Whether you want to take your user research skills to the next level, get better at UX writing, or stay up-to-date on the latest design trends, a newsletter is the perfect opportunity to get the best of the best resources delivered straight to your inbox on a regular basis. In this post, we highlight some design newsletters that you might want to consider subscribing to.
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We’re running a lil’ giveaway among our dear Smashing newsletter subscribers, and if you subscribe, you join in the raffle, too! With online workshop tickets, books and an entire collection of 100 Smashing cats in SVG format! We’ll announce the winners in the upcoming issue on Oct. 27, 2020. Meow, join in and good luck!
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Announcing a set of checklists to help you create smart interface design patterns. Totally free if you sign up for our friendly newsletter. These checklists are based on the work Vitaly has been doing for many years, exploring and examining examples of desktop and mobile interfaces. Learning what works and what doesn’t in usability tests and user interviews.
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If you’ve been looking for a list of email newsletters dedicated to web designers and developers, Ricky Onsman has got one that is bound to help you keep up with the industry — the most useful news and resources sent directly to your email inbox. The newsletters that were most namechecked are included here in their own section: “The Favorites.” For this article, Ricky focused on great newsletter content. It could be presented as sophisticated HTML with videos and infographics, or it could be no nonsense plain text with minimal descriptions, as long as the content — including how reliable any links are — is good.
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Designing a good signup form is tricky. UX design does matter. To improve UX, the designer needs to put themselves in the user’s shoes. Make your form clear from the start, with visible labels placed outside of empty form fields. There’s always room for improvement. In this article, Kate Sipkina & Olga Ratinova will show you how to improve your contact forms — those crucial elements before users make a purchase or subscribe to a newsletter.
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Creating responsive email is not an easy task. If you want to stand out, no matter how beautiful your emails are, you need to make sure they render correctly in your reader’s inbox, regardless of what email client they’re using. There are a few techniques out there to help email developers. You might be familiar with some of them, such as the hybrid approach, the mobile-first approach or even the Fab Four technique by HTeuMeuLeu. But because of the reasons stated earlier, and especially the lack of a standard, none of these techniques will enable you to tame all email clients at once.
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Looking for a starting point for designing emails? Not sure which font size to use? In this article, Anna Yeaman explores how email designers handle responsive typography within various industries, so she amassed 50 emails across various industries that she thinks do a good job with typography to see if any patterns emerged. This study provides a decent starting point for designing emails. The proportional relationships, the guideline to build out a custom responsive type scale that adjusts across viewports and some basic guidelines such as fluid line heights have proven the most useful.
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Using the data from over 22 billion email subscribers, we determined what designers should prioritize when creating an email newsletter, both this year and beyond. Which email clients and platforms should we be supporting now? Should we learn all of the email workarounds or just use existing builders and frameworks? In this article, Ros Hodgekiss will interpret the numbers from her “Email Marketing Trends” report to help designers like you make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t in email newsletters.
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There are so many options for running an online course, and all of them seem slightly confusing or time-intensive to set up! Using the method outlined below, Paul Jarvis created a self-paced email course that had over 1,000 registrations in the first 24 hours, and almost 2,500 in the first week. There are other ways to do this using MailChimp, such as triggering the completion of a course with a URL, but this is how he did it.
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What’s the point in creating a beautiful, valuable app if no one knows about it? Today we’ll focus on how to get a head start with email marketing by wrangling testers, staying in touch with users and successfully building hype for your app. Then, we’ll move on to how to announce the launch and measure results. While this article isn’t heavy on coding and development, you’ll find an assortment of practical suggestions that you can apply to your projects.
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