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Shopping Carts Gallery: Examples and Good Practices

Imagine that you are designing an online-store. Since stakeholders are only interested in the number of sells, the success of your work directly depends on how well you manage to drive users to the “Checkout”-button. In this case you might want to consider some design approaches which will set you apart from your competitors. After all, the probability that they’ve done it wrongly is extremely high.

One of the simplest examples of flawed design decisions is the incorrect use of the shopping cart icon — a traditional icon which stands for the virtual holding place for any products of the store. Used properly, this little yet powerful element can help users to buy a product as quickly and painless as possible. As such, it is essential for the purchasing procedure and therefore deserves to be considered carefully during the design process.

In this post we present attractive, creative and user-friendly shopping carts, bags, trolleys, buckets and baskets — any kind of carts as they are used in the online-stores. Besides, we also cover related creative ideas, design approaches and usability guidelines.

Imagine that you are designing an online-store. Since stakeholders are only interested in the number of sells, the success of your work directly depends on how well you manage to drive users to the “Checkout”-button. In this case you might want to consider some design approaches which will set you apart from your competitors. After all, the probability that they’ve done it wrongly is extremely high.

One of the simplest examples of flawed design decisions is the incorrect use of the shopping cart icon — a traditional icon which stands for the virtual holding place for any products of the store. Used properly, this little yet powerful element can help users to buy a product as quickly and painless as possible. As such, it is essential for the purchasing procedure and therefore deserves to be considered carefully during the design process.

An unusual view of the shopping cart, a huge shopping bag accompanied by a mascot.

In this post we present attractive, creative and user-friendly shopping carts, bags, trolleys, buckets and baskets — any kind of carts as they are used in the online-stores. Besides, we also cover related creative ideas, design approaches and usability guidelines.

But simple text link is enough, right?

Yes, sometimes. However, in many cases it depends on what kind of products the company or store is going to offer. If the company is going to sell screwdrivers, colorful shopping bags are probably not the best option for the shopping cart icon. In such cases a clearly visible text link might be sufficient. However, if you’d like to attract customers’ attention in a shoes store, you might be better off with some slightly more attractive design elements.

Landsens uses a simple text link for the shopping cart functionality. It’s one possible solution, but probably not the most effective one…

…however, sometimes a text link can be enough.

In both cases the question of how subtle shopping cart functionality is presented is the question of the store design. Shopping cart and checkout-icons have the most significant function for both customers and store owners which is why it requires a thorough design decision. And if there are effective replacements for boring text links then why not use them?

1. Attractive shopping carts

Quite often designers tend to design shopping carts in an attractive way, preferring visually appealing elements to standard trolley icons. It’s interesting that most stores which specialize in products for woman shopping carts look much prettier compared to computer electronics stores. The purpose is quite clear: shopping carts are supposed to motivate users into buying the products.

In most cases designers limit the shopping cart to its primary function — to stand for the virtual holding place for any products a customer selects from the online store. However, in some cases shopping carts are more informal, look similarly to real shopping carts and try to communicate emotions.

2. Shopping carts can improve usability

From the usability point of view it is better to offer users a brief but complete overview of the ongoing shopping process. The basic reason for that is that users can verify that the system works properly and they’ve interacted with the system properly.

In order to achieve that, shopping carts can be combined with further functionalities of the store. Since users expect the shopping cart in the right-hand side at the top of the page, it might be reasonable to include further options near the shopping cart and thus encapsulate the whole shopping process in a compact and always visible site element.

E.g. it might be useful to

• provide customers with the information of what is inside the shopping cart,
• indicate the minimal requirements for successful ordering,

  

• how much the products placed there cost,

  

• put a link to the checkout-section which might help users to finish the shopping process immediately,

  

• inform about the possible payment options,

  

• offer some help in case users have lost track of the process.

  

Providing this information immediately, a store offers users a permanent overview of the shopping process. It saves visitors a number of clicks, so they can better focus on the choice of products they prefer and feel more comfortable navigating the store.

3. Shopping cart supports the content

Shopping carts can also be used for the simple purpose of illustration. Instead of using them in the header of the online store, designers place them right into the content — e.g. in the description of a given product. Apparently, often it works as there are many examples of where this approach is used throughout the site.

Shopping cart supports the content: Bigw uses the trolley both in the header and in the headings of its store pages.

A “traditional” design: the shopping cart is often placed right to the “Add to a shopping cart”-link.

4. Subtle use of shopping carts

Just as shopping cart is sometimes visible at the first glance, sometimes it is designed in a rather subtle way. This is a first option to consider if you are about to design the store with a rather unspectacular profile. Let’s take a look at some examples of how this can be done.

Being subtle, shopping carts can also be highlighted with a distinctive color which sets it apart from the overall design of the site and makes them more recognizable.

5. Creative use of shopping carts

Apparently, shopping carts don’t necessarily have to look like a traditional shopping cart. From the users’ perspective that might be not the best design decision to use as it should be immediately recognizable and memorable. Nevertheless some designers tend to choose creative approaches.

A shopping cart which looks like a… shopping cart. You can also place multiple items in it.

Dynamic shopping cart on Hqman

6. Shopping cart is embedded into the logo

Sometimes designers tend to integrate the shopping cart into the logo of the store. In many cases the colors used in the logo then are also used for the shopping cart icon throughout the online-store.

7. Shopping Cart Gone Wrong

Although it is quite easy to follow the basic guidelines of the shopping cart design, many (way too many) web-sites often make the very same mistakes:

• the shopping cart icon is not clickable,

  

• the shopping cart icon is difficult to recognize,

  

• the shopping cart icon is difficult to find.

  
  Although the shopping cart box is on the right place and is being highlighted with the green color, it is so heavily overcrowded by other elements that it’s really hard to focus the attention on it.

Shopping cart: where to place?

Traditionally shopping carts are placed on the right-hand side at the top of the page. Over years users got used to this convention as they could see it over and over again on a number of online-stores. However, as the height of the box may grow with the number of selected products, sometimes it may become necessary to prefer a vertical placement of the cart box to the more usual horizontal orientation.

In such cases the shopping cart is often placed in the right-hand sidebar. In both cases the position of the shopping cart should remain consistent on all pages.

Further galleries of shopping carts

Few months ago Jason Billingsley has collected 107 Add to Cart Buttons of the Top Online Retailers. These little, rectangular, sometimes colorful clickables connect the product to the shopping cart and are an extension of your branding. It’s important to put some thought into what your “Add to Cart” icon looks like in your shopping cart.

Shopping Cart Icons were collected by Ro London few years ago. In his opinion using bags is better than using carts.

RealPlayer users held to ransom
It has been a couple of months now since a Russian security researcher, Evgeny Legerov, confirmed that the widely deployed media software RealPlayer was vulnerable to a zero-day exploit. The Russian company, Gleg, is in the business of selling information on such exploits and security flaws. Unfortunately, according RealNetworks’s Vice President Jeff Chasen, Gleg has been unwilling or unable to provide the necessary data to allow the alleged gaping security hole to be patched despite repeated requests from both RealNetworks and CERT. Gleg has, on the other hand, posted a video showing the…

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WP Contact Manager: The versatility of WordPress continues to amaze me. Design Canopy has released a theme/set of instructions for WordPress that would allow you to run a WordPress install as a taggable, searchable contact manager that can be made into a Members Only system and display related contacts. Now mind you, it is not a stand alone theme, needs extra plugins to be downloaded and installed and they outline detailed instructions on how to set it up. However, the setup looks relatively easy and the results are definitely pretty cool. I would have liked to see a Prologue like custom posting interface for logged in users but that could be an easy add on or plugin once the thing is set up.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of

Over years Adobe Illustrator has become the standard application when it comes to illustration design. Artists, illustrators and graphic designers use Illustrator to create vector-based graphics which — contrary to raster-based editors such as Adobe Photoshop — can be easily rescaled without the loss of quality. E.g., Illustrator is often used to quickly transform hand-drawn sketches on a sheet of paper into lively and colorful digital images.

However, to master Adobe Illustrator isn’t easy; and the creating process of professional illustrations requires both time and patience. Therefore tutorials can turn out to be real life- and time-savers as they show exactly what needs to be done in order to create professional illustrations and how masters of illustration actually manage to do their magic. One year ago we’ve presented a hand-picked collection of Illustrator tutorials. Now it’s time for a fresh portion of healthy and creative Illustrator material.

In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers. The new selection isn’t enormous, but big enough to provide you with some good starting points.

Please notice that

• we’ve selected only those tutorials which haven’t been featured last year or were released after the article was published.
• you might also be interested in Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of we’ve presented few weeks ago.

Over years Adobe Illustrator has become the standard application when it comes to illustration design. Artists, illustrators and graphic designers use Illustrator to create vector-based graphics which — contrary to raster-based editors such as Adobe Photoshop — can be easily rescaled without the loss of quality. E.g., Illustrator is often used to quickly transform hand-drawn sketches on a sheet of paper into lively and colorful digital images.

However, to master Adobe Illustrator isn’t easy; and the creating process of professional illustrations requires both time and patience. Therefore tutorials can turn out to be real life- and time-savers as they show exactly what needs to be done in order to create professional illustrations and how masters of illustration actually manage to do their magic. One year ago we’ve presented a hand-picked collection of Illustrator tutorials. Now it’s time for a fresh portion of healthy and creative Illustrator material.

In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers. The new selection isn’t enormous, but big enough to provide you with some good starting points.

Please notice that

• we’ve selected only those tutorials which haven’t been featured last year or were released after the article was published.
• you might also be interested in Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of we’ve presented few weeks ago.

Illustrator Tutorials

Creating a Crazy Cool Logo
In this post I will show you how we created the logo. I will skip the drawing parts, yes there were tons of drawings before going to the computer, because when they stole my computer and backups in 2006 they took all my photos of the drawings.

Spice up Pie Charts
For some charts you might only want to spice up the most important slice or the biggest one. Although most topics aren’t as fun as mutations, any sort of added graphics make boring charts look a lot better.

Wolf Drawing Tutorial
Learn how to create an illustrated wolf from the hand-drawn paper sketch to final product with Illustrator and Photoshop.

Skull Tutorial
An alien skull tutorial. Editorial illustration.

How I Do Stuff Tutorial (Video-tutorial)
It’s just a speed-up video of how one can go from a sketch to a mediocre illustration using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Test Your Creativity
“Using a provided set of basic shapes I have to compile them to create my illustration. The theme is up to me but there are some ground rules such as you cannot edit the shapes or distort them, you however can subtract from them using any of the shapes in the provided set.”

Vintage T-Shirts
It’s easy to create authentic collegiate T-shirt designs using Illustrator, Photoshop and a good old-fashioned iron. In this tutorial, illustrator Derek Lea reveals how combining both applications can create stunning results.

Gigposter Design: The New Sex
Learn how to create an impressive gig poster design with Illustrator.

Pirate cartoon tutorial
Learn how to create a vector pirate cartoon character from a hand-drawn sketch.

Pixels and Vectors Tutorial
The gap between working with pixels and vectors in Photoshop and Illustrator is closing rapidly, thanks to Smart Objects. Derek Lea explains all while creating a highly textured yet vector-sharp masterpiece.

Comic Book Style Tutorial
Learn how to create illustrations and turn them into flyers or posters. The end product will be a flyer which was created for an art show.

Creating Road Maps in Adobe Illustrator
Sooner or later every designer comes across the exciting job of producing a map, whether it’s on a leaflet or website the overall aim is to visually document a particular area of land to allow for people to find their way to a place of business or event.

Cutaway Car Illustration Tutorial
In this lesson you’ll learn how to create a 3-Point Perspective-view drawing of a generic car, working from plan and elevation view reference only.

White Tiger Tutorial
A cartoony white tiger tutorial. A poster illustration.

From Sketch To Vector Illustration
A technique of vector illustrating that takes a little bit more skill is starting with hand-drawn sketches. This tutorial captures the whole design process — from scratch.

Retro Car Tutorial
All you need is Illustrator, some inks and some brushes to turn a photograph of a car into a vector illustration.

Intricate Patterns In Illustrator Tutorial
This tutorial will show you how to create intricate patterns in Illustrator super quickly. Stuff that would take you hours to draw manually with the Pen Tool takes just seconds when you use this technique. Video-version is also available.

Not as easy as it looks: A beveled star
A simple and effective tutorial on how to create a beveled star — in 7 steps.

Tutorial: Transform, Style, Blend
Do you like things to have a bit of randomness, an element of surprise? Me too. Learn how to create random swirls in Illustrator with few steps.

Tutorial: Transform, Style, Blend
In this video tutorial you’ll learn how to illustrate an iPod Nano from scratch using the 3D Effect in Adobe Illustrator.

Ellipse Drawing Tutorial
Creating a Circle in Perspective with Adobe Illustrator. More excellent tutorials for beginners.

How To Make 3D Vector Vintage Stars
I’m going to walk you through a technique to create vintage looking 3d stars in Illustrator. You guessed it, 100% vector.

Poster Illustration: Go Forth and Create
Suffice it to say this tutorial is my personal switcher story from FreeHand to Illustrator and contains the good, the bad and the ugly details of both apps. Tutorial Includes Notes in both ‘English’ and ‘Español’.

Create a Vector RSS Icon with Illustrator
Probably one of the most popular and recognisable icons in the web universe; the RSS icon is displayed on many website to indicate the availability of a subscription feed. There are pre-made icons you can download and place on your website, however this tutorial cover the process of creating your own custom vector RSS icon in Illustrator.

Vehicle Vector Tutorial
Learn how to design a vector vehicle with Illustrator.

Fertile Mind Tutorial

This tutorial will walk you through an illustrative banner for the Portland Oregon AIGA chapters ‘Urban Forest Project.’

Face, Hair, Clothing Illustrator Tutorial
Learn how to create real-looking human face, hair and cloth.

Illustrator: Golden Selection
Have you ever wondered why a profound piece of art is so compositionally pleasing? The artist probably employed the use of the Divine Proportion, which is a phenomenon that suggests that there’s a mathematical equation that’s consistent with the aesthetics of good composition.

Tropical Transparency Effect
Learn how to create a bouquet of Tropical Flowers. This tutorial is a breeze. You’ll blow through this really fast.

Complex Circular Design Techniques
Creating intricate circular designs and patterns may look difficult because the shapes can be very complicated, but you will be surprised at just how easy making these shapes can be. I will go over some neat tricks, tools, techniques, and settings that will have you pumping out perfect circular designs in no time using Illustrator.

Illustrating the Flower Pattern
This article will outline the main steps on how I made the flower pattern in Illustrator. Hopefully, this can answer your question.

Drawing a Character’s Face in Illustrator
Creating a cartoon or human-like caricature is a fun and rewarding project to do in Illustrator. Not only that, but if you’re pretty good with the pen tool, it doesn’t take very long. In this tutorial I will be creating an elf. Be sure to look at refrences of other cartoons or caricatures to make sure your shapes are correct.

Ornate Lettering Process
I’m going to show you the process as to how I do my ornate lettering. This is a new design I did for Stone Sour that utilized this technique. Now right off the bat, this is not a step by step tutorial. It’s more of a look behind the scenes into how I work.

Transform Again
You can achieve surprisingly cool results using the Transform Again feature in Illustrator starting from a simple shape. As you all know simplicity is my motto. Today I try turn this into practice again. So sit tight for another step-by-step tutorial using this simple but oh so powerful feature.

Create A Blob Monster in Illustrator - The Scream
Over that last couple of days i’ve been playing around in Illustrator a lot make some basic shapes and images. One of my best creations is the Blob Monster called the scream. It is really simple to do and doesn’t take long to complete. This technique can be used for nearly any type of simple shape / monster.

Drawing Homer Simpson
Illustrator is a great program. It offers so much versatility in creating vector images. Hence why it is the top vector program out there. As a beginner to this program I want to share with you a tutorial that is simple to follow that you can use to draw Homer Simpson of The Simpsons.

7 Things You Didn’t Know Adobe Illustrator Could Do
These are: The Blend Tool / Adding Lines Between Lines… The Mesh Tool / Adding Shading To A Shape… 3D / Entering The Next Dimension… Patterns / Making Fills Interesting… Symbol Sprayer / Splatter some vector… Blur / Smooth Out The Vector…. Transparency / Bringing Depth To Overlaying Shapes…

Creating Seamless Patterns
One of the frequest questions I get from readers is how you create seamless patterns in Illustrator. Today I’ll explain how I create such patterns and how you can scale and rotate them using different settings in the Scale tool options.

Creating Pins
Pins are popular these days, so I thought why not write a tutorial on how to create these in Adobe Illustrator. If you’ve ever wondered how to simulate this realistic looking pin or button effect, here’s your chance to learn.

Complicate Orb Icon
This tutorial will teach you doing more complicate button icon or Orb effect Icon using Illustrator. This is quite a long tutorial.

Retain Spot Colors without Losing Your Marbles
Are you using Photoshop to create something with both transparency effects and spot colors? You may be better off with Illustrator instead.

Stylish Vector Flower
Learn how to create stylish vector/line flower with Illustrator Blend Tool. This Adobe Illustrator tutorial is great for creating background and large print illustration. More Illustrator tutorials from nDesign.

Illustrator Tutorial: Creating Vector Snowflakes
Just in time for the holidays… a tutorial for creating those fun, festive holiday snowflakes. These vector flakes are a must-have for turning your holiday designs into a winter wonderland. So sit back, grab a cup of eggnog, and feast your eyes on how amazingly simple it is to create a vector snowflake.

The Complete Digital Comic, Part 2: Inking in Illustrator
This is part two in my series of tutorials about how to make comic book art on the computer.

Instant Op Art
Use Illustrator’s transform functions to create a stunning op art piece with a real sense of movement. Mark Mayers shows you how… This is a PDF-Document.

Creating Reflecting Web Icons in Illustrator
One of the looks of “Web 2.0″ is the aqua icons that Matt Kloskowski shows us how to make in the first issue of Adobe Illustrator Techniques print issue. Another look is the reflecting icon. The clean, crisp look of these attractive images makes clicking through a website’s navigation fun. Here’s how to make one of those neat icons.

Draw Ballon in Illustrator Tutorial
Simple, yet effective. In few steps to a nice illustrated baloon.

Illustrator 3D Effect Tutorial
3D Effect slide show tutorial on Flickr.

Sources and Resources

• 65 Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
• ComputerArts.co.uk Tutorials
  A growing collection of high-quality tutorials for Illustrator.
• Adobe Illustrator CS3 Tutorials
  Over 7.5 hours of free video-tutorials for Adobe Illustrator
• The Tutorials Pool on Flickr
• Tutorial By Picture Pool on Flickr

List of WordPress Tutorials
List of WordPress tutorials: A bunch of WordPress tutorials on various topics in the form of screencasts. Topics include various tasks such as installation on a variety of platforms and tasks inside the WordPress admin.

List of WordPress tutorials: A bunch of WordPress tutorials on various topics in the form of screencasts. Topics include various tasks such as installation on a variety of platforms and tasks inside the WordPress admin.

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Trackbacks: Still Useful?
Six Apart created the Trackback specification as a way to enable bloggers to communicate between each other via a link or acknowledgement. My question to the reader: in what ways do you use Trackbacks? Do you still find Trackbacks useful? With the growing Trackback spam, how do you keep up with legitimate bloggers?

Six Apart created the Trackback specification as a way to enable bloggers to communicate between each other via a link or acknowledgement.

My question to the reader: in what ways do you use Trackbacks?

Do you still find Trackbacks useful? With the growing Trackback spam, how do you keep up with legitimate bloggers?