In the last few years, traditional computers have ceded dominance to smaller screens, including tablets, mobile phones, smartwatches and more. As the craft has evolved, so has its toolset; and from one app to rule them all, we have gotten to a point where it seems like a new contender among UI design tools crops up every month. And many of the new UI design tools look pretty good and promising. At the moment, Sketch has grown in popularity and for a good reason: The developers of Sketch have figured out exactly what interface designers have been looking for and have steadily added functionality to address those needs. The pace of development of Sketch has been phenomenal, to say the least.
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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.
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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.
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With CSS Grid being now supported in all major browsers, most of the hacks that helped to achieve complex layouts have become obsolete, and we’d love to invite you to a little contest to explore the possibilities and features of CSS Grid together. You create an interesting, accessible layout with CSS Grid, or use CSS Grid to rebuild an existing layout, and at the end of the contest, all templates and layouts will be made available to everyone for free download under the MIT license. The aim is to build a community repository full of CSS Grid goodness that inspires fellow developers and helps spread the wide adoption of CSS Grid.
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Retrospectives and reflections allow you to codify what you’ve learned from experience, to document mistakes and avoid future ones, and to increase your potential to grow in the future. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you a few approaches that you and your team can immediately incorporate into your practice. He’ll walk through post-project retrospectives in this first article, and in a second article, Victor will present some lessons learned and researched-backed techniques that those who wish to engage in reflection can attempt to include in their routine.
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The web has the power to bring virtual reality to the world, to every consumer, to every developer. Recently, there has been a proliferation of virtual reality (VR) web browsers and VR capabilities added to traditional browsers. In this article, Ada Rose Cannon will look at the state of browsers in VR and the state of VR on the web via the WebVR APIs. It is still early days for VR on the web, but now is the time to get building, to see what works and what doesn’t.
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We embarked on a special creativity mission nine years ago: to provide you with inspiring and unique desktop wallpapers every month. Wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the usual crowd and that are bound to fuel your ideas. In this post, Cosima Mielke brings amazing artworks for September 2017. All wallpapers come in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. Time to freshen up your desktop! We are very thankful to all artists and designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing to this mission, who challenge their artistic abilities each month anew to keep the steady stream of wallpapers flowing.
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Welcome back to the second part of this tutorial on Gravit Designer. In the first part Christian Krammer took you through a general look at Gravit and set everything up, created the background image in the weather app and the status bar, and then started to make the initial elements of the design’s content. Having created the main text layers of the content area in part one, let’s continue with the weather conditions for the different times of day.
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Success means many things to many people. However you choose to define success, it will require other people’s cooperation. It will involve landing the right job, winning the right kind of work and being able to charge enough money for your services. It would be great if that were all defined by the quality of your work, but it’s not. There is another factor at play here; your reputation. Think of reputation as a currency. A currency that you can spend to advance your career, win new clients or ensure projects run that little bit easier. It a currency that you can spend to achieve your version of success. People should respect ability, not reputation. But most clients don’t know what good looks like and so have to fall back on how other people talk about you.
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In this article, Aidan Sliney is not going to make you the next Instagram, but he will hopefully help you get a nice base level of users that you can grow from. The example app in this article received 100,000 downloads in eight weeks. This is with a marketing budget of zero and very little work since launch. Aidan will cover the basic app store optimizations that will help bring people to your Google Play page. Getting them to download and stay is up to you and up to the value your app provides. Of course, to get traction, you need to pick a topic in which enough people are interested, and then the quality of your build is what is going to help keep these users.
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