The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. Setting up a conference isn’t an easy undertaking. It takes time and attention to all the little details that make up a truly memorable experience. It’s not something one can take lightly, and it’s often a major personal and financial commitment. But what lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.
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Whenever project managers try to manage their team using spreadsheets alone, they usually face some problems. Reporting and documenting with spreadsheets can become quite a time-consuming task. Today, Nick Babich will like to introduce Float, an app that makes it so much easier for product managers to keep a good overview on the tasks of the entire team and everyone involved. Float makes it easy to see everything you need to know about your team’s projects in a single place, giving project managers the information and functionality they need to handle the fast-paced world of digital design and development. Let’s get started!
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A roundup of Advent Calendar sites of interest to web designers and developers. From accessibility to UX, coding challenges to Perl, there really is something for everyone this December. Today, Rachel Andrew brings you calendars which are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors. So, please join us in supporting these efforts, share the articles that you enjoyed reading, and join the discussions respectfully. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, you can certainly learn a lot of new things over the next 24 days.
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Photoshop is what many digital artists, photographers, graphic designers, and even some web developers have in common. What sets us apart is how we use the tool. In this tutorial, Yoanna Victorova shares her most often used Photoshop shortcuts and a few key parts of her creative process. To profit the most from this tutorial, some familiarity with Photoshop would be required, but you should be able to follow along because every technique will be explained in detail. For this article, she decided to use one of her most famous Photoshop artworks named “Regret”.
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Designing apps for mental health is one area where UX designers can have a huge impact. You might assume that there are already dozens of wonderful digital therapies available for people struggling with mental health disorders. Bu most apps are useless at best, and harmful at worst, due primarily to a disconnect between the designers building the apps and the patients and providers in the field of mental health. In this article, Marli Mesibov will look at the issues with current apps, and guidelines to ensure UX practitioners are using clinically proven methods for improving mental health treatment.
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Rachel Andrew writes about her involvement with the CSS Working Group, and why she feels it is important that web developers understand what is being worked on in CSS, and have a way to offer feedback.
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There are internships in every industry imaginable — from HR to investment banking — but what could a UX design internship look like? In this article, Erica talks about her internship at an agency in Granada, what her tasks were, all the challenges she faced, and how she overcame the fear of simply trying something new. This is intended for those who are new to UX design looking to explore the field — read on to learn if a UX design internship is the right thing for you!
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Looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team? It’s not as difficult as you may think. If you’re a team manager who is looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team, then this article for you. Here Nick Babich brings you seven of the most common challenges distributed product teams should overcome and how a team-management tool called “monday” can help.
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We asked the Smashing Community for their favorite tips and tricks when editing text and code. With so many great suggestions, Rachel Andrew decided to collect them all into one article so you can add it to your useful bookmarks. Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply and share their best-appreciated tools and techniques — we sincerely appreciate it!
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Involving other people early on — especially people from other disciplines — can feel scary. By taking inspiration from code reviews, we can improve collaboration both within our own fields as well as across disciplines, be it design, UX, content or development. No one is really promoting waterfall processes anymore. So how can you involve people early on so that you’re avoiding the waterfall, but also making sure that you’re not setting yourself up for design by committee? Ida Aalen found her answer when learning about code reviews.
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