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…
Print style sheets is the main thing that comes to mind if you mention printing with CSS. But CSS is also being used to format books, catalogs and brochures — content that may never have been designed to be a web page at all. In this article, Rachel Andrew will take a look at the CSS modules that have been created not for use in web browsers, but to deal with printed and paged media. She’ll explain how the selectors, properties and values that they introduce work. She’ll finish up with a working example that you can use as a starting point for your own experiments.
Read more…
The World Wide Web is not static. Quite the opposite: It’s responsive, fluid, evolving and ever changing.
Web designers need to be familiar with HTML and CSS code and front-end technologies when they conceive a website or application’s interface. In Creative Suite version 6, a CSS Properties panel was added to its toolset — a tool that, if used properly, could help both designers with CSS coding experience and beginners alike. By the end of this article, you should have a better overview of this feature and also know how to use it with CSS Professionalzr, a free extension developed by Matt Stow to further optimize the code generated by the panel.
Read more…
Ruth John has met some resistance when talking about this API. People either can’t see a need for it with the web, or they would feel uncomfortable talking to their device — both valid views. However, he hopes he will inspire you to at least give it a go and think about it the next time you are building something. Start welcoming speech: It might be just what you’re listening for.
Read more…
People make all sorts of visual notes. An army of sketchnoters is out there, and everyone has their own style. Some do amazing sketches and lavish letters. Some translate complicated concepts into easy-to-grasp diagrams. But for the sake of this article, let’s keep it simple. Making your notes more interesting doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. It’s not like learning to play the piano or taking up diving. If you think sketchnoting looks fun, Elisabeth Irgens has some tips to get you started.
Read more…
In this article, Sara Soueidan will go over the prerequisites and techniques for working with CSS in SVG.
She’ll also go over how to export and optimize SVGs, techniques for embedding them and how each one affects the styles and animations applied, and then we’ll actually style and animate with CSS. Make your SVGs accessible! You can do several things to make that happen. In addition to accessibility, don’t forget to optimize your SVGs and provide fallbacks for non-supporting browsers. We hope you’ll find this article to be useful.
Read more…
CSS is usually considered a language for applying styles to webpages. However, in this article Krasimir Tsonev will show you that it is more than that. It is also a handy tool for collecting statistics. What matters in the end is the impact for clients. Are they getting more products sold or are there more visitors for their campaign sites? The final results usually show if your project is successful. Google Analytics is a powerful way to collect data. In this article, you will see a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
At Typeform, David Okuniev was inspired to simplify online forms by a movie that’s decidedly a blast from the past: the 1983 film WarGames, which centers around a student who remotely logs into a research computer and, through its terminal interface, nearly sparks a nuclear war. Stripping forms down to their basics and building them back up into something better took four years of work, but that core idea guided the team all along: questions are better than lists. In this article you will find David Okuniev’s story of how he turned that idea into a product that’s helped companies of all sizes get a 55% completion rate on their forms.
Read more…
The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
Read more…
