Ideaflick

When it comes to design an action button, colour of the button deliver a serious role to play. We always have a quest that which option is more intuitive for the user or what colour will drive user to click. This UX phenomenon became very important for sites that have lead generation as a business model. To find out how the human psychology works in this context, we have to drill down in to human behavioral pattern.

Now let us talk about a very common instrument called traffic signal where red, yellow and green colour used to convey visual message to car drivers. Red depicts stop, yellow stand for steady and green says go. Therefore, red typically denotes danger & green means clear. Red naturally gives us pause due to its warm & energy. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. In our cell phone also, the red button warns us that we are going to cut off a call, and green gives us the message that we are going ahead to receive the call.

Case study

The red vs. green war has been a long running battle on the web, with no definitive winner. There are plenty of case studies found online, but many of them are conflicting. Hubspot.com carried out a test regarding this. In the test, they found that, green had a much bigger impact than red and conversions were 21% higher.

Similarly, a test run by Dmix.ca comparing the feedback for red and green buttons also increased conversion rates by a huge 34%.

http://dmix.ca/2010/05/how-we-increased-our-conversion-rate-by-72/

Some designers opt for a dark orange color instead of red, as these contrasts better with some backgrounds. Designers believe that, orange is the future when it comes to CTA buttons.

http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/the-future-of-marketing-call-to-action-buttons/

We all know that front-end frameworks are the latest trend for developing fast and powerful web and mobile interfaces. These frameworks has predefined components, add-on etc. They have done extensive research on components and create library. Last week I was going through a front-end framework named uikits. In their theme section, they sincerely name the buttons as blue for badge, green for success, yellow for warning and red for danger.

Danger is a very powerful trigger of action and red is the colour of danger. As I discuss this with Mr. Wadhwa and he says people are very much attract in odd things. As an example, he says people will read a murder news 1^st rather than travel news. Therefore, in this case murder news (Danger) attracts users. Therefore, in his opinion red button may generate more leads then green.

At last, I would say that all those tests reported that red converted at a higher rate. However, is this is true?

“That’s the old way, that’s the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen. Well, that doesn’t really cut it anymore.” — John Underkoffler

Remember the data interface from Minority Report? Well, it’s real, John Underkoffler invented it – as a point-and-touch interface called g-speak – and it’s about to change the way we interact with data. Minority Report marked a change in popular thinking about interfaces – showing how useful it could be to use natural gestures, without keyboard, mouse or command line.
John Underkoffler led the team that came up with this interface, called the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment. His company, Oblong Industries, was founded to move g-speak into the real world. Oblong is building apps for aerospace, bioinformatics, video editing and more. The g-speak platform enables the development of multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, spatial, networked applications.

Happy Reading…

John Underkoffler website
John Underkoffler Ted Talk and BBC Future says…

Alexa Meade an American artist best known for her portraits painted on the human body. She paints on the surfaces of live human subjects, and architectural spaces in a way that optically looks 3D space into a 2D plane when photographed. She takes a classical concept — trompe l’oeil, the art of making a two-dimensional representation look three-dimensional—and works in an opposite direction.

Her aim is to do the opposite, to collapse depth and make her living models into flat pictures. Meade never attended art school and taught herself how to paint. She said she did didn’t have to think of painting as this thing on canvas, because I didn’t have any practice doing that.

I just saw paint as something that can be used in space. She applies acrylic paint to the surfaces of people, objects, and walls in a style that mimics the appearance of brushwork in a traditional painting.

Happy reading

Alexa Meade’s site

Art work

Masonry is a JavaScript grid layout library. It works by placing elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, sort of like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

What is Masonry?
Masonry layouts are a rage nowadays. Pinterest come out with masonry layout a big hit, many sites have started using this layout to build some really creative websites. In responsive design this layout creates magic to display the blocks. Masonry is a grid layout based on columns. Unlike other grid layouts, it doesn’t have fixed height rows. Basically, Masonry layout optimizes the use of space inside the web page by reducing any unnecessary gaps. Without this type of layout, certain restrictions are required to maintain the structure of layout.

jQuery Masonry
The term Masonry layout probably owes its name to the popular jQuery Masonry plug-in that is used to generate this type of layout. jQuery Masonry is the most popular solution to pull off this type of layout. It utilizes some pretty fancy JavaScript to re-flow a series of divs.

Practical Uses of Masonry Layout
Masonry layout can gives a site with better functionality, as well as enhance a site’s design. We can use this in Image Gallery, Portfolio, Blog post type of sites.

Some useful links:
Understanding Masonry Layout
Masonry cascading grid layout library
Three Super Easy Ways to Pull Off a Masonry Layout

Infinite scroll has been called endless pages. It’s a web-design technique that loads content continuously as the user scrolls down the page. Pagination is a very common and widely-used navigation technique. Twitter has made this technique popular.  Long endless pages are good for time killing activities because users are in the mindset for serendipitous exploration and discovery. Basically, as the user scrolls down the page, more records are loaded asynchronously using AJAX. In this manner, scrolling seems more natural and can be easier for a user than constantly clicking on a ‘Next page’ link.
Helpful example given below. Happy readings…

Infinite Scrolling in Rails: The Basics
Infinite Scrolling word-press plugin
Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website
Example 1, Example 2,

Philographics is conceived as a visual directory of philosophy. Genis Carreras a graphic designer from London UK. In his work Carreras uses geometry and vibrant colours to create beautiful and meaningful pieces.

It is a merger of philosophy and graphic design, where these two areas are completely opposite. It is actually convert complex subject in to eye catchy and fast consumed graphics.

The visual book are open to different interpretations, allowing the reader to draw their own path to connect the idea behind each theory with its form.

 Happy reading

There is an Interesting border animation effect that can be seen on the creative website of Carl Philipe Brenner. When we mouse hover over on the box items in the grids, we can see a subtle animation happening. The grid becomes transparent and the border lines of each side animate clockwise in a rhythmic manner, creating nice effect. In this case, the effect is done by animating the widths or heights of several spans with some JS. However that can be done using SVG and CSS transitions. This experiment & code structures are present in the codrops.

We can surely create this effect without SVG, even without extra elements, just using pseudo-elements. But here we want to explore what we can do with SVG and how we can control it via CSS rather than using JavaScript.

See experiment.

With Foundation Ink Framework we can quickly create responsive HTML emails that work on any device & client, even looks great in Outlook.

Why we need responsive email?

These days, a lot of users read their emails through their mobile devices (about 48%) So it is now necessary to deliver a email which works fine in any device from mobile to desktop. The bigger problem we face while doing a email template  is getting a consistent look of emails in all email clients.

The Solution

To reach out to all range of people who subscribe to your emails, Zurb the same company that came up with the Foundation framework released an Email framework named Ink. According to them, Ink enables you to ‘Quickly create responsive HTML emails that work on any device & client. Ink CSS framework helps you craft HTML emails that can be read anywhere on any device. Gone are the days where you had to choose between Outlook and email optimized for smartphones and tablets. Ink’s responsive, 12-column grid blends flexibility and stability so your readers can view your emails perfectly from wherever they may be.

Ink has created some common layouts for you to start from so you can cook your emails faster.

http://zurb.com/ink/