In this article, Cameron McEfee will give you a taste of how GuideGuide can change the way you use guides in Photoshop and Illustrator. If you’re one of the many people who already use GuideGuide, you may discover some unconventional uses that are not immediately apparent. Cameron will provide an overview of the major features, and then give some examples of advanced and unusual ways it can be used to make you a more efficient designer.
While he’s going to focus this post on Illustrator, nearly everything is applicable to Photoshop as well.
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A while ago we asked on Twitter and Facebook what music the web community is listening to when coding and designing. The answers were as diverse as the community itself and Cosima Mielke has compiled those hand-crafted playlists, favorite artists, and loved soundtracks in this article to see which tunes fuel the web, and to provide you with some new ear candy to get you through lengthy coding and design sessions, of course. Get your headphones ready!
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Front-end fatigue is very real. Technology is evolving so rapidly, that it can be overwhelming. The worst thing you can do is reach the edge and become fully burnt out because once you are, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place. In this article, David Berner shares advice on how to avoid fatigue and stop your head from exploding. Once you’re fully burnt out, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place.
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How do you go about designing an app? Michael Flarup brings you an article about just that. A top level, somewhat simplified, and very honest overview of the steps involved in designing an app. This is an account of how most of the apps I work on are born, complete with shameless links to the tools he uses. Now when people think of ‘designing’ something, their thoughts often circle around the visual aspects of a product. Pixel pushing in Photoshop or laying grids in Sketch, but that’s a common misconception. Design, in the context of this article, covers the entire process. It is every deliberate action meant to produce something. The truth is that from the moment you get an idea, you are designing.
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Most of us carry the dead weight of an undefined process. We’re too passive, or ignorant, or foolish, or dismissive, or proud when it comes to our workflow. And that’s where we lose. Being ignorant of our process is to be ignorant of how long things really take, or where opportunities for improvement, in skill or outcome, are hidden. In all this we lose control of our intellectual and creative growth, letting too many opportunities slip to become the designers (or developers or writers) we aspire to be. In this article, Alexander Charchar will show you how to master your time and schedule, and how to have more control to make more (and better) choices.
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So you’ve attended a conference, listened to some truly inspiring talks, made quite a few valuable connections, maybe even attended a hands-on workshop and learned a thing or two. What now? How do you bring back the new knowledge and ideas and connections to your team and to your work? This article highlights a practical strategy of getting there without much effort.
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Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings, and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would “add” accessibility on top of the finished product. With our new book, we get to the bottom of it all! Written by Heydon Pickering, a well-respected accessibility expert, the book includes dozens of practical examples of accessible interface components and inclusive design workflow, applicable to your work right away. With this book, you’ll know exactly how to keep interfaces accessible from the very start, and how to design and build inclusive websites without hassle and unnecessary code.
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A team must be able to respond quickly to feedback on their product from clients, project managers and developers. A style guide ensures that your project doesn’t encounter serious problems when you implement the initial design. In this article, Nick Babich will review the process of creating a style guide, the process of handing off a design, and collaboration across the whole team. He’ll also walk through an example workflow, demonstrating how developers and designers can improve cross-team communication and drastically reduce iteration time.
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In 2011, the traditional comp-to-HTML workflow was only beginning to be critiqued, and since then, we’ve seen a myriad of alternatives. Style Tiles, Style Prototypes, Visual Inventories, Element Collages, style guides, and even designing in the browser have all been suitable approaches to multi-device design. Also, applications like Webflow and Macaw have made breakpoint visualization digestible for the code-averse. Many designers have moved on from Photoshop as their workhorse to Sketch, Affinity Designer, or similar. Others have adopted apps like Keynote for prototyping.
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Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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