February 6, 2015 — Every project starts with a briefing sent to your team. Don’t take the content for granted, and make sure you clearly understand the objectives before working out anything tangible. You can do this by including a small learning phase, based on interviews with your client and their customers. Address your learnings and observations in an involved relationship. By simply asking the right questions, you’ll learn a hell of a lot more. In this article, Thomas Joos shares his learnings after years of streamlining creative dialogue. Read more…

February 5, 2015 — By 2030, around 19% of people in the US will be over 65. Doesn’t sound like a lot? Well it happens to be about the same number of people in the US who own an iPhone today. Which of these two groups do you think Silicon Valley spends more time thinking about? This seems unfortunate when you consider all of the things technology has to offer older people. A lot of people in the tech industry talk about “changing the world” and “making people’s lives better.” But bad design is excluding whole sections of the population from the benefits of technology. If you’re a designer, you can help change that! Read more…

February 4, 2015 — Mail.Ru Group has about 40 products — even more if you add mobile and tablet websites and apps, promo websites, etc. Yury Vetrov’s team deals with almost half of them. Their goal is to update these products and unify them around several guidelines. Continue reading of Part Two. In this article Yury will discuss the transformation of their design process from the classic Prototype → Design Mockup → HTML → Implement approach for every screen to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach. Read more…

February 3, 2015 — The total size of media elements on the average web page is increasing constantly. Yet, especially on mobile devices, performance bottlenecks remain, which stem from bandwidth issues, widely varying network latency, and limitations on memory and the CPU. You need solutions for better and faster browsing experiences that work across all devices and browsers. In this article Denis Ryabov & Ugur Kaner will discuss why they should and shouldn’t use Lazy Load, and how to implement it. Read more…

February 3, 2015 — This time we decided to turn our mystery riddle into an exercise of patience and stubbornness — beyond problem solving, of course. To achieve just that, we had to hide the right answers properly and provide subtle hints that attentive readers would need to discover first. So, what if we looked closely at the things around us and introduced a riddle that would reflect those experiences? Read more…

January 31, 2015 — As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for February 2015. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for almost seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

January 30, 2015 — Something interactive will almost always communicate more than a picture ever could, and you’ll have better conversations because of it. On the other hand, Sketch is an excellent UI design tool, lightweight and quite powerful, and it works great with Flinto, InVision and the like because they live in the borderlands of flat images and HTML or native code. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will talk you through why you should prototype and how you can do it with Sketch and prototyping tools such as Flinto and InVision. He’ll also get a nicely documented freebie Sketch file to help you. Read more…

January 29, 2015 — The diffusion of innovations is a complex process; design teams can use their knowledge of the theory to create a road map for how they will address critical factors in the design and marketing of their product. In this second part, Victor Yocco presents the five characteristics of an innovation that determine its use. According to the diffusion of innovations theory, how well an innovation addresses these characteristics will determine people’s long-term adoption of an innovation. Design teams can address many components of these characteristics. Read more…

January 28, 2015 — The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf NYC 2015, we’ve prepared a new mystery riddle, and this one will be an exercise in patience and stubborness. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden Twitter hashtag. Your job is to discover those hashtags as fast as possible. If your guess for a hashtag is right, search for that hashtag on Twitter and you’ll find a tweet leading you to the next level. Are you ready? Action! Read more…

January 26, 2015 — Spartan is a project that has been in the making for some time now. It will be a matter of few months until users and developers alike will be able to try Spartan for themselves, but we can share some of the interesting bits already today. In this article, Jacob Rossi will cover the inside story of the rendering engine powering Spartan, how it came to be, and how 20 years of the Internet Explorer platform (Trident) has helped inform how it was designed. Read more…