, and we’re increasing revenue by a million dollars every three months.”

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

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Leave it to Google to dispel the myth that one shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. The search giant and social network contender has stripped off the ominous, horizontal black bar hovering atop its pages to reveal a milky-fresh new hue for each of its web-based products.

The new Google bar occupies the same space as the Google logo and search box in most products and now provides people with one- or two-click access to its other services via a drop-down menu. It has started appearing on some users’ accounts already and will soon be coming to all accounts.

Essentially, that tacked-on navigation-meets-notification bar that debuted with Google+ is no more. What’s left in its wake is a bar-like experience that’s better woven into the essence of each product through the Google logo.

“We’re now ready for the next stage of our redesign — a new Google bar that will enable you to navigate quickly between our services, as well as share the right stuff with the right people easily on Google+,” technical lead Eddie Kessler said. “Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of the page, you’ll now find links to your services in a new drop-down Google menu nested under the Google logo.”

The bar introduces a space-saving, polished style to Google products, but it also dramatically alters the way people engage with and navigate to Google entities like Gmail, Docs and Reader. Will web denizens find Google’s new look to be a fashion do or don’t? We’re still waiting for the bare bar to hit our browsers before we cast our vote.

The tool is free to use, though it requires registration once you start designing a site and want to save it. Upon launch, you have a choice of website templates based on categories, such as restaurant, photographer, hotel or bio. You can also skip the templates and start from scratch, which is what I did.

While I started testing IM Creator just for this article, I ended up designing and developing a website for an idea I’ve had for a while now — a place where you can complain about your ultimate pet peeve. The whole process took me about an hour and I was very impressed with the simplicity and flexibility of the experience. (The ads were my own addition.)

IM Creator is a WYSIWYG editor, meaning what you see is what you get. Designing with IM Creator feels a bit like using Photoshop. You start with a blank white canvas and have a myriad of elements such as widgets, text, video, slideshows, basic HTML boxes and more. Each element can be re-sized and positioned anywhere on the canvas. The big difference from Photoshop, besides that application’s more advanced editing tools, is that once you’re done designing in IM Creator, you just hit publish and then you have a live website. There are some nice extra touches as well, such as being able to easily add search engine optimization (SEO) tags and Google Analytics.

Before you fire your web designer or developer, IM Creator has some restrictions you should keep in mind. You are limited to the design elements provided, and while there is an HTML box, you have to know HTML to understand what goes in there. Also, any graphics still have to be created and uploaded, so a designer would be needed to make your site visually appealing. This tool may actually be most useful and desirable to designers who lack any front-end web development skills.

IM Creator is one of the easiest and more flexible website creators I’ve used to date. The only issue I see is with the company’s business model. To publish your site to a unique URL, you have to subscribe to a monthly hosting option provided by IM Creator. While comparable to other hosting options in price, not having a choice might be enough to make potential customers jump ship.

The Israel-based company, founded in 2011, claims to have 2,000 paying customers as well as just becoming profitable. IM Creator has raised $300k from friends and family.

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Called Bootstrap, the toolkit is a library of relatively simple but elegant HTML and CSS conventions for building web apps. In many ways, it’s similar to the CSS framework Blueprint.

Bootstrap doesn’t run on Twitter’s platform; the company just fostered its development and is now releasing it into the world.

As Twitter designer Mark Otto wrote on the Twitter developer blog, Bootstrap “uses some of the latest browser techniques to provide you with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and everything else you need in a super tiny (only 6k with gzip) resource.”

Bootstrap will likely be a particular boon to the not-so-design-focused developer/entrepreneur who simply needs to get a great app live on the web in a short period of time.

The Twitter team says Bootstrap should be easy for any web designer or developer to implement, and once it’s compiled, Bootstrap contains CSS and CSS alone.

The toolkit is supposed to be great for cross-browser compatibility for modern web browsers — a constant concern for latter-day web designers and developers. Although Bootstrap doesn’t currently support IE 7 and 8, the team is working to correct that right now.

Bootstrap is built with Less CSS, a CSS pre-processor that extends the language with dynamic behaviors and runs on both the client side in modern browsers (read: nothing less older than IE 6) and on the server side with Node.js.

You can check out the particulars and some examples, and you can also grab all the code on Github. The Twitter developers are also asking for the help of other interested hackers to commit to Bootstrap and help make its footprint even smaller.

Otto notes that Bootstrap was originally an internal tool developed during Twitter’s first Hackweek. Now, Bootstrap is used across the board for all Twitter’s internal apps, of which there are many.

“With the help and feedback of many engineers, Bootstrap has grown significantly to encompass not only basic styles but more elegant and durable front-end design patterns,” wrote Otto. “This release represents our first public 1.0 release and the open sourcing of many months of hard work.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This article is part of a series of posts about DEMO alumni and news of their progress. Zurb launched at DEMO in Spring 2010. Check out more at DEMO.

Yesterday, interaction design firm Zurb held its annual ZurbWired event, a day-long affair where all Zurb employees stay up for 24 hours to design a website and marketing materials for a nonprofit in need.

Zurb prides itself on being more than just “dudes in expensive chairs.” The firm offers web design services, but also creates tools to help implement designs internally, gives how-to lessons, and will make house calls to help teams code and install designs.

ZurbWired is the one day out of the year when coffee flows Bacchanalia style, and cat naps are the only form of rejuvenation. For this year’s event, Zurb chose Rebekah Children’s Services to receive a new website, pamphlets, posters and other marketing materials from the 24-hour push.

“A lot can get accomplished in 24 hours if you just dedicate yourself!” marketing lead Dmitry Dragilev (pictured above) told VentureBeat in an interview. “We have to go for 24 hours. We don’t sleep, we don’t go home, we just crank through it and create a website and brochures.”

The effort is not free — it takes a lot of hands to make the project a success, but it has a lasting impact on nonprofits who generally don’t have the resources to take on months-long web design initiatives.

At the time we talked with Dmitry, Zurb and a group of seven volunteers had already created 70 mock ups for Rebekah Children’s Services. Zurb makes sure the chosen nonprofit is involved in the design process — in this case it was five people from the nonprofit’s executive team.

The group hoped to finish the job by 8am Friday morning, and they succeeded. By that time Rebekah Children’s Services had a new website, an updated backend using Joomla, a full mobile version of the website, new website and promotional copy, printed brochures and post cards, two new logos, and newsletter, letterhead and business card templates.

You can see the completed website here.

When its not being altruistic, Zurb is continuing to turn the innovation gears.

“We’re going to the next stage where we’re staring to release products for people to create websites on their own,” said Dragilev.

Zurb will have released up to six web applications by the end of the year. Many of these apps will work with Zurb’s product Verify, which it demonstrated at the Spring 2010 DEMO conference. Verify is about feedback and testing concepts. One of these web apps will allow designers to bypass coding a test page for feedback. Instead, they will be able to upload their design onto Zurb and share the mock-up in a link.

Zurb was founded in 1998 and is located in Campbell, Calif. The company has 13 employees.

Photo and video shot by Zurb.

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Zurb, interaction design and strategy firm that specializes in online and mobile applications, has gone back to the drawing board for its Web-design collaboration tool Notable. By stripping away unnecessary features, lowering its pricing, and removing storage and user limits, the company is aiming to shine a new light on Notable.

Zurb marketing head Dmitry Dragilev admits that Notable’s previous iteration “got a bit clunky and unfocused” in a blog post today. So the company took to redesigning and refocusing the app to avoid feature creep — the point in which adding new features only makes your program more complicated and slow. It’s a lesson that many developers should take note of: it’s never too late to put a stop to feature creep and start from scratch.

The new Notable still serves the same function as the older version. It’s a Web-based app that allows multiple users to collaborate on web-page design, either via screenshots of sites or pictures of wire-frame design concepts. Collaborators can take notes directly on the designs, or add comments.

Here’s how the new Notable works: Paid plans start at only $19 a month, which gives you the ability to work on an unlimited amount of posts, share them with anybody, and add an unlimited amount of team members to a project. You can also export annotated posts as PDFs to share with clients. The $49 Plus plan adds more customization options, while the $99 Premium plan offers a wealth of organizational features for hardcore designers.

To give you a taste of what Notable has to offer, the company also offers free accounts that let you work on up to 10 pages with an unlimited amount of team members.

Zurb has also made it easier to capture web pages to collaborate on with capture plugins for every major browser, apps for the iPhone and iPad, and desktop screen capturing tools for Windows and Mac OS X. Sharing posts with others outside of your organization has also gotten easier: every Notable post has a private URL that can be shared with anyone, and they will also be able to add comments and notes without logging into the site.

Competitors include design collaboration tools like ConceptShare, but Notable differs from most other options by allowing for unlimited projects, storage and users.

Campbell, Calif.,-based Zurb has been in the design consulting business for more than 12 years. It presented its Verify app at DEMO Spring 2010.