Design

I feel like I haven’t seen a really nice web design inspiration gallery in a while so Design Spells is really doing it for me. Design details that feel like magic. I think it’s the focus on websites. 😍

Let’s say you don’t know JavaScript. You’re a web designer and you’re focused largely on UI and UX. Let’s look at some things you could learn in a day that will give you that bang for the buck.

I’ve had this Tweet bookmarked for months now from Brian Lovin who does a classic and well-deserved wrist-slapping of flashy design at the cost of communication. It’s all-too-easy to focus on exotic micro-interactions that will get likes on social media, but fail to communicate what a product does or tell a compelling story. Criticism of […]

Matej Latin has rejected the vast majority of portfolios he’s seen in his career for one reason, a “linear design process”: By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made […]

The job title “Design Engineer” has been having a moment. I commented on Jim Nielsen’s takes recently. To me it makes a logical sense. The engineer aspect means they know the tech (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), and the design aspect means they are building and refining the look and experience. You don’t have to be both. […]

If there is any one web design style trend that is dominant right now, it’s The Linear Look, as Alex Trost shows off here.

I like the case Jim Nielsen makes here in Part 2 of his series on why a role of “Design Engineer” makes a lot of sense. You’re given a design with a note: the dividing line between these two containers should be interactive so the user can drag to resize the respective containers on either […]

I find it fascinating how websites come to be. Especially websites with user interactivity and functionality, there are so many things to plan, build, and maintain, that it’s no wonder it easily makes for a whole career. Perhaps one of the most cliché introductory things to build on the web (or otherwise), is a to-do […]

I found this review of Letterboxd onboarding, ostensibly about the “Jobs to be Done” theory, really nicely done. If you’re going to critique something, this is an awfully helpful way to do it. These guys Dan Benoni and Louis-Xavier Lavallee have a bunch of these “story format” things.

The caption on this image in Niko Kitsakis’s article In Praise of Buttons speaks to me.