March 19, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release a quite unique icon set. The goodie contains 92 icons in three editable variants: outlined, filled & colored, covering 15 wide categories. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is prohibited. Read more…

March 17, 2015 — Using SVGs can reduce the number of HTTP requests for image replacement. it’s also easy to make an SVG scalable to its container for responsive development. In this article Sarah Drasner will cover a few ways of using SVG sprites to describe motion on the web. She’ll show some techniques for using SVG sprites in complex animation that takes advantage of these factors. All examples shown will assume the use of an auto-prefixer and some basic knowledge of CSS animations. Read more…

March 16, 2015 — Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information. Armed with this understanding, accessibility becomes a cold, hard technical challenge. How do assistive technologies present a web application to make it accessible for their users? Where do they get the information they need? One of the keys is a technology known as the accessibility API. Read more…

March 13, 2015 — Claire Carlson had the opportunity to conduct in-home user interviews in São Paulo on behalf of a Brazilian real estate company called Zap Imóveis. This project provided her with invaluable insider knowledge on how to best conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil and, more broadly, how to conduct field research in foreign countries using the same underlying principles. This article presents her tips for foreigners planning to conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil, including parallels with research in India, China, and Spain. Read more…

March 11, 2015 — A quick query of “mobile navigation” returns thousands of opinions on navigation patterns, including the “hamburger” menu, front-end plugins, frameworks and plenty of other tools. Despite this changing landscape of tools and design trends, a successful navigation system sends users on the path to the exact content they need at the right time. In this article, Patrick Marsceill will explore the beginnings of the design process, as well as techniques specific to mobile ideation, and a unique idea for building a prototype navigation system in Keynote. Read more…

March 10, 2015 — In this article, Igor Fastovski invites UX designers and usability experts to look at the user experience of continuous input. He will detail the process of continuous input and weigh its gains against its pain points. Igor will then apply usability heuristics and basic empathy considerations in an attempt to remove pain points and tweak the design, helping developers improve usability of continuous input apps. Read more…

March 9, 2015 — From simple charts to fancy infographics to complex timeline animations, data visualizations are popping up all over the Internet. However, as in any other area, once everyone gets on the train, distinguishing yourself from the pack becomes hard. There is virtually no limit to what you can do with the physics of data visualizations. Create column charts and make them fall like dominos, or make pie charts roll, bounce and more. You can make objects in charts and maps roll, spin, bounce, change shape and morph in ways that will capture the viewer’s attention much more quickly than regular static or even interactive versions! Read more…

March 6, 2015 — Many of the skills Jeremy Girard honed while playing in a band have contributed to his success as a web designer — as much as, if not more than, his ability to write clean code or design an attractive web page. He learned skills critical to his success, such as the importance of tailoring your set list (or your presentation) to make an early connection with your audience, or the ability to speak clearly and confidently in public. In this article, Jeremy will describe how being in a band taught him to be a better web designer. Read more…

March 5, 2015 — In this article, Varya Stepanova & Juuso Backman will talk about style guides that are generated directly from the style definition sources — i.e. CSS and its modern variants. Style guides are useful in many aspects of development and maintenance, so it’s little wonder that developing them has become a highly popular practice. But even with the clear benefits, taking the necessary steps to start using them is easier said than done, as quite often the challenge is cultural, requiring changes in people’s mindsets. We encourage everyone to try it! Read more…

March 4, 2015 — The success of your app definitely does not depend solely on its looks: it has to be functional and solve someone’s problem, or enhance a current experience. But, given the human attraction to looks and visual cues, giving app screenshots a good amount of focus cannot be wrong. App store optimization (ASO) has become a handy addition to an app developer’s marketing plan, and promises to help increase visibility and, as a consequence, downloads. In this article, Melanie Haselmayr will take a closer look at app screenshots, one of the two key decision-making helpers for anyone who downloads an app. Read more…