The benefits of UI design systems are now well known. They lead to more cohesive, consistent user experiences. They speed up your team’s workflow, allowing you to launch more stuff while saving huge amounts of time and money in the process. They establish a common vocabulary between disciplines, resulting in a more collaborative and constructive workflow.
They make browser, device, performance, and accessibility testing easier. And they serve as a solid foundation to build upon over time, helping your organization to more easily adapt to the ever-shifting web landscape. This article provides a detailed guide to building and maintaining atomic design systems with Pattern Lab 2.
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Babylon.js is a JavaScript framework for building 3D games with HTML5, WebGL and Web Audio. To celebrate the new version 2.3 of the library, David Rousset decided to build a new demo named “Sponza” to highlight what can be done with the WebGL engine and HTML5 when it comes to building great games nowadays. In this article, he’ll explain how it all works together, along with the various challenges he’s faced and the lessons he’s learned while building it.
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In the unforgiving world of SaaS, delaying a critical feature will mean losing clients. A solid agile workflow can make all the difference. The development process needs to run smoothly and up to a standard, with delays reduced to a bare minimum. Before any change makes its way to the end user, it goes through five crucial phases: feedback, design, development, quality assurance and deployment. In this article, Vanja Mimic will share what he’s learned about each of the stages from over eight years in the business.
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If you’re building a physical structure, like a large edifice, with weak material, a lot of external support is required to hold it together, and things have to be overbuilt to stay sturdy. When you’re building a website out of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this external support might look like frameworks, plugins, preprocessors, transpilers, editing tools, package managers and build processes. Instead of adding yet another plugin to the top of the stack, Yommy Hodgins thought of extending one of the core languages, CSS, to strengthen the material that websites are built from, developing better, stronger websites that require less external support and tools to build.
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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.
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There’s no doubt that there are a lot of great techniques out there — they just need to be discovered. Today Vitaly Friedman would like to share a couple of inspirational illustrations and photos which he hopes will help you daydream and relax. You’ll notice some pretty interesting and refreshing color combinations… Get ready to enter the summer with a big spark of inspiration!
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In this article, Emerson Loustau comprises a collection of code snippets that he uses on almost every WordPress project. What they all have in common is that they limit functionality that is either unnecessary, confusing, or unsafe. Everything that follows can be used on any site, but these tips are especially applicable for professionals making custom themes and plugins for clients. A well-designed WordPress theme should make as many design decisions as possible so the author doesn’t have to.
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Made for fast and fluid UX design, Adobe XD gives you everything in one neat bundle: it lets you sketch out ideas, create interactive prototypes, test and share them. To give you a head start when working with XD, Cosima Mielke has compiled 15 pro tips, including features that might not be obvious at first glance but that will make your prototyping workflow a lot smoother. Please note that a Windows version is in the works and due later in 2016, but for now Adobe XD is available for Mac OS X only.
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Considering that most carousel implementations lack many usability details, one can understand why strong wording is often used in discussions about carousels. But there are alternatives to a home page carousel that both perform well and are vastly easier to implement. In this article, Christian Holst will go over the 10 implementation details he’s found that are required to make home page carousels perform acceptably with end users. He’ll outline how and why mobile and desktop implementations should differ and, lastly, suggest a simpler, problem-free alternative to home page carousels.
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Many of your great ideas will fail early in the process. Finding out that the problem you’re trying to solve is simply not a problem that users are really bothered by is incredibly common. But with perseverance and iteration, you’ll eventually come up with a product idea that validates. The goal throughout the process of lean validation is to delay the expensive and time-consuming work of coding as late as possible in the process. It’s the best way to keep yourself focused, to minimize costs and to maximize your chance of a successful launch.
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