A sketch is a skeleton of an idea that was came to be originally as a thought. While we used to do it by hand, and on paper, creating different mock-ups and sketches these days can be done digitally via various applications. While lots of designers and artists go with the times and do their sketches on computers, a big number of creatives still prefer drawing by hand.

It's great following a sketch from conception to fruition, and it is so inspirational to see how an ordinary drawing on a piece of paper can turn into a stunning design, be it for mobile or desktop.

We have put together 20 great examples of user interface sketches and ready designs to inspire you to take a step back and try out your ideas on paper and see where that takes you. Who knows, maybe it will inspire you to go back to the old ways for future UI projects. Let’s see where that takes you, shall we?

Recommended Reading: Basic Guidelines To Product Sketching

Swipe to Login by Eddie Lobanovskiy, ALEX BENDER

Sketch & Mockup by Bady

Ordify Wireframe by Maik Fahldieck

Tweet This by Eddie Lobanovskiy

Radio App – Player by Román Jusdado

iOS Billing App with Timer by Mihnea Zamfir

UI Sketches by Jasmine Calderon

Moment Icon Design by Jackie Tran Anh

UI sketching by Neal Corbett

Player Buttons UI by Luke Etheridge

Ticket App Homescreen by Petr Knoll

Client Feedback Generator by Mike DelGuidice

Info by Nicholas Swanson

Sales Goals + Landing Page by Nicholas Swanson

UI Sketch by Etch

Sketch to Digital Wireframe by Konrad Group

Dashboard PS by Eric Guess

Process of Tasks by Ryan Smith

Motlee UI Sketches by Stephen Corby

NLS Mobile Sketches by Luis M Ruiz

I was previously part of a group of freelance writers who were convinced that they were special. In the group are content writers like me who make a living off writing, and also people who have always wanted to write but never really had the chance to learn. One of these members (from the latter) made the mistake of asking the group what it would take to learn how to make a living freelance writing without going to college.

He got chastised by at least a dozen of these writers armed to the teeth with college degrees. How dare he think that he was even smart enough to go to college, much less learn the ‘incredibly complex’ and ‘difficult’ world of freelance writing. One hour in, and they weren’t letting go, so I had to jump in.

Recommended Reading: 12 Signs That You Are A Writer At Heart (And 3 Signs You Are Not)

Enough is Enough

I told this guy the truth in the open forum for the entire world to see that:

• Yes, you can learn to write without going to college
• Yes, you can learn to freelance without a business degree
• You can earn a very good living in freelance writing without the benefit of a college degree
• You can work from home as a freelance writer, buck-assed naked if you so desire
• You can learn to be a freelance writer without spending a single dime on incredibly expensive college courses

Read Also: 9 Things You Should Know About Freelancing Full-Time

I also sent the young man my regular email and website URL and told him I would teach him the basics of freelancing, and help him find a school to hone his writing skills.

In return, I got ejected from the group. The reason? They thought I was a hypocrite since I went to college to learn how to write, and I would just be wasting the poor guy’s time.

Actually…

You can imagine their shock when I told them that yes, I went to college just as I had listed on my social website profile, but not for journalism, as they had assumed. I majored in Medical Administration. I also showed them proof that I was being paid to write before I started college at age 21. I taught myself to write. And that was the last straw.

Not only did his group kick me out, a few other writing groups I was in (I think it was four of them) kicked me out too. I started my own writing group but no one signed up.

You Can Do Anything

But the point of this sad story is that if you want to be a freelance content writer, you can be. All it really takes is dedication and a heartfelt commitment to the craft. By the way, the young man (Ben) has been following my lead for more than 6 months and it is already paying off.

He has two clients, is still learning to write, and I throw him work when I bite off more than I can chew. I’m glad to report that he is a very good writer now and is very well liked by the people for whom he works.

Resources For Learning How To Write

If you Google “Learn Freelance Writing,” you will get hundreds of thousands of results. There are a lot of people who know how it is done and are willing to help. Learning to write… now that is a horse of a different color. Part of freelance writing or writing in general, is in knowing how to perform deep research. Just because you may not have plans to go to college, it doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from their free online courses (expect to do a lot of reading):

The Open University

With well over 600 topics to choose from in free online courses, this site has numerous writing courses open to the public. Search for gems such as Writing What You Know, or the ever-popular What Is Good Writing to get started.

Yale University

Literature and poetry are not only fun; they are essential if you want diversity in writing. The site offers free courses in both subjects.

MIT

Believe it or not, MIT offers courses in both humanistic and writing. Yes, it is free. You will not believe what you find at the end of this rainbow (I almost passed out from sheer joy). Christmas in August. Writing in Cyberspace is especially enlightening!

University of Massachusetts Boston

You do not want to miss the free courses on Critical Reading and Writing, and Critical and Creative Thinking.

The Purdue OWL

This list would not be complete without the Purdue Onling Writing Lab (OWL), one of the best resources for any higher education need, without the higher education price. The Writing Process is far more than it appears to be, and their resource list is amazing.

Others

Daily Writing Tips. Perhaps one of the best newsletters on the planet for those who want to learn the craft is DWT, or Daily Writing Tips. The newsletter comes right to your inbox and covers the detailed basics of the English language. DailyWritingTips is a must have for both the new writer and the experienced professional alike.

The New Horizons Writing Academy. Here’s my site which offers free, college level courses for anyone who wants to write. Follow this link and sign up for a free account on writing.com. Get to the enrolment page from the link in the bio.

To Be A Writer

Never let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do. Those yahoos on that website are miserable now and will still be miserable tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ben will soon be making more money than they do simply because he believed in himself and conquered his fear of failure (which was the only thing holding him back from his dream).

If you want to be a writer, nothing can stop you. In fact, you can find a lot of help from Google and a lot of these fine online courses for free. Don’t stop learning. There is nothing that you cannot do if you put your mind to it.

More

Here are more articles on learning something new, you might like:

• Top 10 Websites To Learn Coding (Interactively) Online
• Learning Programming: 10 Misconceptions That Are Not True
• Ultimate Guide To Setting Up Your First Online Shop
• Develop Your Windows 8 App – Resources, Tools And Tips

Tabbed browsing is an ingenius idea. All you have to do is open all your links in a new tab and you can let the tabs load in the background while you read your article or watch your video on any single loaded tab. However, when it comes to revisiting a site that you have once read, finding and retrieving the link from your Chrome browsing history is a pain. In this case, you’ll need a plugin called Deeper History.

With the Deeper History Chrome extension installed, you can easily search for any words that you remember reading within the contents of the page and navigate to that webpage. Deeper History is great for people like researchers or students who comb through a lot of content on the browser. It’s easy to use and secure as well. Here’s our short take on Deeper History.

Recommended Reading: 10 Browser Add-Ons For A More Interactive "New Tab" Page

Using Deeper History For Chrome

Deeper History only starts working after you install it, so if you’re looking to search for something before it was installed, you’re out of luck. However, once installed, it works in the background and creates a database of random words within the content of your history.

To search for something, all you have to do is type dh on the address bar and press tab twice until the Deeper History search engine appears. You can then begin typing in words to search through the content of your browsing history.

It will search through the secure database it has created to help you find the webpage that you opened days ago. The database it creates is saved locally on the computer you’re using and isn’t uploaded to the cloud, thus ensuring your web browsing privacy.

You can also view what it saves by going to the Deeper History search engine and typing in .db then hitting Enter. You can securely delete this database by uninstalling Deeper History.

Limitation

And that’s that! Deeper History is a great extension to enhance the search of your web browsing history on Chrome. Do note, however, that you may not be able to find the page you want sometimes.

This is because due to limited space Deeper History doesn’t save the entire text content of a webpage, it only saves random words and sentences within a webpage. Being able to retrieve the page you want based on the random word the plugin saves is practically a game of chance. The question now is, do you feel lucky? Let us know if it worked for you, in the comments section below.

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by writer and editor, Pooja Lohana, who writes for EWC Presenter, a free app that is the Swiss knife for visualizing ideas for creating infographics, presentations, banners, animations etc for free. You can reach Poojaon Facebook and Twitter or her site here.

It’s true – data never sleeps. This infographic by DOMO states that there are 347 WordPress blog posts created every minute on the Web. And Google gets over 2 million queries per minute! That is a lot of data to slip into a lot of infographics (which are also being created every minute). Do a simple search of the word "infographic" on Google and you’ll get about 13 million results.

Big data makes it very necessary to police infographic data and to separate bad infographics from good ones. Not only that, it makes things even harder for a legitimate, trusty and useful infographic to go viral because there are so many of its counterparts doing the rounds, vying for the same attention from the same crowd.

(Source: visual.ly)

It all sounds too simple: You collect your data, create a good-looking piece of infographic, embed it on your website and it drives traffic, boosts your sales or generates more leads. KissMetrics estimates that making a campaign viral could have an effect that’s 500-1000 times more than that of a non-viral campaign. One very effective way to gain virality is to have your infographic discovered by an authoritative site.

Yet there are many, many infographics that sit undiscovered in some corner of the deep Web. That said, let’s look at some methods you can adopt pre-, during and post-production to make your infographic go viral in 2014.

Recommended Reading: 20+ Tools to Create Your Own Infographics

1. Be Anything but Neutral

If you want to move crowds, create traction and see your infographic go viral, make it "viral-worthy" first. Are you playing too safe and neutral? People will subconsciously create a label for you: Boring. And guess what? There are too many boring things out there online so you don’t have to be one of them.

To influence masses and create a wave, don’t feel afraid to experiment and go fully vocal about your stand (which pre-supposes take a stand!). The aim is to get people to love you or hate you but never ignore you.

2. Use Stellar Headlines

Use simple, short and keyword-rich headlines. A good headline will have at least one powerful word that captures their emotion (words such as "shocking", "trust", "warning", "lies", "mistakes" etc). A cool resource I’ve been using to hack headlines is Jon Morrow’s 52 Headline Hacks. It’s mainly created for viral blog posts but you can well use it for infographics also.

3. Submit to Directories

There are many infographic-specific directories that will happily publish your work. Try the following ones:

1. Daily Infographic (Paid)
2. Visual.ly
3. Submit Infographics
4. Infographick
5. Cool Infographics
6. Flickr
7. Pinterest
8. Visual Loop

A resource of all directories is listed here.

4. Reach Out to Other Publishers

Now is the time to pull out your contact list and reach out to every blogger and publisher you know. Affiliates, websites you’ve networked with, experts in your niche… every one counts. It never hurts to ask - whether they accept your post or not is up to them. Although your aim is to target sites with huge traffic, don’t underestimate sites with moderate traffic. You never know who’s listening!

Another cool way to find more leads is by doing a quick search on Twitter for your keyword. If you see these people have a good following and have their niche in common with you, go ahead and talk to them. Do the same for big Facebook pages.

Read Also: Powerful Branding Techniques Through Social Media

Make a list of all Facebook, Twitter and blog contacts that are talking on your topic and reach out to them one by one, via email. The longer this list, the better. Create an excel sheet for this and add columns for their social media contacts, direct email and website.

Don’t forget to make a reference to a relevant post on their website – you’ll have to make a mention of this post when you’re reaching out to them. This not only shows you’ve got things in common but also that you‘ve done your homework.

5. Find People Who Forgot to Quote You

A lot of times, people will publish your work but forget to link back. In times such as this, it’s pretty smart to include a water mark on your infographic. Picmarkr is a free watermark service you can try.

If you included a watermark, it’s still a good idea to find people who are showing your infographic but had not properly linked back to your site. Search for the title of your infographic in Google. You’ll find a list of websites that are using your infographic. Better yet, go to www.images.google.com and make a direct image search by uploading your infographic.

6. Provide Exclusive Content

Some authority websites will ask for exclusive content. Offer them a limited-time exclusivity to your content to boost your chances with them. Of course you want to send your work to other blogs also. To do so, tweak your headlines and create several versions of your infographic. This keeps the editors happy and you gain traffic from multiple sources.