Personas have been in use since the mid-’90s and since then have gained widespread awareness within the design community. Once Shlomo Goltz understood why personas were valuable and how they could be put into action, he started using them in his own work, and then his process became more efficient and fun, while the fruits of his labor became more impactful and useful to others. Personas will supercharge your work and help you take your designs to the next level.
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Email is one of the most important tools for reaching your customer base. But with the ever-growing number of emails to send, getting them all out the door can seem a little overwhelming. By putting in place a solid email design workflow, you’ll be able to regularly ship engaging and mobile-friendly emails with ease. Incorporating a modular approach and a custom framework into your email workflow can lead to increased productivity and make it easier for you to iterate on your designs. You will have to make an initial investment of time to get everything up and running, but the result will improve your designs, the customer experience and your engagement rates, leading to happier customers and increased revenue.
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The simplicity of Jekyll’s theming layer and writing workflow is fantastic; however, setting up the website takes a lot longer than expected. It isn’t for every project. The biggest disadvantage of a static website generator is that incorporating dynamic server-side functionality becomes difficult. Jekyll’s strength is its simplicity and minimalism, giving you just what you need to create a content-focused website that doesn’t need much dynamic user interaction — and no more. This makes it perfect for your blog and portfolio and also worth considering for a simple client website. In this article, Barry Clark will walk you through the quickest way to set up a Jekyll powered blog, how to avoid common problems with using Jekyll, and much more.
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Since Adobe decided to feature-freeze Fireworks in 2013, there is no replacement available for this Software, and, as every designer out there knows, Fireworks works best with extensions! However, there are many extensions that might help you improve Fireworks. In this article, Michel Bozgounov will show you some of the most useful Fireworks extensions that will help you work faster and be more effective with Fireworks; he has tested many of them himself, to be sure that they work flawlessly.
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Communicating effectively can be quite difficult, especially when a project involves many people with different responsibilities and levels of authority. The problem compounds when the people involved belong to different organizations with different working guidelines. Effective communication happens when a message is delivered whose content has the same meaning for the recipient as it does for the sender. In this article, Krzysztof Rakowski will show us the rules he follows for a better communication. He hopes you find these insights useful to your work.
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As digital professionals, we like to complain that the organizations with which we work are a hindrance. But are they? Exactly how digitally-friendly are the companies we work for? Before Paul Boag helps a client go through the process of digital transformation, he needs to understand where the problems lie. He does this using a digital health check. Below is an outline of the areas that he investigates, the questions he asks and what those questions reveal. Paul’s hope is that this health check will help you better understand the organizations with which you work.
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Gulp is one of quite a few build tools available in JavaScript, and other build tools not written in JavaScript are available, too, including Rake. Why should you choose it? Gulp is a build system that can improve how you develop websites by automating common tasks, such as compiling preprocessed CSS. In this article, Callum Macrae will see how you can use Gulp to change your development workflow, making it faster and more efficient.
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Brian Wood found many web shops faced challenges fitting responsive design into their workflow, and the role of most web designers had changed to include coding in some form or another. Well, a new generation of visual responsive design tools has arrived. These responsive design tools are for anyone who understands HTML and CSS (or is willing to learn) and wants to visually design a responsive website — and have code to show for it. You could use one of these tools in the design process to create responsive comps, regardless of whether you intend to use the generated code. So, let’s have a look!
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In this article, Biran Krall, will look at how the need of a more involved design and implementation process, due to responsive design complexities, create opportunities to work together better. We have to kill the mentality that there is an assembly line of workers waiting for it to be their turn, and instead embrace more focused collaboration across the project’s entire team.
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Ajay Revels is always looking for novel ways to present information to the audiences she works for. Her collaborators and clients aren’t limited to UX designers, software developers and UI visual designers. It was only recently that she thought a comic book would make a fine user-research deliverable. Sure, it might seem strange to create a comic book in a staid corporate environment, where they are thought of primarily as light entertainment. But it’s not strange at all.
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