By using colour, typography, hierarchy, contrast, and all the other tools at their disposal, designers can take an unordered jumble of information and turn it into something that’s easy to use and pleasurable to behold. Like life itself, design can win a small victory against the entropy of the universe, creating pockets of order from the raw materials of chaos. For years, web design was dictated by the designer. The user had no choice but to accommodate the site’s demand for a screen of a certain size or a network connection of a certain speed. Now, web design can be a conversation between the designer and the user. Now, web design can reflect the underlying principles of the web itself.
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As UX specialists, you have varied and diverse backgrounds, but visual interfaces are what you spend most of our time on. You are visual thinkers with a highly trained eye. That’s why it’s tempting sometimes to jump straight to the visual UI design stage when starting a new project, and one of the reasons why you may be bored by some other tasks. In this article, Javier will give you some hints and tips on how to put that app design you are working on to the test, and to see whether it’s ready to be released into the wild. Changing your workflow might be challenging in the beginning, but after a while you will enjoy working within the constraints. This will also transform the way you think, and hopefully help you to move away from focusing on the visual details.
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Most of the time, the weather can’t quite make up its mind, and so the days pass by with half of the sky sunny while the other half gray. With springtime lurking around the corner, our need for extra inspiration is even bigger. So, today, Vitaly Friedman hopes that this month’s set will give you just that spark you need to cheer you up and boost your creativity.
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Typefaces are always telling us something. We receive information through typography. Type influences us, adds coloring to words, sets a mood and atmosphere, assists, teaches, scares us, brings us joy and inspires us. The contemporary world has its own rhythm, aesthetic and philosophy; while we are changing, everything is changing around us. In studying historical lettering in calligraphy, we can understand the character and potential of a writing instrument, and, as a result, we can manage its expressive means.
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Gray days always are a great time we can use to reflect on our work and perhaps better decide what it is that we hope to improve or change in the next months. They are the spark that sets the process of creation in motion. It doesn’t take much; it can be any part of an element that catches my eye, be it a particular color, style, texture, or anything really. You’ll find a bit of everything in today’s selection: Architecture, colors, some of the best photographs from 2016, and more. We hope you’ll like Vitaly Friedman’s playground! ;)
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In this article, Constantine Konovalov will attempt to describe the principal solutions involved in the development of his own version of the Paris metro map. The entire process that went into the creation of this new map, took him around two and a half years to complete, and an article of that length would bore even the most committed of readers. So, In this light, he will cover only the principal graphical solutions. At the end of the report, Constantine has included a time-lapse video of the entire creation process.
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The human to computer interaction is heavily based on interacting with graphical UI elements, and color plays a critical role in this interaction. When designing a new app, it’s often difficult to decide on a color scheme that works well, as there are an infinite number of possible color combinations out there. In this article, Nick Babich will go over the most important points related to color in apps. He’ll cover traditional color scheme patterns, custom color combinations that aren’t based strictly on any one pattern, and he’ll also learn how to choose colors and contrasts for your app that support usability. If you’d like to hone your own color usage skills, you can download and test Adobe XD for free, and get started right away.
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Thinking about images in terms of their usability is important. All visual communication in your design leaves a cumulative impression on the user. Compelling images have a unique ability to inspire and engage your audience to provide useful information. Take the time to make every image in your app or site reinforce user experience. Human beings are highly visual creatures who are able to process visual information almost instantly; 90 percent of all information that we perceive and that gets transmitted to our brains is visual. In this article, Nick Babich will cover a good number of useful principles and best practices that will help you successfully integrate imagery into your designs.
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May 2017 bring you a healthy and inspiring adventure. As for that kick-start inspiration, Vitaly Friedman hopes this article will help get you back in the creative mindset. The above illustration has a style that I’m sure everyone will admire. The combination of colors used is simply marvelous — so simple, yet so complex.
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How do designers design a website? Do they just mess around in Photoshop or Sketch for a while until a pretty design appears? You don’t have to be blessed by the design gods with special talent. So, how should you, a developer, learn design? This article is for design beginners. So, throughout the piece, Mason Gentry will use simplified definitions of user experience (UX) and visual design.
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