The world is a stressful place. That’s probably why if you search for articles about dealing with stress you’ll find lots of great advice. But the problem is that most of it is pretty generic. Is there anything more specific to the profession of design? In this article Ollie Campbell takes some of the academic research on stress and applies it to the challenges designers face every day. If you’re a designer who feels stressed from time to time, then this article is for you. It takes some of the academic research on stress and applies it to the challenges designers face every day.
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There are a good number of benefits and reasons why you should consider integrating design workouts into your team. In this article, Arturas Leonovas shares some exercises which are worth trying out with your design team and get you all to train before the big game — together. Doing this at least once a month is a fun way for everyone to polish skills that they use every day. Not only that, the added benefit of team-building and knowledge-sharing will help everyone become the best versions of themselves.
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Integrating prototyping deeply into your creative process can be transformative. It can make for a more positive, enriching team culture. In this article, Jamie shares his experiences and advice on how prototyping can help you work on a wider variety of projects much faster. He’ll provide some prototypes that he created for a game he made, Melody Jams, which got featured by Apple in 130 countries and was the number one kids app in the store for a brief time.
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Conversations about ethics are often difficult and awkward. Nevertheless, designers can play a vital role in finding new ways for people to relate to and communicate with each other. In this article, Ciara and Samantha set out to understand how ethics is used in contemporary design.
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A design sprint allows you to see into the future to learn in just five days what customers think about your finished product. As a UX consultant and in-house design strategist, Claire Mason has facilitated dozens upon dozens of design workshops (ranging from rapid prototyping sessions to, of course, sprints). The sprint is by far the most effective process she’s seen to drive customer-first decision making in a design thinky way.
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When Denys Mishunov was invited to speak at one of the best front-end conferences in Europe, he felt like he did not deserve to be at that conference. And he didn’t even know that those feelings of his had a name! This is called impostor syndrome and it is a real psychological issue, rooted deeply in many of us. If we do not pay attention to its symptoms, if we blindly follow its triggers, then we can get into real psychological trouble. The good news is that, even though there is no pill for it, we can change out attitude towards it. Simply acknowledging the feeling can help to neutralize its effect.
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In the previous article, David Tucker introduced the concept of user management and how complicated it is in our current digital landscape. If you regularly create new web or mobile applications, then Amazon Cognito is a powerful tool that can cut 90% of the time it usually takes to set up a custom user-management solution. David believes that whether you are a web, iOS or Android developer, this toolset will prove to be a valuable one. Feel free to use the sample code to help you in that process. Happy coding!
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In the last few years, traditional computers have ceded dominance to smaller screens, including tablets, mobile phones, smartwatches and more. As the craft has evolved, so has its toolset; and from one app to rule them all, we have gotten to a point where it seems like a new contender among UI design tools crops up every month. And many of the new UI design tools look pretty good and promising. At the moment, Sketch has grown in popularity and for a good reason: The developers of Sketch have figured out exactly what interface designers have been looking for and have steadily added functionality to address those needs. The pace of development of Sketch has been phenomenal, to say the least.
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Welcome back to the second part of this tutorial on Gravit Designer. In the first part Christian Krammer took you through a general look at Gravit and set everything up, created the background image in the weather app and the status bar, and then started to make the initial elements of the design’s content. Having created the main text layers of the content area in part one, let’s continue with the weather conditions for the different times of day.
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Today there are plenty of applications available for modern design that let you easily bring your ideas to the screen: Sketch, Affinity Designer, Adobe XD (beta) and Figma, to name just a few. Gravit Designer is a quite new app, that gives you all of the tools needed to create functional and elegant screen designs. It can also be used to make icons, designs for print, presentations and much more. In this tutorial, Christian Krammer will walk you through the creation of a neat weather app.
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