Interfaces Archives

Creative / Development Inspiration 55

3rd December 20183rd December 2018 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/

Creative / Development Inspiration 54

25th November 201825th November 2018 Robert Marshall Leave a comment

This week is a little more focused on UI design and development. And god damn they are pretty. Its all about those micro-interactions. On top of this, there are articles on Just In Time Design (it rhymes right!) and User Empowerment. Plus so much more! Enjoy this weeks design and development inspiration rundown!

Website Inspiration

BornFight

A digital agency that has been building websites and apps since 2009. Considering they have been doing it this long, I would have hoped the site would load slightly faster. However, it looks really good on desktop!

https://www.bornfight.com/

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Design Dots

Another design and dev article curator. But this one is so much nicer. Build on Webflow, the auther only adds 5 pieces of content a day. Each from a different sector. Well worth a look.

https://www.designdots.co/

UI UX Interaction Design Week 16

A collection of UI and UX interfaces. Some great examples of websites done right.

http://gillde.com/ui-ux-interaction-design-week-16/

Building Your Colour Palette

An article on how to build a website colour palette. Well written, helps get the job done.

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

User Empowerment Through Design

It’s not just about creating stunning visuals anymore, users are seeking whole experiences that make them feel more powerful and complete.

https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/empowerment-through-design/

The UX of Registration and Login

Two of the biggest barriers to entry. Registration and Login. If not designed right can lose a lot of users.

https://www.twotalltotems.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/20/the-ux-of-registration-and-login/

Mobbin

A collection of hand picked mobile design patterns that reflect the best in design. A definite bookmark.

https://mobbin.design/

Gestalt-Driven UX: The Patterns That Drive Our World

Gestaltism is a holistic philosophy that studies how humans recognize patterns and simplify complex, disparate information.

https://hackernoon.com/design-psychology-gestalt-driven-ux-64ac01cd257a

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Feather

Feather is a collection of simply beautiful open source icons. Each icon is designed on a 24×24 grid with an emphasis on simplicity, consistency and readability. Only loads the ones you need.

https://github.com/feathericons/feather

autoComplete

autoComplete.js is a simple pure vanilla Javascript library that’s built for speed, high versatility and seamless integration with wide range of projects & systems.

https://github.com/TarekRaafat/autoComplete.js

A bit of everything

Just In Time Design

Continuously delivering small iterations based on the team’s needs can transform the product development process. This approach shifts the focus away from highly-produced, out-of-date, difficult-to-maintain design, opening up the process to tighter collaboration and a higher standard of quality.

https://matthewstrom.com/writing/just-in-time-design.html

No I Don’t Want To Take Your Survey

In our industry surveys help with understanding the end user. The issue is how companies go about getting the information. Sometimes a survey on a website that interupts the user experience just isn’t the best way!

http://gerrymcgovern.com/no-i-dont-want-to-take-your-survey/

HolaBrief

Very few projects end up with exceptional results. HolaBrief makes it easy to ask all the right questions and nail your design brief every time. Built by designers, for designers.

https://www.holabrief.com/

Creative / Development Inspiration 53

19th November 201819th November 2018 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/

First Taste of Grav

29th October 201828th October 2018 Robert Marshall 2 Comments

Up until recently I have been predominantly a WordPress based developer. I have dabbled in other things, a little bit of React here and there but nothing crazy. Recently however, I have felt a bit nonplussed with it all. Everything seems to take a little bit too long to spin up, and although I have built Gulp scripts to help speed me along, they hasn’t help as much as I would like them to. Then Gutenberg became a thing. Not that I don’t think WordPress needs to stay with the times, I just don’t think it will make my life any easier.

Enter Grav. I was looking for a simple, easy to spin up static site generator that has a backend simple enough for ~~idiots~~ clients. It is PHP based (so I can put it on a clients hosting without having to explain Node), and speedy as anything. It seems to cover all those bases.

Installation

This was a dream. I already have WAMP and Composer installed on my machine so I had to run 3 commands to get Grav installed and ready to go.

git clone -b master https://github.com/getgrav/grav.git

composer install --no-dev -o

bin/grav install

This last one did give me a little bit of trouble. I got the error message:

‘bin’ is not recognised as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Turns out this is due to the PHP directory not being found by Windows. To get past this all I needed to do was show my computer where PHP was located using this command:

C:\wamp\bin\php\php7.0.10\php bin/grav install

At this point everything went well. I already had Wamp switched on, so pointed my browser to that folder in my Localhost.

Woop!

Installing Admin Panel

The Grav “Learn” section has a really good rundown of all the configuring and option settings that can be set. It walks through the folder structure, what is used for what, and the general layout.

At this point I was not bothered about this. I just want to install an admin panel and smash out a theme (if you are bothered, here is the link: https://learn.getgrav.org/).

It turns out installing the admin plugin is just as easy as installing Grav itself. Firstly you have to make sure that your version of Grav is the latest version.

bin/gpm selfupgrade

Then, once you are sure you are on the latest version, add that plugin

bin/gpm install admin

For the two above command, remember that is you had an issue with PHP when installing Grav, you will do again. So reference PHP directly.

I found that my console sat thinking for a while, before anything happened. But something did happen, so sit tight. The admin plugin also requires three other plugins. Login, Forms and Email. These set as though dependencies so will install them for you.

Once this has been completed, I found that when I pointed my browser back to the Grav folder on my Localhost the page had changed. Now there is a admin screen asking me to set up a user. Once this is done you are directed to the admin area.

Admin Panel

First thoughts: God damn I like this. It has very obviously been built with ease in mind.

All the options and settings that the “Learn” section went through are all included down the side of the admin section. This made me happy, as I want it as simple and as easy to explain to clients as possible. On a quick click through it seems much like any other CMS, but simplified. There is obvious room for adaption is a project requires it, but for a simple brochure site or blog this setup is perfect.

As Grav is saved down into static files, there is no need for a database. This means that the way the site is backed up, is by downloading the static files. This option is set front and center on the dashboard, alongside a simple user statistic chart.

I like to automate everything I possibly can, and the idea of manually downloading a site backup every week does not appeal to me. Turns out this is not a problem. The Grav CLI allows you to hook into the inner workings of the site, so a cron job could be set to do this for you. Happy days.

Markup Though?

The text editor works in the same way the pages do when editing manually. They use Markup. This is a barrier to entry for a lot of people who are not so technically minded. Turns out someone has already got a solution for this.

The TinyMCE Integration Plugin

https://github.com/newbthenewbd/grav-plugin-tinymce-editor

Once again, installation is a breeze (yes, I like Grav). There are two ways you can manage this.

Log into your admin panel,navigate to plugins. Search the plugin. Click add.
Or, if you are like me and want to run everything quickly when rolling out a new project. Run this command.

bin/gpm install tinymce-editor

Love. It.

I am going to spend a bit of time looking into developing a proper, fully fledged theme. But as a general overview to rolling out a site on a localhost, it is a definite winner! As there is no database it means the whole site can be dropped on a hosting service via FTP/SFTP and you are laughing.

Creative / Development Inspiration 50

28th October 201828th October 2018 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

Creative / Development Inspiration 49

21st October 201821st October 2018 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/

Creative / Development Inspiration 48

15th October 201815th October 2018 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 43

2nd September 20182nd September 2018 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

Creative / Development Inspiration 42

20th August 201820th August 2018 Robert Marshall Leave a comment

Brilliant UX/UI articles this week – how to craft a kickass post filter, the Screenlife app case study, and a whole bunch of design resources. On top of that we have a tutorial on NodeJS gesture recognition, and how to create a blog with React. Ever considered launching a side project? At the bottom there is an article on how to do it in 10 days! Take a look!

Website Inspiration

Kollegorna – Swedish Digital Agency

This site seems to be built on top of Bulma or at least styled similarly, but I’m not sure. It is very sleek and easy to digest, which is a big thing for me. I love how each element has been considered and animates in its own way. My only issue with this this site is it is for a digital agency, and yet has a Chrome Lighthouse performance score of 35… mixed messages.

https://www.kollegorna.se/

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Screenlife App — a UI/UX case study

A step by step breakdown of the process the Screenlife App team went through to end up at the final product. Very interesting to see the user of paper mockups.

https://uxdesign.cc/screenlife-app-ui-ux-design-case-study-4830d364c76f

Design Resources

Neede is that resource we have all been looking for, for a while. One site, holding all of the good quality design resources. Get this on your bookmarks!

https://neede.co

How to craft a kickass filtering UX

Filters are a great tool to narrow down high volumes of content and to surface the most relevant results. How do we make sure they are helpful rather than confusing?

https://uxdesign.cc/crafting-a-kickass-filtering-ux-beea1798d64b

100 Days of Motion Design

It was a summer night in Seattle. She ate some ice-cream, watched a Youtube tutorial, and downloaded a free trial of Principle. Several months later, completed her 5th 100-day-project — 100 Days of Motion. Then made these.

https://uxdesign.cc/100-days-of-motion-design-463526af852f

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Simple Hand Gesture Recognition using OpenCV and JavaScript.

This article is nothing short of really fucking interesting. Gesture recognition using JavaScript (Node.js) and OpenCV. Its a tutorial.

https://medium.com/@muehler.v/simple-hand-gesture-recognition-using-opencv-and-javascript-eb3d6ced28a0

Tinies

Another URL shortener. But pretty.

https://tini.es

Creating a Blogging App Using React

A bookmark I have been keeping for myself. A tutorial series on creating a full blogging app with React. Very comprehensive. I am collating a series of tutorials and links for React if you are interested – thoughtsandstuff.com/beginners-guide-learning-reactjs/

https://code.tutsplus.com/series/creating-a-blogging-app-using-react–cms-1171

A bit of everything

How to launch a side project in 10 days

This post isn’t about the advantages of building with a new technology, or “7 things I learned while doing it”. Rather, it’s about the process of building a web app quickly, keeping irrelevant ideas from muddying focus, and the tool belt to make it happen. The end result was Card Surge.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/launching-a-side-project-in-10-days-615df3b0e808

ZoomQuilt

This is a bit of a mindfuck, but very interesting! Inifinity image zoom.

http://zoomquilt.org/

Creative / Development Inspiration 41

13th August 201813th August 2018 Robert Marshall Leave a comment

A brilliant landing page example, common web design mistakes, pure CSS wizardry, and some great thought-provoking articles. This weeks design development rundown is a little more aimed at helping you consider your design and dev. For example, how did Facebook end up bad? Is Google Amp really the way forwards (no is the answer to that), as well as articles explaining the best way to design elements on your website.

Website Inspiration

Duda – Landing Page

I found this through clicking an advert on Facebook. Selling themselves as a WordPress replacement I was intrigued. I left having found a brilliant landing page. Simple, and effective, with nice use of CSS animation.

https://wp.duda.co

Designer Resources, Examples and Inspiration

Common web page design mistakes

16 well explained examples of the most common mistakes made in web design, with a focus on how to avoid these.

http://blog-en.tilda.cc/articles-website-design-mistakes

Waveguide – Design Knowledge Base

A curated, searchable base of design knowledge, UX/UI patterns and examples for research and inspiration. The goal is to help create a repository of referable concepts to help designers and developers build amazing, high quality products.

https://www.waveguide.io

Designing Charts – Principles every designer should know

Seemingly simple rules can be forgotten when overwhelmed with the larger project. This article steps though the correct principles for designing charts, and why.

https://uxdesign.cc/designing-charts-principles-every-designer-should-know-part-2-ce1e06af56fc

Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles

Pure CSS Wizardry

A brilliant codepen by Julia Muzafarova. A wizard with potions making animals come alive. All with CSS. Love it!

https://codepen.io/miocene/full/mjLPVp/

Guess.JS

A selection of libraries and tools for enabling a machine-learning driven user-experience across the web. It uses Google Analytics to work determine which page the user is likely to visit next, and pre-fetches all resources required.

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

Carbon

Create beautiful images of your source code, right in the browser. Share directly from the platform.

https://carbon.now.sh

Creating the “Perfect” CSS system

A high level guide for designers and developers who write CSS, but want to be more strategic about building moderate to large scale CSS systems

https://medium.com/gusto-design/creating-the-perfect-css-system-fa38f5bcdd9e

Lazyestload.js

Only load images when they are in the view port, if you scroll past they wont be loaded. Only 350 bytes of JavaScript. I introduced Carl a couple of weeks ago, but that is a more general asset manager.

https://github.com/Paul-Browne/lazyestload.js

Fast Average Colour

A client side library to quickly get the images average colour. Not sure how much of a good idea this is to use on a front end, but it could be used on the admin side to save the colour in an input.

https://github.com/fast-average-color/fast-average-color

A bit of everything

Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate

Let’s talk about Google AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated-Mobile-Pages. It’s a technology Google originally introduced to get web developers to speed up their web pages for mobile devices and mobile networks. But in many ways it seems like great technology for any device or network. Who doesn’t want fast websites?

https://medium.com/the-set-list/google-amp-a-70-drop-in-our-conversion-rate-35fe3cb69c59

Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason

In June 2016, Antonio Perkins unintentionally broadcast his own death to the world. It was a sunny day in Chicago, and he was sharing it on Facebook Live, a platform for distributing video in real-time, released just a few months earlier.

https://qz.com/1342757/everything-bad-about-facebook-is-bad-for-the-same-reason/

How to create a customer journey map

Understanding users’ behaviour and feelings is crucial when building a user-centred product. In this guide you’ll learn how to create a Customer Journey Map and how to apply it to any project.

https://aerolab.co/blog/customer-journey-map