November 2018 Summaries

The text highlights several artist websites that effectively use design to showcase their work and engage audiences. Kate O’Sullivan's site uses a minimalistic design with dynamic animations to highlight her artistic process through a timelapse video of her painting animal portraits, managed by Webflow CMS. R.A.R.E. uses blockchain technology to allow artists to sell limited editions of digital works, with a modern aesthetic reflecting its innovative approach. The Asheville Art Museum's website prioritizes current exhibitions and events, featuring a user-friendly design with easy navigation and practical information like museum hours. Gaffa Creative Precinct's site offers an unconventional design with quirky touches while providing information on its art studio spaces and events. Becca Hillburn's website, built on Webflow’s Newport template, showcases her watercolor comics with a minimal layout, emphasizing the organic feel of her work.

Webflow CMS offers a streamlined approach to content modeling by allowing users to create databases without coding, facilitating the design process visually. Content modeling involves defining the structure and relationships of content types, both at the website level and for individual content types, with the quality of a model judged by its relevance to website goals and fidelity to described objects. The author starts Webflow projects with a spreadsheet due to the advantages of CSV import, which transforms spreadsheets into a powerful design tool by integrating them directly into the site, minimizing disposable design artifacts while simplifying collaboration. The process begins with defining the purpose of a site, as demonstrated by the author's Voice, Tone, & Style Guides website, which aims to increase visibility of voice and tone practices in design, offering a grid-based design with detailed entries to enhance user discovery and understanding.

A collection of free ecommerce templates is available for users looking to launch or enhance their online stores, each designed to suit different types of products and branding needs. "Fre" offers a versatile, modern design suitable for a wide range of products with customizable product, cart, and checkout pages. "Mariela" focuses on artisans selling home goods, allowing for extensive customization to reflect brand identity, emphasizing detailed product presentations. "CoffeeStyle" caters to brands with a story to tell, featuring a minimalist design with a built-in blog and adaptable checkout pages. "ToyStore" is designed for selling children’s products, emphasizing a colorful and mobile-friendly experience. Finally, "Pompeo" targets artisans, providing a meticulous design that complements handcrafted products with customizable order confirmation pages. Each template aims to provide a user-friendly and engaging online shopping experience.

Webflow Ecommerce, now in open beta, offers a groundbreaking approach to creating custom ecommerce experiences by allowing users to visually design and customize online stores without the need for coding. The platform provides complete control over product structures, design elements, and checkout processes, which are traditionally challenging to customize on other platforms like Shopify and WordPress. Users can create custom product pages, galleries, shopping carts, and checkout pages, integrating ecommerce seamlessly with other site elements such as blogs and campaign landing pages. The beta version supports payment processing through Stripe, enabling secure transactions in multiple currencies, although it currently limits users to Stripe-supported countries. Webflow plans to expand its payment options and shipping integrations, and already includes features like automated tax calculation through TaxJar for certain regions. The platform also facilitates order management and fulfillment, making it a versatile tool for building comprehensive, custom ecommerce sites.

In the blog post, Martin Perhiniak, a certified Adobe design instructor, outlines his process for designing a website using Adobe XD and Webflow. He emphasizes the importance of creating a solid design system by organizing branding and web-centric elements on a single artboard and saving them to XD’s Assets UI, a practice he mirrors in Webflow by setting up font families and global colors early on. Perhiniak's approach is divided into five sections: System, Sitemap, Wireframe, Artboard Layout, and Transition to Webflow. The process begins with establishing a comprehensive design system, followed by creating a site map to visualize page relationships and wireframing to develop the user experience in XD. He maintains a one-to-one relationship between mockups and the website by adhering to the web’s box model, further facilitated by setting up artboard layouts with default settings like 1200px width and 15 columns, ensuring a seamless transition to Webflow.