Design

For my contact page, I wanted a generic calendar icon to let people view my diary. Calendar icons are almost always a skeuomorph of a paper calendar, but I wondered if I could make it slightly more…

Improving your designs with tactics instead of talent.

Find out how your blog design impacts how much time visitors spend on your site.

Phase - digital design reinvented.

A few years back (2014) a link was sent around the design and development community that made everyone stop and question all their…

"It looks great, but can you make it 'pop' more?" We've all been there, the dreaded subjective design feedback, no use to anyone; let's stop a moment and look at what led to this subjective nonsense, what chain of events instigated this horror show of unusable feedback? Actually, how clients receive your work and how you frame the feedback request is often just as much to blame as the person asking you to make your designs 'pop'. Ask yourself how often have you simply sent over an email to a client with a .jpg attached and the seemingly innocent request "let me know what you think". The tru...

Today’s UX designers have failed to act in the best interest of users. To right the ship, the next generation has to make three significant changes, writes Mike Monteiro.

Really bad UX mistakes will frustrate and alienate your users. We break down some really bad UX mistakes that show up even in popular products.

Ethan Marcotte explains why it remains the best way to meet client needs.

SVG Backgrounds hosts a collection of free to use customizable SVG-based repeating backgrounds for websites and blogs

Designers and their clients will never understand each other. And that's a good thing. I mean, let's face it, designers have a way bigger understanding of their craft and (usually) the more freedom brands give them, the better the results of their collaborations are. A recent tweet by Japanese brand Nissin Cup Noodles is a perfect example of the terrible visual disaster that happens when a designer follows through with every single client request.

The semantics inherent in HTML elements tell us what we’re supposed to use them for. Need a heading? You’ll want a heading element. Want a paragraph? Our t

A colorpicker for people who live in their text editor

Disclaimer: If you enjoy dashboards, this article isn’t for you.

by Marli Mesibov

Q&A is a column in which I’ll post long-form answers to thought-provoking questions. This particular question was inspired by a thread in…

Digital Design Reinvented

Holistic web design: it just sounds so... '60s counter-culture acid-fueled epiphany-like. But it's worth looking at anyway. I mean, everyone here has either read the Dirk Gently books, or at least watched the latest Netflix adaptation, right? No? Well, here's the crash course: Everything is connected. That connection might be tenuous or obvious, but everything is more or less connected somehow. You can find elements of this idea in chaos theory, especially in the Butterfly Effect—you know, a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and Florida gets hit with a hurricane. (Prediction: by 2020, we ...

Moqups is a streamlined and intuitive web app that helps you create and collaborate on wireframes, mockups, diagrams and prototypes - for any type of project.

I am a huge advocate of User Experience (UX) design.

Easing gradients supercharges linear gradients so they're a lot more flexible and you can say goodbye to hard edges.

A dark user experience pattern is loosely defined as a way to trick users into performing certain actions. These actions always benefit the company employing these techniques, and often leave user out of pocket in at least one way. Sometimes this is monetary; other times it's at the cost of privacy, time, or even user rights. Some of the most common dark patterns include disguising advertisements, sneaking additional items into a user's basket, making it difficult to cancel a subscription, and tricking users to share information they did not intend to. The list goes on, and it's becoming a ...

Why We Abandoned The Hamburger Menu

_Alec McGuffey is the co-founder of RookieUp, a design education platform that offers short-term bootcamps and portfolio-building tools to give aspiring designers everything they need to build a strong design portfolio and launch their design career. Here, he outlines his top tips._

I can’t stress how much I despise these browser pop-ups. I see them all the time, and put simply, they’re ruining the Internet. Every site that uses them fundamentally undermines their readability, and makes me never want to go back. News sites don’t need to know my location. And nobody wants random, shrill notifications in […]

When your product, and the team building it, scales fast, it can be hard to maintain consistency. Here’s how we created a comprehensive design system to keep everyone on the same page.

Now, we’re going to look at a subject that comes directly from mathematics and that we can also find all around us – the golden ratio. Don’t worry; we’re not going back into the classroom for long. We will examine what this concept is and exactly how much it is a fundamental part of making designs pleasing to the user’s eye. The golden ratio’s story is the stuff of legend. With a history dating back almost to the time of Pi (another great mathematical formula, which is essential in understand...

“Golden Ratio” is of great importance in the design of architecture, appliances, logos and photos. I don’t want to write about it a lot…

One of the major characteristics of effective design is a clear user interface.

Learn what wireframing is, how to design them, and some best-practices to follow, so you can diagram your own wireframes using Cacoo.