Our Mandate
Digital Design Standards aspires to be the de facto guide for the design industry’s best practices as applied to the web.
Designing For:
Accessibility
Why Designing for Accessibility is Simply Good Business
When we think of disabilities, most of us tend to think about the extremes: someone blind since birth... a quadriplegic... being completely deaf. Yet most disabilities are more subtle, more temporary, and most of us have them. Let’s take a quick surv...
Learn MoreInclusive Digital Design
You may have heard of web accessibility, if not through the digital design community, then through what are increasing client requests. Not accessibility in a sense of people in developing countries being able to access the Internet – albeit a burge...
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Desktop
Picking the Right Colours
Though there aren't any rules about the colours that should and shouldn't be paired together, there are tools that can help you pick the best colours for the web and provide you with an easy way to match them with their corresponding hex codes (your devel...
Learn MoreUnderstanding Web Fonts
At long last it's finally practical to use more than the traditional "web-safe" fonts on the websites you design. Sure, there were options going back several years, but we're emphasizing “practical". One of the complexities that still remains with we...
Learn MoreDesigning For:
Mobile
Designing for the Internet of Things
The term “Internet of Things” is simply a fancy way of talking about the proliferation of sensors that are connected via a network (the internet, satellite, terrestrial cellular or RFID networks are examples). It can even be a simple as an object bein...
Learn MoreResponsive and Adaptive Design
The difference between adaptive design and responsive design is that adaptive design adjusts to pre-defined specifications (or “break points”) and serves up an experience based on whichever specs are the closest. As an example, a site could be set to...
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Process
Best Practices in Online Storytelling
At The Works, telling a good story lies at the heart of everything we do: you could call it our master best practice. So, how does this apply to best practices in digital design? Simply, it comes down to figuring out how content, form and function ...
Learn MoreThe Importance of Engagement and Research as the First Steps to Design
The most important part of any new website or digital work is to build a shared understanding and definition of the project with the key players. By creating the website together you build in ownership and commitment. This initial collaborative phase of t...
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Social Media
Social Media Cover Photo Layouts and Sizes
It's important to keep the branding and design of your social media channels consistent with that of your website. Each network has its own specs for the background 'cover image' used on profiles. Below are some resources for templates that will help you ...
Learn MoreOfficial Social Media Logos
Over the past few years, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have gone through some fairly dramatic logo updates. In some cases, the updates happen often enough that it's hard for designers to keep track of what the proper usage rules are for their branding. ...
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Blog
The Visual Commerce Revolution: Selling Your Products Using Visual Assets
Visual commerce is an emerging trend beginning with social commerce where you switch social content into Shoppable content using the social commerce platform. Brands create their visual commerce stores by curating the user-generated content fr...
Learn MoreHeadless CMS: A Simple Way to Power Web and Mobile Apps
When the subject of headless comes up, it’s usually within the context of ecommerce. Specifically, it’s usually around how headless solutions (e.g. products with decoupled front- and backends) are the longer term of omnichannel experiences. ...
Learn MoreDDS Inspire
How Intersectionality Influences Product Strategy
As much as we might like to design products in a completely unbiased way that works for everybody , we’re just not excellent at that as humans. As designers, we frequently struggle to go away from our prejudices and assumptions at the door, and mercha...
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Digital Marketing Trends for 2019
Regardless of the type of business you run, having a strong online presence is a must. If customers can't find you online, you basically don't exist. This claim holds even if you run a brick-and-mortar store and don't sell anything online. That said, i...
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8 Ways the iPhone X UI Changes Mobile Design
This is a guest post by Alissa Davis, a tech writer and enthusiast who has been following the debate around the iPhone X. In this article, she has gathered important information about the iPhone X UI design that designers and developers should underst...
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DDS Contributors
Michael Larkin
Michael Larkin is Director of Digital Media for The Works Design Communications, one of Canada’s top corporate communications studios. Trained in traditional design as well as in digital media, Mike leads digital design projects for The Works and also s...
Full bio and standards +David Berman
David Berman is a special advisor to the UN on how to use accessible design to fulfill the Millennium Development Goals. He also conducts accessibility workshops and blogs for Design Edge.
Full bio and standards +Rob Harvie
Rob Harvie brings a rich background in ICT and accessibility solutions. At the University of Toronto, he directed Information Technology Services with the Faculty of Information, lectured on emerging technologies including augmented reality and multi-sens...
Full bio and standards +Enginess WP Operations
Full bio and standards +Tutorial: Optimizing your mobile content for responsive sites
If you’re going mobile, it’s a great opportunity to streamline your content creation and meet the needs of a whole new audience. Know...
Learn moreTutorial: Responsive Web Design in PhotoShop
Responsive web design is more than just a way to optimize your site for mobile devices – it's also a way to think about designing for ...
Learn moreTutorial: Create Textures & Patterns for Web Design
This video will help any designer master the art of creating textures and patterns for web design using PhotoShop. ...
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