Gigs Going Global? What Freelancers Need to Know About Classification

Freelancers go by many names these days. They can be “non-traditional workers” in Canada or “autónomo” in Spain. They can be “self-employed” and “independent contractors” in the US and UK. But, statistically, the trend is consistent. Freelancers now make up 30 percent of the world’s workforce, and the number is projected to grow to 50 percent by 2020.

This nuclear growth has been fanned primarily by technology, as an entire generation of digital natives joins the workforce. This has changed the way we work and what we value, transcending many restraints of the physical world. But the very catalyst of employment mobility is also becoming the root of many unforeseen consequences, in the form of employee misclassification lawsuits playing out in courts across the globe.

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Popular Design News of the Week: May 21, 2018 – May 27, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

The Biggest WTF in Design Right Now

 

Designing the UI of Google Translate

<img style="max-width:100%;" class="image-border" src="http://idgraphics.

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What’s New for Designers, May 2018

Do you ever get bogged down with some of your tools? They work, but you know there’s got to be a better way to do something. Hopefully, this month’s collection has the solution. It’s packed with design tools that are lightweight and functional.

If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered!

Duotone Effect Generator

Create a quick, and trendy, duotone effect with the Duotone Effect Generator. Upload a photo and pick a color combo or use your own and get a cool effect in seconds. Then you can download the image for use in projects.

Curtains.js

Curtains.

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Popular Design News of the Week: May 14, 2018 – May 20, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Google Just Remade its Brand Again

 

Site Design: MetaLab

<img style="max-width:100%;" class="image-border" src="https://idgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/metalab-jpg.

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6 Pointless Design Achievements You Should Totally Go For

Web design is a process of carefully planned and researched steps. You have a job to do, and users to satisfy. Ideally, everything you do has a purpose. There is a point to it all.

But life is weird, complex, and even fun sometimes. Sometimes, you end up doing something that might seem a bit excessive, a bit “out there”, or even downright silly. But you do it just because it makes you feel good to have accomplished it, or because it looked fun. In gaming parlance, we call these things “achievements”.

Achievements in gaming often don’t give you anything but a sense of pride and accomplishment. (That’s an EA joke for you fellow gamers out there.) But seriously, while achievements occasionally do give you an in-game bonus, they’re usually mostly pointless. You do these things just to see if you can.

I thought it would be fun to take a look at some possible achievements that I think we should make official.

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9 A11y Tips for Global Accessibility Awareness Day

The 17th May 2018 is Global Accessibility Awareness day, which makes today the ideal time to consider how inclusive our experiences are for those users who may be disabled, differently-abled, or temporarily inconvenienced.

2017 was a big year for website accessibility lawsuits. Seyfarth and Shaw reported that, by year’s end, there were 814 ADA Title III federal lawsuits filed against websites in the United States alone. Perhaps the most well-known of these cases was Juan Carlos Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc.

The blind plaintiff, Mr Gil, alleged that certain parts of the website essential to the shopping experience (like the store locator tool and coupon generator) could not be accessed by his JAWS screen reader. The reason why this case made such waves in the news is: one, because it was the first of its kind to go to federal court; and, two, because Winn-Dixie lost the case (as well as a lot of money and part of its reputation in the process).

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Take Control of WordPress with New Elementor Pro 2.0

Elementor 2.0 is an innovative approach to site building in WordPress that lets you customize any part of your site, with absolutely zero coding knowledge.

A plugin rather than a theme, this flexible approach means that you can use Elementor 2.0 to manage your site design, and unlike some WordPress site builders, you won’t be tied to a particular theme; Elementor 2.0 works with almost any WordPress theme from any vendor, as well as custom themes.

Build everything on your WordPress site exactly as you want it, without having to switch themes to find the right functionality, or pay a developer’s fees to personalize your template.

A Comprehensive Site Builder

There are dozens of different theme builders that will allow you to change the layout of your static content, but they nearly all tie you to fundamental elements of the theme, such as the header, or footer. Elementor 2.

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Website design service

In its early phase of development, website design service organized individuals to work in teams to enable graphic web design, interface design, the use of proprietary software and search engine optimization. The technology of web design service today cuts across many disciplines, scientific orientations, and computer-based procedures.

Web design service goals vary depending on the needs of the client and the purpose of communicating either a product, service or even a personality. You can have many layout designs for your website to optimize the design you have created, and maximize the flow of information from the site to the reader. For corporate websites, the principles are fundamentally the same except for the use of additional software to enhance the beauty of the website.

Different software developers that offer web designers the capacity to enhance their designs are an integral part of this design service system. New and upcoming software is integrated into the technology platform. Today’s technology allows website creating using a platform. The design service also links the website landscape and structure to the website’s page quality as determined by the PageRank from the total links pointing to the page, as a measure of a “vote of confidence” of a page. The presence of links in a web page, therefore, is a way of telling searchers that the page is useful.

Web design is also primarily used for marketing and communication, either by way of a static web page using static content or through a dynamic web page using a document database and content management systems. The service is also applied to social brand awareness requiring a sustained presentation or flashing of the brand and its image or symbol to as many media outlets as possible that include print media, broadcast or radio, television, and online.

Services are extended to online service provider where the website can be placed in an industry classification that fits into an SEO keyword search.

Websites as blog sites may include categories like news in focus, auto and transport, consumer products and retail, financial services and investment, general business, health, policy and public interest, and people and culture. There are many websites where blogs can be posted for free. A company can hire a service provider where it can distribute company blogs to different sites.

Web design technology has advanced so fast that a web design service provider only needs to know the basic operation of a platform. The platform takes care of all the technical solutions in the design process. All that a designer has to do is to incorporate the creative elements and content of the design. Website platforms are also called website builders since the process of enhancing the web design is already built-into the technology matrix of the platform. Examples are WordPress.org and Sitebuilder.com. Clients should be advised to be discriminating in choosing which builder would be appropriate for a beginner’s business.

In an upgraded WordPress site, one can create and publish blogs and at the same time advertise products or services from other sites. The site allows one to maximize the income streams from various sources. One can also build an eCommerce store, a community forum, a membership website, a social forum combined with advertising and much more.

Keys to a successful web designing

Of course, it would depend on when you did your web design. If it were in the 20th century, the criteria for success would be different from the web design being made today. Today we are about in the first quarter of the 21st century, and the vast leaps in computer and software technology from 1998 makes a lot of difference in judging what successful web design is.

Now web designing is ever more challenging to judge regarding success if the definition of success is in technical design terms alone. The proliferation of site builders or platforms that take care of all computing tasks including the software and apps used can give the web designer a lot of options in making a creative design.

Among these building sites are WordPress.com, SiteBuilder.com, Wix, BoldGrid, Weebly, Shopify, Squarespace, and iPage Website Builder to name a few. Perhaps a successful web designing can be judged by the competitive advantage one site has over another, and the rest depends on the creativity of the web designer.

We can name a few of the criteria or keys to a successful web designing based on standard indicators.

First, a successful web designing leads to a naturally attractive following that attracts viewers and visitors to the site. The number of hits a site is visited or volume of traffic created determines the rate of success. The higher the number of visitors or traffic to the site, the more successful the website becomes.

Second, a successful web designing optimizes the response capacity of the site through the built-in features like control over the site, functional buttons and plugins. Can the web designing allow for the creation of multilingual sites? If yes, then the response capacity is optimized. Will the site owner or user find it easy to control his or her own website? A successful design will allow this to happen.

Third, a successful web designing allows the integration of hosting, domain name and a branded email address on the domain, and enables to sell products online by automatically creating a payment account to receive payment from customers, such as a new Paypal account linked to the branded email address.

Fourth, a successful web designing can utilize numerous website design templates taken from the site builder’s library, as well as a large stock of plugins to make the site truly functional and useful. The web designer must be able to express his creativity in templates and plugins in such a way that the marketing and communication goals of the client or site owner are maximized and creatively displayed.

Fifth, a successful web designing can build an attractive, creative and functional eCommerce store and attract buyers from different countries, backgrounds, and ages. The design goal, in effect, challenges the designer to optimize his or her creativity so that clients are drawn to the website at all times.

Sixth, a successful web designing can allow the user to quickly change the layouts, navigation menus, colors and fonts to maximize the creative ability not only of the designer but the user himself. The capacity to create a staging website to test the new design, layout, color, and plugins before the site is set live on the internet can be judged as success.