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…
Have you tried drawing animals from circles? It can be quite a challenge, especially if you can only use a particular amount of circles. In this article, Dorota Pankowska explains how she created 13 animals with only 13 circles. The drawing challenge mostly consists of three Adobe applications: Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.
Read more…
This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for eight years now. In this article, artists and designers from across the globe put their creative skills to the test and created unique desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works, because we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. The following wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Happy New Year!
Read more…
A 2014 study found that people with easier-to-pronounce names are deemed “more trustworthy”. Atif Azam built Vocalizer (a simple, lightweight JavaScript plugin that facilitates the accessibility of difficult to pronounce names) to solve a problem that has persisted all his life. Now, he hopes this will prove useful to others, helping them solve the same problem.
Read more…
The best way to convert a user on a mobile landing page is to provide a clear description of what you’re offering, along with obvious ways to contact you. Be clear in describing what your product does and how you’re solving your target customer’s problems. Get to the point of what you’re selling and show the user how to buy it or contact you. Creating landing pages with mobile users in mind will help you to focus on how best to convert people on smartphones. When building a landing page for any online campaign, take special care to consider the mobile experience. Review the presentation of content, as well as the prominence of contact information.
Read more…
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…
Building a genuinely helpful and attractive chatbot is still a challenge from a UX standpoint. While chatbots can be a great tool for creating more personalized customer experience, conversational design still have certain limitations. There are clear cases when a conversation can help or hurt the UX. Before building a chatbot for your business, you should clearly define its purpose and the exact value it could bring to the user. Teach the bot to do one thing extremely good, such as delivering weather forecasts or introducing the company’s scope of service before experimenting further with more advanced features.
Read more…
Are you using progressive booting already? What about tree-shaking and code-splitting in React and Angular? Have you set up Brotli or Zopfli compression, OCSP stapling and HPACK compression? Also, how about resource hints, client hints and CSS containment — not to mention IPv6, HTTP/2 and service workers? A front-end performance checklist of things to keep in mind when optimizing for performance.
Read more…
Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages.
When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable.
Read more…
What would Apple gain by letting developers build web apps that don’t need to go in the App Store? Is iOS holding us back? In this article, Stéphanie Walter presents some of the cool things you can do with APIs and other technologies to make your users’ lives easier. The future of the mobile browser is bright, shiny and fun. We can and will be able to build incredibly powerful things with web technologies.
Read more…
