THIS IS BERG

A SWISS DESIGN STUDIO

BASED IN ZÜRICH

The off-canvas flyout menu has taken over as the primary navigation pattern for mobile layouts — even some desktop layouts have jumped on board. And for good reason: An off-canvas menu is a great way to maintain context while giving the user a lot of additional information.

In this article, we’ll talk about why off-canvas has become so successful as a navigation pattern and show its potential to be so much more. From filters on product list pages to shopping carts to lists of recently viewed articles, the potential of this pattern is bound only by our drive to pioneer. It’s time that we explore just how far off canvas we can go.

Whenever you start a project, you have to repeat certain tasks and set up certain structures: create new folders, choose a framework, set up your development tasks. But configuring settings once and reusing them would.

If you’re a graphic designer, you will often have to work with off-the-shelf material created by others — for instance, combining ready-to-use fonts with images from a photographer or stock website.

It’s OK; it’s a part of the job, and you shouldn’t be bothered by it. But the part of a project that almost every graphic designer likes and is proud of the most is something that you can do from scratch, something that you have control over and can sign off on confidently: illustration.

If you’re a graphic designer, you will often have to work with off-the-shelf material created by others — for instance, combining ready-to-use fonts with images from a photographer or stock website.

It’s OK; it’s a part of the job, and you shouldn’t be bothered by it. But the part of a project that almost every graphic designer likes and is proud of the most is something that you can do from scratch, something that you have control over and can sign off on confidently: illustration.

You probably know by now that you should speak with customers and test your idea before building a product. What you probably don’t know is that you might be making some of the most common mistakes when running your experiments.

Since a smartphone landed in almost everyone’s pocket, developers have been faced with the question of whether to go with a mobile website or a native app. Native applications offer the smoothest and most feature-rich user experience in almost every case. They have direct access to the GPU, making layer compositions and pixel movements buttery-smooth.

Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. This article is your guide to designing quick, effective, low-cost experiments.

I popped the CD in my computer and found a collection of the most horrendous fonts you could imagine. Novelty and “retro” fonts. Spooky Halloween fonts. “Techno” fonts. Fonts with letterforms made up of cats posing in crazy positions. Fonts with terrible kerning, missing glyphs and wonky rendering. Fonts available only in single weights with no italics.

Nowhere to be found was DIN or, for that matter, any font that a professional designer would actually use. Feeling dejected, I ended up just using Helvetica because we actually owned that one.

Fast-forward to 2014. When I hear the words “free fonts,” I still can’t help but picture that horrible CD. But things have completely changed since then, and I find myself actually using free fonts quite often in my projects.

In the past, free fonts typically came from one of two places: amateur designers who created fonts for fun or as a learning experience, and professional type designers who released a single variant of a font family for free as a form of marketing, the idea being that people would come back to purchase the full family once they realized the limited usefulness of a font without multiple weights and italics.