January 13, 2017 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

January 13, 2017 — The following set includes 40 icons with everything ranging from shirts, pants and dresses to a blazer, hat and even a scarf. Available in nine styles and four formats (AI, EPS, SVG and PNG). You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. Please note that this icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. Read more…

January 12, 2017 — In the second part of this series, Christian Krammer will teach you more about using Sketch effectively for mobile app design. You will finish designing the music player that you started in part one. This includes creating the icons at the bottom, as well as making the music player responsive, so that all elements adapt to the width of the artboard and, thus, can be used for different device widths. Shapes are much easier to set up and modify, and you will still be able to combine them into more complex forms using Boolean operations. Read more…

January 11, 2017 — In this article, Nick Babich will talk about the role of functional animation in UX design and see when to incorporate motion into a design. If you’d like to follow along and spice up your designs with animations, Adobe introduced Adobe XD which you can download and test for free, and get started right away. Identifying the places where animation has utility is only half the story. If you’re going to use animations in your designs, they should be built well, and that is only possible when an animation is a natural part of the design process. Read more…

January 10, 2017 — Email design and development is a beast. Email client vendors haven’t been as progressive as web browser vendors in adopting new standards. Not much has changed in email design. In fact, it has gotten worse. With the introduction of mobile devices and more and more email clients, we have even more caveats to deal with when building HTML email. In this article, Lee Munroe brings you an insight into the world of building and sending email, and a couple of code snippets and resources that are sure to add some hours back into your life. Read more…

January 9, 2017 — May 2017 bring you a healthy and inspiring adventure. As for that kick-start inspiration, Vitaly Friedman hopes this article will help get you back in the creative mindset. The above illustration has a style that I’m sure everyone will admire. The combination of colors used is simply marvelous — so simple, yet so complex. Read more…

January 9, 2017 — Have you tried experimenting with the Complications API? Thanks to the Complications API, every Android application can easily export the most important data and make it accessible at a glance directly on the user’s wrist, even without requiring a dedicated watch face. In this article, Daniele Bonaldo shows how to make your app’s data available directly from a wearable watch face, allowing the user to access it at a glance. You’ll also learn how to sync data between a phone and smartwatch, and how to display it using the new Complications API. Read more…

January 6, 2017 — You can facilitate kickoff meetings to improve shared understanding of a project’s goals and potential challenges. You can facilitate presentations to elicit more productive questions and feedback. Even impromptu discussions and group whiteboard sessions would benefit from better facilitation. In this article Brian Frank focuses on developing the soft skills to feel more comfortable facilitating UX design, research and strategy sessions. You don’t need to be a full-time facilitator or leader, or even a designer. These skills can be used by anyone in any role to inject more productive collaboration throughout their design process. Read more…

January 5, 2017 — Sketch is known for its tricky, advanced facets, but it’s not rocket science. We’ve got you covered with The Sketch Handbook which is filled with practical examples and tutorials that will help you get the most out of this mighty tool. In today’s article, Christian Krammer gives us a little taste of all the impressive designs Sketch is capable of bringing to life. Read more…

January 3, 2017 — Digital products are getting more and more complex. In this article, Yury Vetrov explains why we need to support more platforms, tweak usage scenarios for more user segments, and hypothesize more. Our industry has both high- and low-skilled designers, and it will be easy for algorithms to replace the latter. However, those who can follow and break rules when necessary will find magical new tools and possibilities. Read more…