The time, effort and money invested in designing better user experiences, more beautiful branding, and innovative advertising creates stronger, successful companies. Designers can become founders by implementing the three key simple phases of ideation, validation and iteration. Yes, there are other factors to making this process successful. However, the path should start with designers. Regardless of space, time and budget, the future of design founderism can be better realized with disruptive educational practices and open source collaboration, which nurtures more innovative designers and, in turn, results in more innovative companies.
Read more…
Solid typography, well-crafted with attention and care is one of the small details that make a project shine. In practice, however, publishing on the web is supposed to be fast, and the little details are often overlooked, which is a pity, because they are not only pleasing to the eye but also improve the reading experience. The tools and resources compiled in this article will help you bring some of that meaning that typography has always benefited from in print to your web projects. Are you ready to do some catching up on that type game?
Read more…
Your “virtual retrospective board” needs to allow team members to sync the current state of the board in real time between all team members, talk about the board via video chat, create, edit and move sticky notes and make sure users log in with the right password. To achieve this you need deepstream and a bit of JQuery. In this article, Wolfram Hampel will show you the step by step you need to know.
Read more…
In this article, Anya Pratskevich will share some ideas about app page design. She’ll also argue that dropping your assumptions and testing is the only way to find content that not only looks and reads great, but also helps your bottom line. The reality is that nobody knows for sure how to design for maximum conversion. What worked in one project will not necessarily work in another. What you can do is test everything: whether it is a different background color for each screenshot (worked in our case) or simply rearranging your current visuals on the page. Design optimization is a dicey game, so roll with it and have fun testing.
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…
As our artifacts and everything around us become more connected, we run the risk as humans of becoming increasingly disconnected from each other. We have a responsibility as interaction designers and user experience researchers to consider the ways in which we create interfaces for everyday experiences in the home, at school, out and about, and with our trusted advisors such as financial planners, doctors and educators. In this article, Jes Koepfler & Kieran Evans will discuss the concept of shallow interaction design and show how we applied some basic principles of this approach to a learning game related to disaster resilience.
Read more…
To celebrate all the little moments of inspiration that comes from the colors of your favorite music album, or the typography on a book cover, we have compiled some resources for you which honor the beauty of graphic design and the ideas behind it. Perfect to squeeze into a short coffee break. Enjoy! The variety is endless, and sometimes you’re lucky and find a little piece of art shining through the sheer mass. It’s inspiring to see how designers boil the idea behind a book down to the limited canvas space of one rectangle. What will it inspire you to? Perhaps something extraordinary, like your own series of book covers made with HTML and CSS?
Read more…
Web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting point, from which to apply development and design patterns. In this article, Dmitry Nutels will show you examples that will get you to the point of being able to be a better judge of how, in your particular application, a server-side rendering solution should be approached. The evolution steps he’ll go through are hardly comprehensive, especially in the area of data retrieval on the server. There is a lot of additional work being done by tools and frameworks that have been inspired and enabled by React: Redux, Relay, Fluxible, Alt and so many, many more.
Read more…
Pagination is still the most popular way to load new items on a website. However, the usability test sessions found “Load more” buttons combined with lazy-loading to be a superior implementation, resulting in a more seamless user experience. In this article, Christian Holst will present Baymard Institute’s usability research findings for both “Load more” buttons, infinite scrolling and pagination, including for both mobile and desktop. He’ll see how search results need to be implemented differently from category navigation, along with several pitfalls with implementation and examples from leading e-commerce websites.
Read more…
It’s time to freshen up your desktop! This post features desktop wallpapers for March 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop! Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.
Read more…