The internet is a wonderful place (mostly). An unprecedented revolution in communication, it continues to empower more people to publish and share their knowledge than any other phenomenon in history. It is a limitless playground of ideas and unbridled creativity. Or is it?
In 2014, Elliot Jay Stocks declared that designers have stopped dreaming. That we’ve stopped being creative. That... Read More
I love being a web designer and I'm incredibly thankful that I decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, despite my love of this profession, there have been a number of times during my career when my passion has waned and I’ve found myself simply going through the motions instead of fully applying myself to my work. This scenario is likely familiar to many of my fellow web... Read More
As the web continues to evolve at a breakneck, Moore’s-law pace, the divisions between traditional design and development are increasingly shifting. The “learn to code” movement is also gaining momentum among designers, but you’d be hard pressed to find a similarly strong movement for other disciplines within a team. Perhaps there should be.
We should all be striving to learn, but the... Read More
Let’s say you run a UX team. Better yet, let’s say you don’t. Let’s say you just want to do great work. You’re a consultant. You’re a newbie. You’re an intern. Your position is irrelevant. So is your title. What’s important here is that you want great UX to happen. You want it consistently. You want it now. You want it all the time.
No matter your status or situation, whether director or... Read More
Recently, I was having a discussion with some web design students about the variety of skills a successful web professional must have — skills that go far beyond HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the other technical demands of the profession. During this conversation, one of the students asked me where I learned these skills. My response was not one the class expected.
“By playing in a band,” was... Read More
Choosing typefaces is an integral part of every web design project. With thousands of typefaces available from hosting services such as Typekit, as well an ever-improving collection of free fonts available, there has never been a better time to be a typography-obsessed web designer.
One could easily argue that nothing affects a design more than typography. And good typography starts with... Read More
I can’t imagine any other industry in which so much change happens so quickly. If you stop paying attention for a week, it can feel like you’ve not been listening for a year. There’s so much to learn. Falling behind is easy, too. We might be in the middle of a major project, so we put off learning about this newfangled thing called Sass or Node.js or even quickly experimenting with the new... Read More
The internal systems of many organizations have shocking user interfaces. This costs companies in productivity, training and even the customer experience. Fortunately, we can fix this.
"How come I can download an app on my phone and instantly know how to use it, yet need training to use our content management system? Shouldn’t our system be intuitive?" This was just one of the comments... Read More
Successful developers all have something in common: the desire to create. To fully realize that creativity, they need to continually improve their skills. The web industry has grown from this desire to learn. You only need to look at the unwavering demand for conferences, workshops and training days for evidence of this.
For many companies, however, these sources of training require time... Read More
