CategoryTools

September 23, 2013 — User research helps us to understand how other people live their lives, so that we can respond more effectively to their needs with informed and inspired design solutions. It helps us to avoid our own biases, because we frequently have to create design solutions for people who aren’t like us. In this article, David Sherwin will share a process he uses at Frog to plan and conduct user research. It’s called the “research learning spiral.” Read more…

September 17, 2013 — This article scratches the surface of the Three.js library. Once you are comfortable with the API, experimenting with particles, mapping and more complicated meshes can yield incredible results. Three.js is a gold mine for creating beautiful and complex Web experiments. Taking the extremely simple demonstration explained here and turning it into a mind-blowing experiment merely takes experimentation and the willingness to try new things. Read more…

August 16, 2013 — Adobe’s InDesign page-layout application has been made faster and more feature-rich with each iteration. But even the best applications lack some features. Luckily, Adobe realized this and opened the doors to allow designers to expand this set of tools through plugins. In this article, we’ve put together a small collection to show a bit of what InDesign can do. Read more…

August 8, 2013 — Tools for live CSS editing aren’t new these days. So, why would someone ever need to create yet another tool and even call it a “live CSS editor of the new generation”? In this article, Sergey Chikuyonok would like to introduce Emmet LiveStyle. This plugin takes a completely different approach on updating CSS. Unlike other live editors, it doesn’t simply replace a whole CSS file in a browser or an editor, but rather maps changes from one CSS file to the other. Read more…

July 25, 2013 — Automation saves precious time on repetitive tasks and helps us solve certain problems more quickly and easily. Kamil Khadeyev has known about Photoshop scripts for years but decided to really dive in a few months ago. He had avoided it because he thought it was the domain of smart math-minded programmers. He was wrong, and today he’ll show that, although it requires some basic programming skills, scripting isn’t hard to grasp. Read more…

July 3, 2013 — In this article, Martin Gittins will explore the idea of consciously restricting yourself to a set of core tools that you know, love and trust, so that you don’t get overwhelmed by the staggering array of resources and options available to designers. You should know what your most precious tools are, and keep a portable set close at hand. Read more…

May 29, 2013 — In this article, Anselm Hannemann suggests how we can manage to test on multiple devices to resolve errors, without pouring a truck-load of money into actually buying all of these different devicessince these tasks haven’t become any simpler since the wide variety of smartphones, tablets and other devices that sport various operating systems and versions. Read more…

May 22, 2013 — Flexible box layout is a new box model optimized for UI layout, and it makes a lot of tasks much easier, or even possible at all. Flexbox’s repertoire includes the simple centering of elements, the expansion and contraction of elements to fill available space, and source-code independent layout, among others abilities. Read more…

May 1, 2013 — As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. Read more…

April 9, 2013 — In this article, Ariel Salminen is pleased to introduce Responsive Nav, a free and open-source JavaScript plugin. A solution that doesn’t require a big library and is released under the MIT License, so you can use it in all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. The solution is not one size fits all, nor is it meant to be. But for those who are looking for a solution that does one thing well, it’s definitely a good choice. Read more…