Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. “Beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”? No one has figured out how to describe their product effectively. For example, Write, a note-taking app, describes itself as “a beautiful home for all your notes,” which doesn’t say much about why one might want it. Macworld describes it as “Easy Markdown Writing for Dropbox Users.” That’s both concise and specific: If you like Markdown and use Dropbox, you’ll read more. It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, when Dave Feldman became a designer, he had the opposite problem.
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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 September 2014. This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
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Badges often look the same. So… is it really necessary to budge? If you have a little, different conference, you need different kinds of things. Badges included. In 2013, at the first Kerning conference, Maurizio Piacenza was asked to design the official notebook: he ended up with a really typographic design for the cover and a funny pattern on the back. And an Easter egg on the cover. It was a really funny project, so when a member of Kerning’s organizing committee, asked him to design the notebook and some printed materials for Kerning 2014 he immediately said “Yes, let’s start!”.
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As responsive design has evolved, we now more often start with the content and then set breakpoints when the content “breaks.” This means that you might end up with quite a few content-centric breakpoints and no particular devices or form factors on which to test your website. However, we need to continually monitor a design’s performance with real traffic. Content-centric breakpoints are definitely the way to go, but they also mean that monitoring your website to identify when it breaks is more important. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås and Luca Passani will demonstrate how WURFL.js and Google Analytics can work together to show performance metrics across form factors. No more guessing.
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If you use custom post types in WordPress, you might need to organize them like categories and tags. Categories and tags are examples of taxonomies, and WordPress allows you to create as many custom taxonomies as you want. In this article, Josh Pollock will explain custom taxonomies and how to create them. He’ll also go over which template files in a WordPress theme control the archives of built-in and custom taxonomies, and some advanced techniques for customizing the behavior of taxonomy archives.
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WordPress has released the first release candidate for the upcoming 4.0 version. According to the official version numbering, and a new major release is always a cause for excitement! Since Daniel Pataki has always used WordPress in English, it took him a while to realize how important internationalization is. Version 4.0 makes it much easier to get WordPress to speak your language. In fact, the first installation screen asks you to choose your native tongue. Let’s take a look at the new features the team at WordPress has been working on for us!
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Technology companies are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. While the concepts they focus on are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
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Most plugins try to do too many things, which makes it difficult for designers and developers to integrate them in their projects. Apple introduced the iPhone 5S, which was accompanied by a presentation website on which visitors were guided down sections of a page and whose messaging was reduced to one key function per section. Pete Rojwongsuriya found this to be a great way to present a product, minimizing the risk of visitors accidentally scrolling past key information, and he set out to find a plugin that does just this. To his surprise, he didn’t find a simple solution to integrate in his current projects. That is when One Page Scroll was born.
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Jon Bernbach is a user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designer of mobile and web applications. In a way, like a teacher, he needs to present information in an easily understandable way to new visitors. He needs to consider how his students (end users) consume the information that he provides. So, reflection on his high-school experience serves a purpose (aside from painful fashion memories).
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Using the data from over 22 billion email subscribers, we determined what designers should prioritize when creating an email newsletter, both this year and beyond. Which email clients and platforms should we be supporting now? Should we learn all of the email workarounds or just use existing builders and frameworks? In this article, Ros Hodgekiss will interpret the numbers from her “Email Marketing Trends” report to help designers like you make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t in email newsletters.
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