May 9, 2016 — Let these designs shine on you with their smart details, fantastic textures, and well-chosen color palettes that will undoubtedly help you start the new week with your creativity freshly nurtured. This time Vitaly Friedman has collected a potpourri of styles ranging from delicate and subtle to bold and playful. Nothing but design goodness. So please lean back and soak it all in. Read more…

May 6, 2016 — 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. Read more…

May 6, 2016 — In his article on Selling Design Systems, Dan Mall suggests to illustrate how fractured an organization is by printing out its different presences online and putting them on a large board as an example of all the wasted money and effort that goes into making sites from scratch, one-by-one, needlessly reinventing the wheel every time. What Vitaly Friedman learned from his experience is that trying to focus on the workflow or the process is never as helpful as focusing on tangible benefits that the client will get as a result. Read more…

May 5, 2016 — Designed by the team behind IconCrafts, this music instrument icon set is dedicated to all music lovers. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons. Please note that the set is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. We kindly ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word. A big thank you to IconCrafts for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Read more…

May 4, 2016 — If you’ve ever written an iOS app beyond a trivial “Hello world” app with just one screen and a few views, then you might have noticed that a lot of code seems to “naturally” go into view controllers. Because view controllers in iOS carry many responsibilities and are closely related to the app screens, a lot of code ends up being written in them because it’s just easier and faster that way. Read more…

May 4, 2016 — In this piece, Cosima Mielke wants to indulge in the aesthetic of past times. She’ll dive into wanderlust-awaking travel posters, design manuals that wrote history, and, last but not least, Cosima will bridge the gap to today by looking at how a mid-century design movement still influences designers. Buckle up… and off we are to a journey through pre-Photoshop, pre-Sketch and -Illustrator times! Read more…

May 3, 2016 — Understanding how to use similarity and proximity to affect the relationships between elements in your work will help you create designs that enable easier organization and improve the usability of your work. In this first article, Jon Hensley will take a look at how the principles of similarity and proximity work, and look at real-world examples to illustrate them in use so that you can begin to use similarity and proximity to create both relationships and differences between elements in your designs. Read more…

May 3, 2016 — CSS pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements can certainly be a handful. They provide so many possibilities that one can easily feel overwhelmed, but that’s the life of a web designer and developer! In this guide, Ricardo Zea will teach you all the things you need to keep in mind so that your pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements are well implemented. If you’re an experienced web designer or developer, you must know and have used most of the pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements discussed here. However, you might not have heard of one or two of them before. Read more…

May 2, 2016 — Robots only succeed in making customers feel like another number, a dubious accomplishment for your team. They’re the opposite of the personal touch that effective support is supposed to be all about. It’s not that robots are useless. They’re great at repetitive tasks, perfect for finding data and remembering anything you’ve ever written down. You just have to give them the right job. In this article, Matthew Guay will show you how to find the perfect job for your robots, so that you can automate support and offer more personalized, hands-on support at the same time. Read more…

April 30, 2016 — We discovered the best source for inspiration: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar for May 2016 and can be downloaded for free. This creativity mission has been going on for eight years now and artists and designers from across the globe got their creative juices flowing to produce desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in. A big thank-you to everyone who contributed their works! Read more…