When Denys Mishunov was invited to speak at one of the best front-end conferences in Europe, he felt like he did not deserve to be at that conference. And he didn’t even know that those feelings of his had a name! This is called impostor syndrome and it is a real psychological issue, rooted deeply in many of us. If we do not pay attention to its symptoms, if we blindly follow its triggers, then we can get into real psychological trouble. The good news is that, even though there is no pill for it, we can change out attitude towards it. Simply acknowledging the feeling can help to neutralize its effect.
Read more…
We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building design systems or pattern libraries, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and shaping that article. This post is a re-post of Maya’s final article. In this article, Maya will shed some light on how to built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components.
Read more…
Windows, macOS and Linux made up font-wise, and since then, all modern fonts have been compatible across those OS’. There’s no question, the future of web typography looks promising. At the 2016 ATypI conference, the world’s biggest type design conference, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Adobe announced that they have been working on a new iteration of the OpenType standard, called variable fonts. Because it gives a lot more control to the user to modify the typeface depending on the context and device, this new version opens new opportunities for web typography and will close the gap in quality between web and print. In this article, François Poizat will show you the ins and outs of these new tools and how to take control of our typography.
Read more…
Making a major career shift late in life to follow your passion is scary. Thankfully, becoming a professional creative is now more accessible than ever because of the numerous educational resources available. With so many options available just a few mouse clicks away, how do you decide which option is the best fit for you? In this article, Alec McGuffey has put together a list of the best ways to learn design according to your personality, budget, lifestyle and personal goals. Get out there and find the perfect one for you! If you set your mind to it and immerse yourself fully in the creative world, you’ll be able to learn the skills necessary to build a career in design, no matter which educational route you go down.
Read more…
If you’re working in a growing startup or a large corporation, you probably know the issues that come with this: The big-picture falls from view easily as everyone is focusing on the details they are responsible for, and conceptions about the vision of the design might be interpreted differently, too. The bigger challenge lies in keeping the sum of the parts intact. And accomplishing that with a lot of designers involved in the same project. What you need is a set of best practices to remove this friction and make the process smoother. A strategy to scale design without hurting it.
Read more…
In order to really know whether your work is any good, you need a higher level of principles that can be used as a measuring stick for implementing design. You need something that is removed from a specific language like CSS or an opinionated way of writing it. To bridge this gap, Tom Greever’s compiled nine principles of design implementation. This is a set of broad guidelines meant to preserve an underlying value. It can be used as a guide for someone working on implementation or as a tool to evaluate an existing project. To make it easier to follow along and see how each principle applies to a project, Tom will use a design mockup from one of his projects as the basis for this article.
Read more…
Creating large, harmonious and uniform color palettes can be a challenge. Good intentions and confident plans can be abandoned when things get a little unwieldy.
But you can equip yourself with some tools to manage the complexity. With the right techniques, large color palettes can be created, refined and refactored at will. Large color palettes can be tamed.
Read more…
Strong graphic design makes transportation systems more attractive. Graphical language can be so iconic that you can even buy all sorts of souvenirs with its elements: t-shirts, umbrellas, shower curtains. This helps cities get rid of privately owned cars. People spend more time outside, interacting with each other. This gives small businesses a boost and makes cities more pleasant to live in. Today, Ilya Birman will show you how map design works by taking a look at a series of maps as an example.
Read more…
If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you may never discover something that you love doing, or perhaps even worse, never learn a whole lot about yourself. Even the most talented artists out there practice so much more than you’d ever imagine, and hone their skills by trying out copywork. The most important thing is to be confident and simply give it a try. For more encouragement, Vitaly Friedman has collected a good number of inspirational artwork that is bound to give you that spark you need to get started already!
Read more…
How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? As a team leader, Alecsandru Grigoriu was faced with a new challenge: making sure there’s enough recurrence in his team’s communication to facilitate the team’s development. Enter the weekly design meetings. Having a structure and a template to work with is not enough. They’ve settled on a few ground rules in order for the meetings to unfold properly. Looking back at the first 10 meetings, they went through over 100 resources and tackled 2 main design challenges.
Read more…
