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Tag: Design System

Humaaans Illustration Design System

Creative / Development Inspiration 56

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

Are you able to be the villain? What about if the product you are making has potential to harm? Also, on a more positive note. Here are some great examples of design systems, the state of UX in 2019, and more! Enjoy!

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Stop Showing Design Options and Commit

Normally create 20 different versions and let the client pick? But you are the expert, no?

https://medium.com/slite/stop-showing-design-options-and-commit-595d80bdb4aa

 

The State of UX in 2019

We have seen quite a lot this year. Here’s what to expect for UX in 2019.

https://trends.uxdesign.cc/

 

Humaaans

Mix and match illustrations of people with a design library. Definitely bookmark this!

https://www.humaaans.com/

 

A UX Guide For Designing Error Pages

404’s & maintenance pages. Use this checklist before you get started.

https://blog.prototypr.io/a-ux-guide-for-designing-error-pages-fb9ced1f1c8a

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Why You Shouldn’t Split Test During an eCommerce Redesign

Comparing the performance of the old and new site isn’t as useful as other exercises during the redesign process you can run. Don’t split test this!

https://www.goinflow.com/ecommerce-redesign-best-practices/

 

Awesome Design Systems

A collection of design systems, some open source. All the way from Audi, to Cloudflare. Some great examples.

https://github.com/alexpate/awesome-design-systems

 

React Create

Simple library to create component templates for React and React native projects.

https://github.com/obiwankenoobi/create

 

Tiny Details: A Look at Hamburger Menu Reveal Transitions

Examples of the hamburger menu done well, and also not so well. A few nice takes here.

https://speckyboy.com/hamburger-menu-reveal-transitions/

 

A bit of everything

Be the Villain

They’re not going to be fun conversations. It’s not going to be easy convincing others that these aren’t paranoid delusions best tucked out of sight in the darkest, dustiest corner of the backlog. Realistically, talking about it may even harm your career.

https://24ways.org/2018/be-the-villain/

 

8 Lessons from Creating a Design System

Mono created a design system. Here is what they learnt along the way!

https://mono.company/design-systems/eight-lessons-from-creating-a-design-system/

 

Raindrop.io

Think bookmarks, but your your team. Build collections of assets, or working on a new job that needs inspiration. Raindrop makes it simple.

https://raindrop.io/

Dogs on CodePen Banner

Creative / Development Inspiration 55

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

This week is more UI focused, due to a project that I am working on. I have still managed to include some brilliant development inspiration articles, and a few thought pieces at the bottom of the rundown. Have a good week!

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Adobe XD Wireframe Kits

A collection of Adobe XD wireframes to get you off the ground in your next web project!

https://newtodesign.com/xd-wireframe-kits/

 

Accessibility before Aesthetics

It’s time we start addressing accessibility before aesthetics in our design processes to create meaningful products for our diversified societies and cultures. Before diving into the Why, How and What of it, let’s revisit the definitions of these terms to set the context.

https://uxplanet.org/accessibility-before-aesthetics-9a0fb463e149

 

Montage

Fast, easy prototyping for everyone. Using a user-generated library of components, designs can be got of the ground quicker than ever.

https://www.trymontage.com/

 

Rememberly — A UX case study to help people affected by Alzheimer’s and Dementia

A brilliant case study for a apps UX that needs to do its job.

https://medium.com/tj-egbert-design/rememberly-a-ux-case-study-to-help-people-affected-by-alzheimers-and-dementia-6a5c17a1e690

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Zeroheight

This brings the design system closer to everyone involved. Starts with the designers, then can be fleshed out by the developers. Edited by everyone.

https://zeroheight.com/

 

The Dogs of CodePen

10 animated dogs. Thats all.

https://blog.codepen.io/2018/09/05/the-dogs-of-codepen/

 

Strategies For Headless Projects With Structured Content Management Systems

Using a Structured Content Management System (SCMS) can be a great way to free your content from a paradigm that begins to feel its age. In this article, Knut Melvær suggests some overarching strategies, with some concrete real-world examples on how to think about working with structured content.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/11/structured-content-done-right/

 

Getform

Not enough time to build in a form? Use Getform! Backend platform for designers and developers.

https://getform.io/

 

FreeCodeCamp – JavaScript Platform Game Tutorial

Lear how to build a Maria like platform game with this 3 hour video tutorial!

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/beaucarnes/platformer-game-turorial-javascript–m1JO9zlF4

 

Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them

Deciding when to use a drop-down — or when to use another interface type, such as a radio button interface or open text field — for a specific input can be tricky. This article talks through the when and wheres.

https://baymard.com/blog/drop-down-usability

 

A bit of everything

Deep Dive Duck

Need to keep an eye on your competitors? Monitor changes on their site and get it set to you in a weekly email!

https://deepdiveduck.com/

Users love dark products like this

Creative / Development Inspiration 53

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

A massive selection this week. 2 great website examples to help inspire your portfolio designs. Some great JS frameworks and testing tools. A few articles to help designers design the good stuff, and even more articles to keep you busy. Enjoy this website design and developer inspiration rundown.

Website Inspiration

Tom Rush

A Leeds based digital creative website. Tom has built a simple, easy to read, and quick to load portfolio that does a great job.

https://tomrushworth.co.uk/

 

Tim Householter

First Tom, now Tim. A lead designer at Transom Design in Seattle. His site uses lots of white space and grids to display his work. Clean, simple, easy to read.

http://timhouseholter.com

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

In the dead of night we are drawn to dark interfaces

Distraction free, pretty, and amplification. What dark interfaces are a massive thing in product design.

https://uxdesign.cc/in-the-dead-of-night-a4c7fa98aec4

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Grid Tile Layouts with auto-fit and minmax

A new and easy way to make perfect responsive title layouts with CSS Grid.

https://gedd.ski/post/tile-layouts/

 

Building Your Colour Palette

You can’t build anything with five hex codes. To build something real, you need a much more comprehensive set of colours to choose from.

https://refactoringui.com/previews/building-your-color-palette

 

Creating Excellent UX Flow Charts

Flow charts, like any deliverable in the design process, is an excuse to talk to your team. As much as we like complaining about meetings and formal deliverables, the truth is that design work would come to a dead stop without (a) conversations and (b) pictures.

https://medium.com/eightshapes-llc/creating-excellent-ux-flow-charts-df6f1e46e524

 

Google Web.Dev

With actionable guidance and analysis, web.dev helps developers like you learn and apply the web’s modern capabilities to your own sites and apps.

https://web.dev/

 

Glorious Demo

The best way to create animated code for demos. Copy, pastable, and pretty.

https://glorious.codes/demo

 

Chromatic – UI testing for Storybook

A continuous UI testing tool that combines the accuracy of manual testing with the efficiency of automation. 21% of software budget is on bugs, and the cost of bug repair in production is 5-10x. This tool helps save time and money.

https://blog.hichroma.com/chromatic/home

 

Maizzle

Maizzle is a BYOHTML framework for rapid HTML email development. It’s like a static site generator, but tailored to email.

https://maizzle.com/

 

Svelte

The magical disappearing UI framework. I still need to have a proper look into this but it seems really interesting. Using vanilla JS, but the same functionality as major JS frameworks. Teeny tiny in size.

https://svelte.technology/

 

Why using `tabindex` values greater than “0” is bad

Using Tab Indexes in web development? Maybe you should stop doing that…

http://www.karlgroves.com/2018/11/13/why-using-tabindex-values-greater-than-0-is-bad/

 

A bit of everything

Web Typography Resources

A great list of resources all centred around typography. Perfect for designers and developers.

https://betterwebtype.com/web-typography-resources

 

Cacher

The code snippet organiser for developers. Integrates with most editors to store commonly used snippets from the whole team on the cloud.

https://www.cacher.io/

 

Heat maps 101: a complete guide with examples, tools, and case studies

Hotjar walk you through why, how and when to use heat maps. Mixed up with a few case studies and examples to show how valuable they can be.

https://www.hotjar.com/blog/heatmaps

 

Designing, laws, and attitudes.

I often hear from stakeholders who worry that “accessible” means “ugly.” Well here are resources that are accessible and visually beautiful.

https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/designing-laws-and-attitudes/

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Creative / Development Inspiration 52

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

Website Inspiration

Puree Maison

Although the designers have not considered usability at all, it is a good site to show the different animations and reveals that can be used across a website. Some brilliant hover states over images, and gentle fades on scroll.

https://pureemaison.com/en

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Palx

The last few week have been good for colour generators. Here is another brilliantly simple colour palette generator to sit in your bookmarks.

https://palx.jxnblk.com/

 

40 Orange Website Designs

Creative Overflow have pulled together 40 websites that are based on the colour orange. Some modern, some dated, but all good examples.

http://creativeoverflow.net/40-orange-website-designs-to-inspire-your-next-project/

 

Three Web Design Tools To Speed Up Things

While looking for tools to unify web designs and developers I came across three really interesting web apps. One not yet out yet. One that have been the block a few times, and the other new on the scene.

 

Webflow

Give you the power to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually, while writing clean, semantic code for you.

https://webflow.com/

Hadron

Hadron is a development environment for designers and developers who work together towards the same goal, moving ideas forward and learning from each other along the way.

https://hadron.app/

 

Bondlayer

Bondlayer empowers web designers to craft native apps and responsive websites. Without coding or template restrictions.

https://www.bondlayer.com/

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Spectre

A new lightweight modern CSS framework. It is under 10kb gzipped, responsive and uses modern elements and components.

https://picturepan2.github.io/spectre/

 

Markdown to JSX

A lightweight customizable component for Markdown within React

https://github.com/probablyup/markdown-to-jsx

 

Playroom

A simple design environment that allows you to simultaneously design across a variety of themes and screen sizes, powered by JSX and your own component library. Create quick mock-ups and share the work simply.

https://github.com/seek-oss/playroom

 

An Annotated Webpack 4 Config for Frontend Web Development

As web development becomes more complex, we need tooling to help us build modern websites. Here’s a complete real-world production example of a sophisticated web­pack 4 config

https://nystudio107.com/blog/an-annotated-webpack-4-config-for-frontend-web-development

 

‘Atomic’ font size management with Sass

Atomic sizing with Sass should make styling fonts easier. It moves away from styling font elements like H1s, and focuses on specific classes.

https://iamsteve.me/blog/entry/atomic-font-size-management-with-sass

 

A bit of everything

Kill Your Personas

How persona spectrum’s help push real user needs.

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/kill-your-personas-1c332d4908cc?

 

We Do People Leave Your Website? Undecided Explorers

Trying to improve conversion rates? Maybe take a look at users that do convert… You may need to tailor.

https://www.hotjar.com/blog/why-people-leave-your-website

 

User Research? But Why?

If your job has anything to do with design, there is a good chance that you would have experienced the need to do some form of user research. If you happen to work with or for a group of people who have limited understanding of the design process, then you must have had your moments of frustration. This article helps answer these questions.

https://uxdesign.cc/user-research-but-why-2d399182637b

 

Meta Tags

A great tool to mock up Meta Tag views across social media platforms, as well as a teaching tool for those who are not in the loop.

https://metatags.io/

 

Netflix Web Performance Case Study

There are no silver bullets to web performance. Simple static pages benefit from being server-rendered with minimal JavaScript. Libraries can provide great value for complex pages when used with care. Netflix breaks down the process in this case study.

https://medium.com/dev-channel/a-netflix-web-performance-case-study-c0bcde26a9d9

Web Character from Pub and SVG

Creative / Development Inspiration 50

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

This is the 50th Creative and Development Inspiration rundown. That is almost a year of finding best practise articles, and not updating my site to have SSL (I only sorted it yesterday, what a ballache). In any case, this week has been a great one for web articles. From best UX practices, to setting website goals, to infinite scroll, and back to web accessibility. This weeks design development rundown is an eclectic mix.

 

Website Inspiration

Franco Manca

Kicking this week off with the website inspiration. A website for sourdough pizza. Simple, easy to understand, with subtle (and not so subtle CSS animations). Someones websites don’t need to be astounding to do a great job.

https://www.francomanca.co.uk/

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

UX Design Practices: How to Make Web Interface Scannable

Scannability is one of the most essential factors of website usability. We have so much content at our fingertips, more than as can consume. Due to this websites need to be designed in a way to get the information easily and quickly, so we can go back to Twitter.

https://uxplanet.org/ux-design-practices-how-to-make-web-interface-scannable-2010125c710e

 

7 Ways to Design For a Global Audience

How you design a website that doesn’t have a clearly defined target audience? Web Designer Depot walk through 7 different steps.

https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/10/7-ways-to-design-for-a-global-audience/

 

User Experience: How to Improve Your Website UX with Humor and Cuteness

Building a website is all about your users. You need to be aware of your audience and you build your brand identity around them. There are thousands of ways to approach and enhance your website user experience. One of the strategies we are often presented with is using humor and cuteness added to your website style.

https://icons8.com/articles/user-experience-improve-website-ux-humor-cuteness

 

What is a Design Sprint

Taken from Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products. This article breaks down how to maximise the chance of making something people actually want.

https://www.freshtilledsoil.com/what-is-a-design-sprint

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Mouth Expressions with Pug, SVG ad GSAP

Bringing some character to Codepen, Alessandro Falchi as created this brilliant animation that jumps between moods.

https://codepen.io/afalchi82/pen/OBjKyZ

 

Is Gutenberg the End or a New Beginning for WordPress?

I would argue yes, maybe, depending on the user. Iain from Delicious Brains has a lot of say on the issue. Well worth the read if you are a user of WordPress

https://deliciousbrains.com/wordpress-gutenberg

 

Stop Building Websites With Infinite Scroll!

I’ll be honest. I was surprised when I saw this article, as I had no idea people still developed sites with infinite scroll. Turns out they do. Please, please stop.

https://logrocket.com/blog/infinite-scroll/

 

Percy.io

Sold as an all in one visual testing solution, Percy takes screenshots of your site when a new version rolls out. If there any any issues, Percy will tell you!

https://percy.io/

 

Web Accessibility for 2019

Today’s content can consist of VR, animation, data visualisations, and video games. As well as the more standard HTML tags. This means a broken experience for those who rely on assertive technologies. How can this be changed moving into 2019?

https://blog.sourcerer.io/building-web-accessibility-in-2019-b4bf16ef5754

 

A bit of everything

 

Making Your Design Systems Dynamic

Components are not static. They resize and move with the page. So why are designers designing them as such? Is it due to the tools evolving from a print background?

https://uxdesign.cc/making-your-design-systems-dynamic-644cf1c7d33f

 

Uber’s Undoing Part III: Redemption

In Design and Development Inspiration 58 I covered the 2 part of this article. Here is the third. A real look at why Uber should get gone (they don’t know what is going on it seems).

http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2018/10/24/ubers-undoing-part-iii-redemption

 

The Modern Web Design Process: Setting Goals

The first step to a successful website, is working out the point of the website. This seems like common sense, but apparently not.

https://webflow.com/blog/the-modern-web-design-process-setting-goals

 

User Research is a Team Sport

Big reveal research does not work. As in, one person going away and doing all the work, ending in a presentation does not allow the team to immerse in the user information. The team must be there from the start.

http://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/user-research-is-a-team-sport

CSS Shape Radius Blog Banner

Creative / Development Inspiration 49

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

This week is more developer heavy, but with reason. There have been some brilliant tools and articles this week, and I really wanted to share them all! Enjoy this weeks design (little less) and development (little more) inspiration rundown.

 

Website Inspiration

ACLU — 50 State Blueprint

Not your typical website, but incredibly effective. ACLU have created this simple website showing each one of the 1,942,600 people in state prisons and jails in the US.

https://50stateblueprint.aclu.org/

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Stop Solving Real Problems Once in a While

We sometimes take things too seriously and thus overrate people sharing their shiny design and code experiments with the world.

https://uxdesign.cc/stop-solving-real-problems-once-in-a-while-e7e1ecdaf9c1

 

Logo Lab

A tool to help you make your logo better. Checks balance, colour, accessibility, and more to ensure your brand is more able to catch that attention!

https://logolab.app/lab

 

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Introducing GitHub Actions

This makes me very excited. GitHub actions allows build and deploy (actually, any task you can think of) to be run when specific commit commands are made. Yes.

https://css-tricks.com/introducing-github-actions/

 

Experimental Gradient Editor

A great Codepen project by David A, showing colour gradient manipulation. Doesn’t really work on mobile, but looks great on desktop!

https://codepen.io/meodai/full/xyqoEO/

 

Rythm JS

Spelling issues aside. This JavaScript library is has an interesting take on using music on websites. Lets make your website dance.

https://okazari.github.io/Rythm.js/

 

Keys to Maintainable CSS: Order

Krisztian makes some great points on how CSS should be organised in a project. From ordering, layout, and simple spacing, this article helps developers write better, more readable CSS.

https://pyx.space/post/keys-to-maintainable-css-order

 

Relax – A Promise Based State Management Library

Think Redux, but smaller. Written from scratch, with no action types, switch statements or middle ware. It’s only 2.23kb gzipped!

https://github.com/relax-js/relax

 

CSS Border-Radius Can Do That?

When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. The article goes through how this is done, and also links out to a handy tool to help in shape creation.

https://medium.com/9elements/css-border-radius-can-do-that-d46df1d013ae

 

A bit of everything

How to Create a Design System

I am not going to give this up yet! I am big on this idea. This article covers the autonomy of a design system, and how you can build one.

https://medium.com/dev-channel/how-to-create-a-design-system-460b93a6565

 

The Inclusive Web – Why It Should Matter to Businesses

An article I wrote last week about how businesses seems to forget about accessibility. This makes no sense, as they seem to be missing a trick…

http://thoughtsandstuff.com/the-inclusive-web-why-it-should-matter-to-businesses/

 

Of Deadlines and Due Dates

This article stood out to be due to this one like – “Do not commit to a deadline you did not help set”. I think this sentiment is something that needs to be considered by a lot of people in this industry. Interesting read.

https://blog.calevans.com/2006/02/03/of-deadlines-and-due-dates/

 

So We Got Tracked Anyway

A brilliant article about how SSL means bugger all to the monopolies of the interwebs, and how Google and Facebook track you everywhere you go.

https://youbroketheinternet.org/trackedanyway

 

Realtime Board

I stumbled across this tool on Reddit. A real time, whiteboard like interface to keep everything in one place. A simple white boarding platform for cross-functional team collaboration

https://realtimeboard.com/

Mawla Banner

Creative / Development Inspiration 48

Robert Marshall 1 Comment

A focus on design systems this week, with a brilliant piece on Ubers rebrand, website inspiration, and micro nudges. Plus a few more in this weeks design development inspiration rundown.

 

Website Inspiration

Mawla – Mobile & Web Development Studio

Firstly, I love these bobble shapes used across the Mawla site. That, combined with the pastel colours makes it friendly, and welcoming. Lots of white space between sections allows the user to fully digest each point. And it works well on mobile!

https://mawla.io/

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Uber’s Undoing Part I: Whipping Boy

Uber has been through so many re-brands, they don’t seem to know who they are any more. Eli pulls apart the company, and looks at the way their re-brands have seemingly had no grounding.

http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2018/10/10/ubers-undoing-part-i-whipping-boy

 

A Guide to Colour Accessibility in Product Design

Accessibility is getting a lot of traction now, with more designers and developers trying to get the upper-hand. With that in mind, have you ever thought about colour accessibility?

https://medium.com/inside-design/a-guide-to-color-accessibility-in-product-design-516e734c160c

 

Micro nudge: a micro animation for behavioural change

A micro nudge is a well-timed small animation that prompts a user to complete a small task. This article includes examples from Instagram, and walks us through the process.

https://uxplanet.org/micro-nudge-a-micro-animation-for-behavioral-change-dd15ecd4fab3

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Building an Image Generator for the Number 1 Track on Spotify

DJ Snake, Cardi B, Selena Gomez, and Ozuna have released their new song, Taki Taki, into the world and it has quickly soared to #1 on Spotify’s Global Top 50. Lee Martin was asked to create a marketing concept. This is what he came up with.

https://medium.com/@leemartin/taki-taki-eb45d03a8fb1

 

Cross Browser Testing Cloud

LambaTest allows you to test your website or application across 2000+ browsers and operating systems.

https://www.lambdatest.com/home

 

A11Y Style Guide

This application is a living style guide or pattern library, generated from KSS documented styles…with an accessibility twist. A well build, well documented style library.

http://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide/

 

 

A Collection of Design System Articles

I have recently become interested in design systems. The concept makes complete sense, allowing all stakeholders to understand the brand – as well as making future design much faster!

Designing Design Systems

Clearlefts Jerlyn walks through the process of designing a design system, and how they run workshops to encourage stack holders to work through pain points.

https://clearleft.com/posts/designing-design-systems

 

Design Systems and Agility

A piece extended from a talk at UX Australia on design systems and their importance. Who do they serve? What is the point?

https://medium.com/interactive-mind/design-systems-and-agility-part-1-of-2-b96c188acfca

 

Understanding Design Systems and Patterns

The concept of design systems is not new to creative industries, but it has only recently been picked up by the digital side.  This article breaks down what a design system is, and can be.

https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/design-system

 

A bit of everything

You can’t do human-first design without looking after your humans.

Our industry has a poor reputation of burn-out, long hours and stress. How can you keep moral high in the office?

https://perspective.despark.com/you-cant-do-human-first-design-without-looking-after-your-humans-726a0074834f

Creative / Development Inspiration 47

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

12 articles to help inspire you from last week. This website design and development inspiration has some great pieces on UX, a few website examples, and some more code snippets.

 

Have you ever considered that web performance goes hand in hand with UX, or why you should definitely user test. Well I have some thought piece for you!

 

Website Inspiration

Torch App

A simple site that works well on desktop and mobile. An interesting product as well. Love a bit of AR.

https://www.torch.app/

 

Poor Millennials

An article by Huffington post that walks you through the issues millennials have, using modern website techniques. Good work. Interesting read.

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

The product design tool for the day after launch

Site has gone live, but you have seen tweaks are needed. No need to write each one down and send to the developer. With this extension you can make the changes in the console and send with comments. Cannot believe its taken this long!

https://mod-dot.com/teaser/

 

Microcopy Inspirations

All those pages (like 404) that you don’t know how to style, or what copy to use. Well here you are.

https://www.microcopyinspirations.com/

 

Icondrop

One place for all your icons – easily used, easily passed on to the next user.

http://icondrop.io/

 

Understanding Design Systems

While it may seem like a new way of approaching digital workflow, the concept of a design system is not “new” to creative industries. At the core of any design system is a language of design patterns that solve common problems a designer might face.

https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/design-system

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

 When to use target_blank

Chris Coyier breaks down when you should, and shouldn’t use target_blank.

https://css-tricks.com/use-target_blank/

 

Random Colour Harmonies

Last week I showed you how Lyft had created a colour palette generator. Well here is another one!

https://codepen.io/meodai/full/RerqjG/

 

Google Maps stopped working? This could be why…

Google recently updated their billing model, and changed the way the APIs were set up. Here I outline how to sort that.

http://thoughtsandstuff.com/google-maps-not-working-with-api/

 

A bit of everything

Breaking the Deadlock Between User Experience and Developer Experience

We cannot talk about user experience, without also including performance. This article opens this issue up. Very interesting read.

https://alistapart.com/article/breaking-the-deadlock-between-user-experience-and-developer-experience

 

Getting to Yes — Convincing Stakeholders to Invest in User Testing

Those who understand the importance of UX know that design-centric companies have a higher ROI so including user testing in a design project comes as a no-brainer. On the contrary, unfamiliarity with its potential benefits means that many product owners don’t consider testing in the first place.

https://blog.maze.design/stakeholders-user-testing/

 

No Conversions? Here are 4 Reasons that Might Help

Getting users to convert can be a tricky one. This article highlights for places where your website might be falling down, and how to fix it.

https://www.cortes.design/post/some-traffic-but-no-conversions-here-are-4-reasons-your-page-is-not-converting-any-why

Design audit banner

Creative / Development Inspiration 44

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

More thought pieces than inspiration, which is sometimes needed in this industry. Take a moment to sit back, read a few and consider the direction you want to take the web. This weeks design and development inspiration I listed an article on designing for accessibility, how AMP can go to hell (it really can), how to run a design audit, and how to stay scrappy.

 

Website Inspiration

Fleur Moreau – Design Portfolio

Not my usual type of website, but I really enjoyed this. Subtle transitions and a great display of content and image.

http://fleurmoreau.fr/

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Fake Clients

Practice logo design using randomly generated client briefs!

https://fakeclients.com/

 

Designing UI with Color Blind Users in Mind

Colour plays an integral role in UI design. When done right, it improves user experience, influences purchasing decisions, and reflects the brands voice. So, how do you design effective, accessible, and aesthetically pleasing interfaces for coluor blind users?

https://www.secretstache.com/blog/designing-for-color-blind-users/

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Progressive Tooling

A list of community-built, third-party tools that can be used to improve page performance. Well worth a bookmark!

https://progressivetooling.com/

 

How to Use GIT Efficiently

Apart from knowing git add, git commit , and git push , there are a bunch of other important techniques in Git. Knowing these will help a lot in the long run.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-use-git-efficiently-54320a236369

 

AMP Can Go To Hell

An article after a piece of my heart. Google are trying to monopolise the “World Wide Web”. Can we please stop them?

https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/

 

A bit of everything

What is a Design Audit and Why You Should Conduct One?

Inconsistencies won’t make anyone trust you or like you. A design audit is essentially a brand checkup. They help ensure everything is consistent and on point. This article discusses what exactly they are, how to conduct them and what results to expect from them.

https://designmodo.com/design-audit

 

How to Stay Scrappy

How to keep your team “scrappy”. How to keep motivated, and fighting for the win. Well worth the read to see how Paper pushes their company forwards.

https://medium.com/dropbox-design/how-to-stay-scrappy-9c42af21c996

Kin Movie Banner

Creative / Development Inspiration 43

Robert Marshall Leave a comment

After a week off ( for sun, mojitos and swimming ) I have another web design / development inspiration for you. However, because I can’t stop researching – even when on holiday – the list is slightly longer than usual, and full of some pretty interesting links.

 

Website Inspiration

Kin Movie

I’m not usually a fan of film websites, but the way the film snippets work alongside the parallax and particles is really something. Worth a look.

https://kin.movie

 

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

The key lessons I learned creating a popular Design System

In 2012 Matt Bond started working on a small side project to standardise design patterns and user experience at Atlassian. This is what he has learnt!

https://medium.com/asana-design/the-key-lessons-i-learned-creating-a-popular-design-system-d078c817b4dd

 

Search Colours – Using Keywords!

Think Google for colours. A sleek interface to help inspire your designs.

https://picular.co/water

 

Colorable

A brilliantly simple colour generator to show if your colour pairings are accessible or not. Definitely worth saving!

https://colorable.jxnblk.com/

 

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

How to Build Complicated Grids using CSS Grid

With CSS grid now available in all popular browsers it’s possible to reliably define the rows and columns that make up any kind of grid. This article details how toachieved the designed layout using CSS grid without any silly workarounds or java-script magic necessary.

https://danwebb.co/journal/how-to-build-complicated-grids-using-css-grid

 

Universal PWA Builder

A universal, framework-agnostic PWA builder that could works along side most of the major JS libraries. Can be run as is, with no need to configure, but it is fully extensible.

https://github.com/lukeed/pwa

 

Create your Design System

A 6 part rundown of all aspects required in creating a design system. This link starts at the beginning, with typography. A concise and well thought out piece to lead the way.

https://medium.com/codyhouse/create-your-design-system-part-1-typography-7c630d9092bd

 

SCSScale

Typographic modular scale starter based on body’s font-size built on SCSS

https://github.com/alectro/SCSScale

 

CSS Icons

An icon set made with pure CSS. No dependancies. Just grab the icon and go. Perfect for a small web project with only a few icons.

https://cssicon.space

 

Emotion JS

I am so happy to have found this. Emotion is a performant and flexible CSS-in-JS library. Building on many other CSS-in-JS libraries, it allows you to style apps quickly with string or object styles. It has predictable composition to avoid specificity issues with CSS. Perfect time saver.

https://github.com/emotion-js/emotion

 

Styled Components

Same as the above, but has been around for longer. Better documentation, large community. Worth looking into both.

https://www.styled-components.com/

 

A bit of everything

Could Value-based Pricing be the Key to Higher Revenues

A recent survey of design and development firms revealed a tantalising statistic: Freelancers who use value-based pricing were more likely to report annual income over $50,000 per year than freelancers who weren’t. Could it raise revenues for your practice?

https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/08/could-value-based-pricing-be-the-key-to-higher-revenues/

 

Honoring a great man – The Story Behind Rebeccapurple

A child’s passing is memorialised with the name of web colour.

https://codepen.io/trezy/post/honoring-a-great-man