We use ad-blockers as well, you know. We gotta keep those servers running though. Did you know that we publish useful books and run friendly conferences — crafted for pros like yourself? E.g. upcoming SmashingConf Oxford, UK, dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
Working on very different projects, in different teams and with different people can sometimes be a challenge. But one thing that works out remarkably well is doing retrospectives with your team.
In retrospectives, you talk about how a certain project went, and the whole team shares what problems/challenges they faced, what was good and what was annoying people, why people were unhappy. And after each person has written this down on a wall (you can use Post-Its), you try to find useful solutions, small improvements that avoid conflicts, that avoid people feeling bad in a project, and that avoid unnecessary stress situations. Ideally, you do this often — like every two weeks. In every team so far, talking about issues and addressing them has helped to bind the team together and improve future work. Let’s work more together in our teams instead of on our own.
Our objects are becoming increasingly connected. My watch is connected to my phone, which is connected to the speaker in my living room, which I can also connect (or not) to the speaker in my bedroom. When I go out to dinner with friends, we have to make a concerted effort to keep our handheld and wearable devices silenced or otherwise placed “in the background” of our social experience, so that we can focus on each other.
As our artifacts and everything around us become more connected, we run the risk as humans of becoming increasingly disconnected from each other — not in a tragic, dystopian kind of way per se, but in a real way that we need to take into consideration when designing for these experiences.
The most inspirational things are often right in front of us. It might be the typography on a book cover, the colors of your favorite music album, the opening titles in that movie you saw yesterday. To celebrate all those little moments of inspiration, we have compiled some resources for you which honor the beauty of graphic design and the ideas behind it. Perfect to squeeze into a short coffee break. Enjoy!
We learned not to judge a book by its cover, but, honestly, there is nothing quite like browsing through a bookstore, soaking up covers, their colors, their typefaces, their layouts, every little detail. The variety is endless, and sometimes you’re lucky and find a little piece of art shining through the sheer mass.
Web applications are everywhere. There is no official definition, but we’ve made the distinction: web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting point, from which to apply development and design patterns.
These patterns are often established through a different look at the mainstream techniques, a paradigm shift, convergence with an external concept, or just a better implementation. Universal web applications are one such pattern.
What is the best UX pattern to display products on an e-commerce website: pagination, a “Load more” button or infinite scrolling? At Baymard Institute, we’ve conducted several year-long large-scale usability studies of more than 50+ leading e-commerce websites. We tested (among other things) these three design patterns for loading products, both on desktop and mobile.
Pagination is still the most popular way to load new items on a website because it ships by default in almost every single e-commerce platform. However, our usability test sessions found “Load more” buttons combined with lazy-loading to be a superior implementation, resulting in a more seamless user experience. We found that infinite scrolling can be downright harmful to usability — in particular, for search results and on mobile. However, it’s not black and white, because the performance of each method varies according to the context of the page.
Inspiration lies everywhere: in a conversation, a walk through a foreign city, or, in other people’s works. To fuel your ideas, we celebrate the beginning of each month with what we found to be the best source for daily inspiration: desktop wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for almost eight years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
This post features their artwork for March 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop!
Preload (spec) is a new web standard aimed at improving performance and providing more granular loading control to web developers. It gives developers the ability to define custom loading logic without suffering the performance penalty that script-based resource loaders incur.
A few weeks ago, I shipped preload support in Chrome Canary, and barring unexpected bugs it will hit Chrome stable in mid-April. But what is that preload thing? What does it do? And how can it help you?
It’s interesting to see how user experience design advances now that we managed to understand what it means. I think artificial intelligence will become a huge part of user experience over time and that we will spend more time on developing clever integrations to third parties than developing our own “dumb” interfaces. That’s why I find it interesting to see research on how services can use unified interfaces like text messaging apps to become more intelligent. Enjoy your weekend!
Why reinvent everything and ship your own application when you could use a messaging app as input and output of your API instead? For example, a schedule for the next bus could be delivered to the user via a text, WhatsApp or Telegram message.
As logo and brand designers, our work starts long before the first concept sketches, and finishes long after the last perfectly placed pixel. Our work requires so much more than just creative ideas and technical skills — it compels us to be a marketer, strategist, psychologist, salesperson, showman and project manager at the same time. It's difficult, but it’s also exciting and challenging!
The goal of my article is to help you rethink your (logo) design workflow. Some of these tips are mine, others are borrowed from world-famous designers. All these tips and tricks are tested and proven, and are tailored to improve your workflow for (re)branding projects.
Augmented reality is generally considered to be very hard to create. However, it's possible to make visually impressive projects using just open source libraries. In this tutorial we'll make use of OpenCV in Python to detect circle-shaped objects in a webcam stream and replace them with 3D Earth in Three.js in a browser window while using WebSockets to join this all together.
We want to strictly separate front-end and back-end in order to make it reusable. In a real-world application we could write the front-end in Unity, Unreal Engine or Blender, for example, to make it look really nice. The browser front-end is the easiest to implement and should work on nearly every possible configuration.
