With the display of the iPhone 6 Plus being even more detailed than that of the iPhone 4, we will need to provide 3x assets. The numbers 1x, 2x and 3x are also called “scale factors.” Of course, Android developers have always had to deal with many different sets of assets. Still, designers are finding themselves questioning their production workflow. In this article, Karsten Bruns will focus on iOS, but you could easily extend this approach to Android and the web. Hopefully, the methods described here will simplify your workflow.
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The majority of conferences are small. Most are single-track events, except for those that are 10-plus-track affairs. Many offer workshops to round out the experience. In this article Jan Constantin won’t present best practices for planning a conference, but rather will look at how it’s actually done most of the time. While this is not a guide to putting together the perfect conference, it gives a good overview of what seems to work and which elements are so unpredictable that they do not serve as reliable guidelines.
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To help balance the craving for visual simplicity with the need to keep websites easy to navigate, you can borrow some concepts from the world of wayfinding. In this article, Dennis Kardys will show you how you can apply these concepts to the mobile web. Keep in mind that every person who browses an application is making their way through a space — often an unfamiliar one. As the user embarks on their journey, what types of wayfinding assistance are you providing to guide them?
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We are humbled to release a set of 50 free autumn-themed EPS icons illustrated in a lovely sketchy style.
Designed by Nick Botner as line art in Adobe Illustrator, the icons are available in EPS, enabling you to change both the color or the weight of the strokes with ease. This icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons.
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Cat Noone is the co-founder of Liberio. She is a young and talented designer and entrepreneur from Brooklyn, New York, now living and working in Berlin. Cat worked in the field of special education before jumping into a career that she really loves and makes her happy. In this interview, Cat shares insights about her personal life and Berlin, talks about her latest project (the startup Liberio) and gives advice to young designers and developers in the industry.
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Design blueprints could mean the difference between a correctly implemented design that improves the user experience and satisfies customers and a confusing and inconsistent design that corrupts the user experience and displeases customers. For those of you who create digital products, design specs could mean the difference between efficient collaboration and a wasteful back-and-forth process with costly implementation mistakes and delivery delays. Specs can help you to build the right product more quickly and more efficiently. Effective collaboration requires effective communication. Investing in the development of workflows and tooling around to make this communication easier will pay off big with the effectiveness with which products are built.
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When sliders are not done well, they can cause a lot of frustration (not to mention lost sales) by standing between your customers and what they want. And getting them wrong is surprisingly easy.
In this article, Greg Nudelman and Daria Kempka will present a solution, including the design and code, for a new type of Android slider to address common problems, along with a downloadable Android mini-app for you to try out. It’s a deep dive into sliders based on a chapter in Android Design Patterns. Working with sliders is no great mystery, and there’s nothing to stop you from trying!
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One of the reasons for AngularJS’ success is its outstanding ability to be tested. The main factor that made Sébastien switch from “Well, I just launch the app and see if everything works” to “I’ve got unit tests!” was that, for the first time, he could focus on what matters and on what he enjoys in programming: creating smart algorithms and nice UIs. After having fixed it, re-updated the application and apologized to customer service, he decided to entirely rewrite this component in test-driven development style. The test file ended up being twice as long as the component file. It has been improved a lot since, especially its poor performance, but it never failed again in production. Rock-solid code.
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Low-fidelity prototypes are rough representations of concepts that help us to validate those concepts early on in the design process. Throughout this article, Laura Busche will look at some of the features that make low-fidelity prototyping a unique tool to radically improve your work and to build an environment in which users’ needs can be truly realized. This article focuses on the practice and general principles behind integrating low-fidelity prototypes in design in general, covering applications that range from graphic, web and user experience design to business and service design.
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Compared to what we can create on the computer today, the original Macintosh, with only 128 KB of memory, had limited capabilities. At the time, though, it opened up so many new possibilities. Emerging digital technology also changed typography. Some digital typefaces were updated versions of classics, while others were brand new, and there was a refreshing jolt of youthful experimentation as people moved past the limits of the rational and functional. Each of the following designers broke from tradition and changed the world of design in some way. Those who designed not only on the screen, but for the screen, ushered in a new era of digital design, mixing media and incorporating motion, sound and interactivity. Below are a few of those pioneers.
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