Three lifelines to call on when you’re feeling stuck creatively I’ve been a professional designer for over twenty years, working across a wide range of media: UX/UI, motion, branding, web design, mobile apps, and creative coding. Most lately, I’ve been developing my font design practice. Design is a long journey of exploration and growth. You… Continue reading How to ‘un-stuck’ your design work
Tag: space
Why Ive's way of doing personal projects is good for designers
Why Ive’s way of doing personal projects is good for designers Personal projects should be an important part of life as designers, but is mixed with the work and the realities of an in-house design team, which can be a messy process. Often, the question of fulfilment comes into play. Surprisingly, the answers to fulfilment… Continue reading Why Ive's way of doing personal projects is good for designers
Think Inside the Box: How Accessibility Shapes Digital Product Design
Think inside the box: How accessibility shapes digital product design How constraints ignite creativity, spark innovation, and why accessibility is a uniquely effective constraint everyone should embrace. “Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames Access to digital technologies is a fundamental human right¹ and legal obligation². In an ideal world, there would be no need for more justification to… Continue reading Think Inside the Box: How Accessibility Shapes Digital Product Design
Innovative Home Decor: How Custom Neon Signs Elevate Interior Design Strategies
“There’s No Place Like Home” LED sign by VoodooNeon.com Introduction to innovative home decor In recent years, the world of interior design has seen a significant shift towards innovative and unconventional home decor ideas. As homeowners, we are always on the lookout for unique ways to express our individuality and creativity in our living spaces.… Continue reading Innovative Home Decor: How Custom Neon Signs Elevate Interior Design Strategies
Apple Vision Pro: how to turn people into 24/7 surveillance agents for capitalism
From Apple.com In the world of tech, innovation is a double-edged sword. On one side, we have the allure of cutting-edge technology, promising to revolutionize our lives. But what happens when this revolution infringes on our privacy? The latest product from Apple, the Vision Pro AR headset, is a perfect example of this dichotomy. The… Continue reading Apple Vision Pro: how to turn people into 24/7 surveillance agents for capitalism
3 Essential Design Trends, June 2023
That’s a big part of the reason so many designers are stripping down menus to more minimal styles. (Plus, it can create a cleaner, more sleek overall design.) Here’s what’s trending in design this month – and it is all about navigation. 1. Pop-Out Navigation There’s an obvious connection to mobile-friendliness here – website designs that use… Continue reading 3 Essential Design Trends, June 2023
Embracing change with system-driven design
To embrace change, you have to make it easy and cheap. System-driven design is one way to do just that. Waterfall, the double diamond, and other traditional ways of approaching the development of digital products rooted in the building perspective take for granted that it’s easier to make changes to designs than code. They operate under… Continue reading Embracing change with system-driven design
AI? Artificial Intelligence? Accessible Intelligence!
What We Can Look Forward To in the New AI World The Journey For the uninitiated, the concept of AI could seem new, but I can remember learning the term in the late 1980s when I took a course in LISP. LISP is a computer language originally developed over sixty years ago at MIT and… Continue reading AI? Artificial Intelligence? Accessible Intelligence!
AI is about to kill creativity
AI has a massive disruptive quality on the creative sector. Is AI going to benefit us, or will it create a new dark age for innovation? The Aeolipile (left) and the Steam engine (right) on a section of Bosch’s masterpiece The Last Judgment (Wikimedia) In the early first century, the first steam engine was invented… Continue reading AI is about to kill creativity
5 lesser-known tips on spacing for product designers
5 lesser-known spacing tips for product designers Your BAE might not give you space but after reading this article you will definitely give your UI objects some well-deserved space :p When we start out as designers, spacing is often the most neglected aspect of the design process. Various objects are spaced based on what we, at… Continue reading 5 lesser-known tips on spacing for product designers
How people read online
Tips for accessible text. What makes a text nice to read? To know more about this, it is important to take a closer look at how people are reading. Additionally, it may be the case that someone is impaired, physically or mentally, to read a text. How does it work? Saccades, fixations, and breaks The reading process… Continue reading How people read online
A radical opinion on ChatGPT
Churn out every idea and then burn it down. We need to talk about ChatGPT. Actually, not just ChatGPT but all AI-powered content development tools. Whether it’s text-to-image AIs, or those capable of generating conversational text, computer code, poetry, and more in response to prompts. Artificial Intelligence has been chipping at creatives for a while, and this… Continue reading A radical opinion on ChatGPT
The Ultimate Guide to Typography
Are you interested in typography? This complete course covers everything from typography history to the difference between typefaces and fonts, typeface classification, how to choose a font, and more! Watch the Ultimate Guide to Typography Course What You’ll Learn What is the history of typography? What is the difference between a typeface and a… Continue reading The Ultimate Guide to Typography
Twitter layoffs, meeting fatigue, Taylor Swift’s AI, Apple accessibility
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers. “Any of us could face what our colleagues at Twitter faced yesterday. Some of us already have, and some of us will in the future, especially if you stick around the profession long enough. It’s a good reminder that, whether we realize it or not, we’re in this together. We… Continue reading Twitter layoffs, meeting fatigue, Taylor Swift’s AI, Apple accessibility
How To Make Your Designs Scannable (And Why You Should)
Jakob Nielsen’s How Users Read on the Web is 25 years old this week, and one glance at an eye-tracking study will tell you its key observations are still relevant today. Simply put, users don’t read a web page; they scan it for individual words and sentences. A typical pattern shown in eye-tracking reports is that… Continue reading How To Make Your Designs Scannable (And Why You Should)
The big picture and the small designer
The importance of understanding and designing for a connected world I was on my train commute home and heard the familiar “tickets please”. Opposite me sat an elderly lady, with a printed paper in her hand, readily awaiting the train conductor to check it. When the train conductor glanced at the lady’s paper, she only said,… Continue reading The big picture and the small designer
Designing for scalable Dynamic Type in iOS
Designing for scalable Dynamic Type in iOS for accessibility When we wanted to implement accessibility settings on our iOS mobile app, I had to figure out where to start. Looking online, I could only find engineering resources. It was all about code and how to implement it with UIKit or SwiftUI with plenty of great… Continue reading Designing for scalable Dynamic Type in iOS
How to find your designer self — and understand how YOU approach design
How to find your designer self — And understand how YOU approach design We all know the feeling. The identity crisis that comes with being a designer is not easy to overcome. Somehow we are solving problems for others all the time, but when it comes to ourselves it feels impossible. The good news is you already have… Continue reading How to find your designer self — and understand how YOU approach design
How to create responsive cards with the help of auto-layout in Figma?
Auto Layout is one of the most powerful features of Figma and today we will be creating a card design inside Figma using Auto-Layout which will be fully responsive, i.e would respond to the screen size. demonstrates the responsive design of the card Before we get started, there are 3 main things we are talking about in… Continue reading How to create responsive cards with the help of auto-layout in Figma?
How to kick off strategic research if you are NOT Spotify?
First steps of strategic product research at Glovo by UXR & Data ✏️ Illustrations credits to Ivan Mesaroš / Available on Blush From Spotify, all the way to Microsoft, Booking.com and many more, the leveraging of multidisciplinary teams to conduct product research seems THE WAY to achieve more actionable, comprehensive insights providing a higher likelihood of making… Continue reading How to kick off strategic research if you are NOT Spotify?
Gestalt psicology for dataviz
Understanding why specific data visualization techniques work better than others may not be so simple. Visual Pattern — Credits: Omar Flores on Unsplash We easily perceive a design that catches our attention, or elements that are out of place, but then we hardly know how to identify and evaluate them accurately, almost as if their effect acts at the… Continue reading Gestalt psicology for dataviz
Co-creating has drastically improved my designs
How co-design has drastically improved my work Users, engineers, product managers… I’m not the only one designing things around here I find defining a problem challenging. Ideally, at the start of a project all the metrics and objectives form a crystal clear statement. But working with high ambiguity in the platform space, I often start with a… Continue reading Co-creating has drastically improved my designs
Wordle is a masterclass in product design simplicity
Some of the most fun I’ve had this year is playing Wordle with my friends and family. But I’m a product designer and a programmer, so as I played, I couldn’t help but notice some strange things about how it was constructed. I was right in the middle of making my own product School Morning Routine,… Continue reading Wordle is a masterclass in product design simplicity
WooCommerce Shortcodes Cheatsheet
WordPress added support for shortcodes around 15 years ago. You can use shortcodes to easily add complicated functionality to your website which otherwise would have required you to write a lot of code yourself. Basically, shortcodes are short text snippets whose behavior depends on some more complicated code written in the back end. While WordPress… Continue reading WooCommerce Shortcodes Cheatsheet