October 22, 2014 — If you browse your favorite website and close your eyes slightly so that your vision is a bit clouded by your eyelashes. Can you still see and use the website? Are you able to read the labels, fields, buttons, navigation and small footer text? Can you imagine how someone who sees differently would read and use it? In this article, Cathy O’ Connor shares one aspect of design accessibility: making sure that the look and feel (the visual design of the content) are sufficiently inclusive of differently sighted users. Read more…

October 21, 2014 — In this article, Patrick Rudolph provides many hints, code snippets and lessons learned on how to build great hybrid mobile apps. He’ll briefly introduce hybrid mobile app development, including its benefits and drawbacks. Then, Patrick will share lessons he has learned from over two years of developing Hojoki and CatchApp, both of which run natively on major mobile platforms and were built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Finally, you’ll review the most prominent tools to wrap code in a native app. Read more…

October 20, 2014 — When planning your IA, involve users of your website in the process as soon as you can. Card sorting is a great way to become familiar with information architecture and user-centred design. It’s cheap, reliable and easy to set up. It’s a great way to become familiar with concepts such as information architecture and user-centred design. In this article, Pierre Croft will discuss card sorting, a tried and true technique for doing just that. You’ll go through some practical tips for running a card-sorting session, and also cover some examples. Read more…

October 18, 2014 — In this industry, there’s so much to learn, that falling behind is easy. So, you tell yourselves you’ll come back to it later. But later never shows up. What if you did just one small thing a day to expand your knowledge and skill set, every day, for 30 days straight? This challenge of stacking knowledge daily will enable you not only to learn 30 things, but to learn 30 things that will increase in complexity and fit together as a whole new branch of working knowledge for you. Read more…

October 17, 2014 — Today’s icon set consists of a set of vector icons that represent monuments across the globe, so they can be literally used anywhere. This colorful set was carefully designed by Freepik and is completely free to use for 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. Please always provide credits to the creators and link to the article in which this freebie was released if you would like to spread the word. Read more…

October 16, 2014 — CSS is usually considered a language for applying styles to webpages. However, in this article Krasimir Tsonev will show you that it is more than that. It is also a handy tool for collecting statistics. What matters in the end is the impact for clients. Are they getting more products sold or are there more visitors for their campaign sites? The final results usually show if your project is successful. Google Analytics is a powerful way to collect data. In this article, you will see a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics. Read more…

October 15, 2014 — With the display of the iPhone 6 Plus being even more detailed than that of the iPhone 4, we will need to provide 3x assets. The numbers 1x, 2x and 3x are also called “scale factors.” Of course, Android developers have always had to deal with many different sets of assets. Still, designers are finding themselves questioning their production workflow. In this article, Karsten Bruns will focus on iOS, but you could easily extend this approach to Android and the web. Hopefully, the methods described here will simplify your workflow. Read more…

October 14, 2014 — The majority of conferences are small. Most are single-track events, except for those that are 10-plus-track affairs. Many offer workshops to round out the experience. In this article Jan Constantin won’t present best practices for planning a conference, but rather will look at how it’s actually done most of the time. While this is not a guide to putting together the perfect conference, it gives a good overview of what seems to work and which elements are so unpredictable that they do not serve as reliable guidelines. Read more…

October 13, 2014 — To help balance the craving for visual simplicity with the need to keep websites easy to navigate, you can borrow some concepts from the world of wayfinding. In this article, Dennis Kardys will show you how you can apply these concepts to the mobile web. Keep in mind that every person who browses an application is making their way through a space — often an unfamiliar one. As the user embarks on their journey, what types of wayfinding assistance are you providing to guide them? Read more…

October 10, 2014 — We are humbled to release a set of 50 free autumn-themed EPS icons illustrated in a lovely sketchy style. Designed by Nick Botner as line art in Adobe Illustrator, the icons are available in EPS, enabling you to change both the color or the weight of the strokes with ease. This icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons. 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. Read more…