The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road.
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Simple design is hard, since it requires much more thought and inspiration. Colors play a major role, and today Vitaly Friedman would like to show you a couple of illustrations that may motivate you to try out some new color combinations and techniques. From 3D illustrations to artwork created with ink and watercolors, Vitaly is sure there’s something that’ll spark your inspiration. Be warned though, some of them may even give you wanderlust from just looking at them.
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Benefits such as personal growth, creative exploration and generation of professional opportunities are some of the reasons to engage in personal side projects. In this article, Jon Yablonski will explore these benefits, as well as learn how to decide on a project and how to effectively manage your time. Finally, for inspiration, Jon will look at some great examples of personal projects. We hope you will be inspired to start your own side project!
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In this final part of this series, Jon Hensley will focus on the principles of continuation and common fate, which involve movement, both implied and animated, to create relationships. Using these principles, along with the principles of similarity, proximity, closure and figure-ground, will strengthen your own design skills and help you create a better experience for your users. Oh, and one final thing. After applying these principles, make sure to test out your designs with users to see what works best for them.
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In this article, Scott Lewis will share the fundamentals of how to create premium quality icons. These fundamentals are technical skills; anyone can learn and master them with practice. Remember that to create better icons, start from the general and work toward the specific. Every icon set submitted to Iconfinder is reviewed and evaluated for potential appeal to our website users and for potential commercial value as premium icons. When reviewing icon sets submitted to the website, we have a responsibility to our designers and to our customers to make sure all premium icons on the website are of the highest possible quality.
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In this article, Jon Hensley will focus on the principles of closure and figure-ground, which play with positive and negative space to build relationships and create wholes with the sum of their parts. As in the first article, he’ll look at how the principles work and then move on to real-world examples to illustrate them in use. Understanding how to use closure and figure-ground will help you build strong relationships and differences between elements in your designs.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Emotions aren’t a problem to be solved. People are complicated. People change. People are often a little conflicted. Algorithms can have a hard time with that. Emotion-sensing data promises to balance machine logic with a more human touch, but it won’t be successful without human designers. It may be difficult to imagine all the ways that artificial intelligence with emotion-sensing or emotionally intelligent technology, will shape experience. Let’s start by looking at the most familiar type of emotionally intelligent technology: a conversational app.
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