It’s not enough to simply design something and meet a goal. Finding your principles will help you find the right place to work and to do your best work. Giving your products a soul will make them better, more engaging products. The next time you’re designing, ask yourself what would make someone find your product useful, and what would make them care about it more than another product? In this article, Joshua Mauldin would like to share how he found his principles and regained a sense of fulfillment.
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If you’re running a major bank or a secure site for whistleblowers, you’ll no doubt want to do anything you can to avoid possible man in the middle attacks. However, if you’re running a content-driven website, it’s just never worth it to use a security technique that could potentially take your whole site down close to permanently! Going offline is a much more severe threat than getting exposed to a sophisticated man-in-the-middle attack.
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Is your website on mobile devices friends with your users? As web designers, you could often treat your users the same way the “bad guys” treat The Little Mole, especially on mobile websites. In this article, Martin Michálek goes through them and suggests best practices to optimize the user experience on mobile devices. Be kind to mobile users. Do not be the wicked old man who tries to get rid of The Little Mole in his yard. Do you want to know how the fairy tale ends? The Little Mole survives, laughs at the old man and moves to another garden.
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So you’ve attended a conference, listened to some truly inspiring talks, made quite a few valuable connections, maybe even attended a hands-on workshop and learned a thing or two. What now? How do you bring back the new knowledge and ideas and connections to your team and to your work? This article highlights a practical strategy of getting there without much effort.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Iconography lies at the heart of UI design. It can make or break the usability of an interface. Every icon should serve a purpose. When done correctly, they communicate the core idea and intent of a product or action, and they bring a lot of nice benefits to user interfaces, such as saving screen real estate and enhancing aesthetic appeal. In this article Nick Babich will show you how to make that possible. If you want to take a go at creating your own icons, you can download and test Adobe’s Experience Design CC for free and get started right away!
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Today, many apps make assumptions about user preferences based on personal data. They use this information to make decisions on your behalf, without any direct input from us. This type of design pattern, where user choice is removed, has recently been coined “anticipatory design”, which leverages data on user behavior to automate the decision-making process in user interfaces. Despite the good intentions imbued in anticipatory design, though, automating decisions can implicitly raise trust issues . In this article, Graeme Fulton will look at how you can give people confidence in the decisions made for them by using “light patterns,” which ensure that user interfaces are honest and transparent, while even nudging users to make better decisions for themselves.
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Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings, and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would “add” accessibility on top of the finished product. With our new book, we get to the bottom of it all! Written by Heydon Pickering, a well-respected accessibility expert, the book includes dozens of practical examples of accessible interface components and inclusive design workflow, applicable to your work right away. With this book, you’ll know exactly how to keep interfaces accessible from the very start, and how to design and build inclusive websites without hassle and unnecessary code.
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There is something magical about Halloween, surrounded by mystery, horror, scare and trick-or-treat candies for kids and adults alike. In this post, we feature artists around the world who have been creating wonderful illustrations dedicated to Halloween. We celebrate the creative side of Halloween with those of you who are also planning to celebrate with friends!
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“The Smashing Book #5 has completely changed the potential for books around the web. It dives deep into a topic and continues to dive deeper until you feel as though your brain might explode from the knowledge. The bar has been raised significantly.” For this article, we asked Paul Scrivens if he wanted to review our latest book, Smashing Book #5. Thank you Paul!
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