Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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Holiday or no holiday, our need for some fresh inspiration never stops! This month, Vitaly Friedman has found some real treasures! As a designer, Vitaly feels that there is so much that he can learn from the techniques and color combinations in these little gems. Let’s dive in, and get inspired to leave your comfort zones for your next designs!
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With technology evolving and language recognition and processing improving, we are on a path that could make interaction with digital services more intuitive, more accessible and more efficient — through conversational interfaces. Conversational interfaces are still in their infancy. There are still hurdles to jump, and we need to explore what works and what doesn’t. However, this means that there are no beaten paths, yet. It’s a time for experimentation, a time to tinker with the concept and try out something new.
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There’s no doubt that there are a lot of great techniques out there — they just need to be discovered. Today Vitaly Friedman would like to share a couple of inspirational illustrations and photos which he hopes will help you daydream and relax. You’ll notice some pretty interesting and refreshing color combinations… Get ready to enter the summer with a big spark of inspiration!
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The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road.
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Simple design is hard, since it requires much more thought and inspiration. Colors play a major role, and today Vitaly Friedman would like to show you a couple of illustrations that may motivate you to try out some new color combinations and techniques. From 3D illustrations to artwork created with ink and watercolors, Vitaly is sure there’s something that’ll spark your inspiration. Be warned though, some of them may even give you wanderlust from just looking at them.
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Benefits such as personal growth, creative exploration and generation of professional opportunities are some of the reasons to engage in personal side projects. In this article, Jon Yablonski will explore these benefits, as well as learn how to decide on a project and how to effectively manage your time. Finally, for inspiration, Jon will look at some great examples of personal projects. We hope you will be inspired to start your own side project!
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In this final part of this series, Jon Hensley will focus on the principles of continuation and common fate, which involve movement, both implied and animated, to create relationships. Using these principles, along with the principles of similarity, proximity, closure and figure-ground, will strengthen your own design skills and help you create a better experience for your users. Oh, and one final thing. After applying these principles, make sure to test out your designs with users to see what works best for them.
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In this article, Scott Lewis will share the fundamentals of how to create premium quality icons. These fundamentals are technical skills; anyone can learn and master them with practice. Remember that to create better icons, start from the general and work toward the specific. Every icon set submitted to Iconfinder is reviewed and evaluated for potential appeal to our website users and for potential commercial value as premium icons. When reviewing icon sets submitted to the website, we have a responsibility to our designers and to our customers to make sure all premium icons on the website are of the highest possible quality.
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In this article, Jon Hensley will focus on the principles of closure and figure-ground, which play with positive and negative space to build relationships and create wholes with the sum of their parts. As in the first article, he’ll look at how the principles work and then move on to real-world examples to illustrate them in use. Understanding how to use closure and figure-ground will help you build strong relationships and differences between elements in your designs.
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