In recent years, new prototyping tools have emerged, many for mobile design. The landscape is constantly changing, with some tools losing favor with UX designers (or UXers) and others taking their place. While this article will not serve as a complete paint-by-numbers manual for selecting a prototyping tool, Svetlin Denkov will discuss important factors that influence the selection process. Near the end of the article, the “Resources” section will point you in the direction of more specific comparisons to give you additional context for decision-making.
Read more…
In this part of the tutorial Nash Vail will start by replacing the photographer’s name with the actual wallpaper image along with proper credits. During this process you’ll learn how to link a library in Xcode, as well as more on general styling and positioning of UI elements. You will learn how to save pictures to the Camera Roll and also how to run your app on a physical device. To apply all your newly learned React Native skills there is a challenge waiting for you at the end. Just like the first part, this article has five sections. Completing each section takes us a step closer to finishing our app.
Read more…
The very best logos are simple and flexible, with varying formats and layout options so that when a site is optimized for a device, the brand is also optimized to the space allocated for it. In this article, Jon Tarr will see why simple, flexible and versatile logo design has become so important. Industry-leading, born-in-the-cloud brands such as Twitter, Facebook, Spotify and Google are refining and simplifying their brands owing to responsive web design and the growing impact of the mobile device market.
Read more…
These frameworks and the whole idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript never appealed to me, though. I always thought, why not just learn Swift/Objective-C or Java and build real apps? That definitely requires a significant amount of learning, but isn’t that what we developers do and should be good at? Quickly learn new languages and frameworks? What’s the point, then? For me, the advantages never outweighed the doubts.
Read more…
React has proved tremendously successful, both on Clayton Anderson’s own projects, and with many others around the web, including large companies like Netflix. And now with React Native, the framework has been brought to mobile. React Native is a great option for creating performant iOS and Android apps that feel at home on their respective platforms. In this article, Clayton will explain why he thinks you should consider using React Native, by providing an overview of the framework and what he believes to be its best features.
Read more…
You can now have multiple designs right next to each other in Photoshop! In this article, Murdoch Carpenter will design an entire set of assets all at once. He will walk you through the basics of artboards and Generate. Then he’ll look at a real project in which he used these techniques together, making for a major time-saver. First up, artboards. What many Photoshop users have been hoping for — with a push from Sketch, no doubt — finally arrives in the form of artboards.
Read more…
Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don’t have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day. Vitaly Friedman loves finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what’s going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support.
Read more…
It is encouraging to see a big increase in mobile web adoption and Google has definitely proved it has the last word when it comes to SEO. Responsive web design is the big winner of the go-mobile race and will most likely continue to gather the spoils. However, the mobile web has a lot of room for growth when it comes to strategies, user experience or conversions. The new .app top-level web domain together with WordPress’s REST API and the emerging JavaScript frameworks could definitely push things in the right direction. This year we might see a new development on the mobile web, a wave that will take us beyond responsiveness and into the promised land of web apps.
Read more…
The best designs balance aesthetics and performance by working with mobile in mind from the start. In this article, Danny Bluestone will share the current mobile performance optimization processes he uses at Cyber-Duck. Aim to create a website that can balance aesthetics and performance on mobile, and achieve real conversion metrics. A collaborative, iterative performance optimization process will help you achieve this. Right from the start of the project, build an understanding of the client and server-side factors that determine website performance on mobile.
Read more…
In this article, Anya Pratskevich will share some ideas about app page design. She’ll also argue that dropping your assumptions and testing is the only way to find content that not only looks and reads great, but also helps your bottom line. The reality is that nobody knows for sure how to design for maximum conversion. What worked in one project will not necessarily work in another. What you can do is test everything: whether it is a different background color for each screenshot (worked in our case) or simply rearranging your current visuals on the page. Design optimization is a dicey game, so roll with it and have fun testing.
Read more…
