New and simplified Enterprise and Partner Terms
Can agreement terms be a great user experience? This was the challenge GitHub’s legal department set for itself last year. We’re excited to announce all-new GitHub Customer Terms for our…
Seven Mistakes To Avoid In Your Technical Interviews — Smashing Magazine
It’s no secret that the technical interview process leaves something to be desired; it’s often riddled with anxiety and stress. From the recruiter’s phone call to the systems design interview to negotiating a job offer, there is no all-encompassing technical interview resource, so Emma Bostian decided to create one. In this article, Emma Bostian is going to take a look at seven of the most common
Growing UX Maturity In Organizations: Education And Training (Part 3) — Smashing Magazine
UX practitioners can play an important role in growing the UX maturity of the organizations and product teams they work with. This final article in a three-part series presents two additional tactics that are critical for achieving and maintaining higher levels of UX maturity: education of UX staff and education of non-UX staff on UX principles and processes.
Better Documentation And Team Communication With Product Design Docs — Smashing Magazine
Have you ever struggled to get the green light on your design proposals? Do you feel like your design process needs to be formalized? Is the COVID19 era becoming a challenge for you when working remotely as a designer? In this article, Ismael González will show you how to get to know a methodology to document your design process, so keep reading!
How Repsol rethinks the way the world interacts with energy
Repsol, Spain's largest multi-energy company, set out to unify their designs in Figma while making energy more approachable to consumers.
Some Articles About Accessibility I've Saved Recently
"Good news about display: contents and Chrome" — Rachel Andrew notes that the accessibility danger of using display: contents; is fixed in Chrome. The problem
The Teams Dashboard: A New Place to Call Home
Today, we’re announcing a new feature within the Teams Dash. We called it “Home”. We created Home with a simple goal in mind: design an adaptive and informative landing page where users can see a round-up of their environment.
Guarding Against Disposable Design — Smashing Magazine
Quick, constant change is a given on the web. It is often one of its greatest strengths. As ever, though, there is a balance to find. Although longevity takes a different form online, its value is immeasurable.
Designing calculator apps
It is extremely weird that the calculator apps, even the default ones baked into desktop operating systems, embrace the UI and UX of those little cheap-o
Building the Future of Our Desktop Apps
For the past couple of years, we’ve been on a mission to modernize our Spotify clients by creating one single desktop UI for both the Desktop application and the Web Player.
Overlay Fact Sheet
I would hope all our web designer/developer spidey senses trigger when the solution to an accessibility problem isn't "fix the issue" but rather "add extra
Behind the scenes of creating the official Figma kit for Tailwind UI
How the team at Tailwind Labs created a set of fully responsive components
Growing UX Maturity: Knowledge Sharing And Mentorship (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
UX practitioners can play an important role in growing the UX maturity of the organizations and products they work with. This article, the second in a three-part series, presents two additional tactics that can be helpful for those working in organizations that have started engaging in UX, but are still at the lower to middle stages of maturity: knowledge sharing and mentorship. You can use these
Completing a transit map
Build on a work-in-progress Figma Community file and help complete a transit map of the San Francisco Bay Area
By the numbers: One year of remote work
How work has changed over the past year, and what collaboration looks like through the lens of two Figma customers
Hawkins: Diving into the Reasoning Behind our Design System
by Hawkins team member Joshua Godi; with cover art from Martin Bekerman and additional imagery from Wiki Chaves
Good, Better, Best: Untangling The Complex World Of Accessible Patterns — Smashing Magazine
How do we know which patterns are good, better, best when it comes to accessibility? Is it better to use an established pattern/library or create new ones? With the myriad of choices available, we can quickly become caught up in a web of confusion on this topic. In this article, Carie Fisher will attempt to untangle the complex world of accessible patterns — one step at a time. She will kick thing
Growing UX Maturity: Finding A UX Champion And Demonstrating ROI (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
We all benefit when we work to increase the overall UX maturity of our organizations. If we wish to meaningfully improve our UX practice, it is critical we look for opportunities to help grow the maturity of UX across our organization. We face a larger challenge when it comes to growing UX in a way that has impact across an organization than we do with growing our own UX skills. In this article, V
Obscure Mobile Design Techniques That Boost UX — Smashing Magazine
To inspire mobile designers, let’s look at how some clever design solutions tackle mobile navigation, confirmation dialogs, animations, and gamifying the waiting experience. While these solutions are mostly unconventional, the point isn’t to highlight them for their own sake. Design solutions have to be built with the pillars of accessibility and usability, but they can be refined according to you
Inside Figma: tips from the team that builds Figma
Best practices and templates from Figmates across teams
Why You Should Pair with Non-Engineers
TL;DR Spotify encourages engineers to become and lean into technologies and skill sets outside of their core specialization. Being a T-shaped developer doesn’t always mean having to learn more code, additional languages, or frameworks. It can be about broadening your outlook on the product-creation process and outside of your discipline. Design Systems Engineering Manager at Spotify Tyce Clee talk
Fresh Inspiration For March And A Smashing Winner (2021 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine
Our wallpapers post this month is a special one: There’s not only a new collection of wallpapers created by creative folks from across the globe waiting for you, but we’ll also award a smashing prize to the best design.
Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed — Smashing Magazine
Where to put the label in a web form? In the early days, we talked about left-aligned labels versus top-aligned labels. These days we talk about floating labels. Let’s explore why they aren’t a very good idea, and what to use instead. Some people assume float labels are best because Google’s Material Design uses them. But in this case, Adam Silver recommends using conventional text fields which ha
Getting Deep Into Shadows
Let’s talk shadows in web design. Shadows add texture, perspective, and emphasize the dimensions of objects. In web design, using light and shadow can add
Beautiful accessibility with Floating Focus
Imagine if your :focus styles animated from element to element as you tab through a site. Like the focus ring up and flew across the page to the next element.
Things To Expect From A Smashing Workshop: Form Design Masterclass — Smashing Magazine
A couple of weeks ago, we organized a [Form Design Masterclass](https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops/workshops/adam-silver), an online workshop with Adam Silver alongside 81 friendly and smart people. Today, Adam Silver shares his experience and details by highlighting what you as an attendee can expect from a Smashing Workshop, and things to keep in mind when running one.
What Saul Bass Can Teach Us About Web Design — Smashing Magazine
Saul Bass is a graphic design legend. Responsible for title sequences in films like North by Northwest and Anatomy of a Murder, as well as a number of iconic posters and brand logos over the years. His work, in the words of Martin Scorsese, “distilled the poetry of the modern, industrialized world.” Film credits, brand logos, posters… Saul did it all, and the principles that informed his work are
How we illustrate at GitHub
In the fourth installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage, we’ll explore the artistic pipeline at GitHub to explain story, character and color, and to show how…
Designing Better Tooltips For Mobile User Interfaces — Smashing Magazine
Tooltips are powerful design patterns implemented to enhance the design experience by providing additional information precisely when users need it. The key to designing tooltips that fit seamlessly into the overall design is to plan for them early in the design process. Specifically, designing useful tooltips requires proper timing and proper implementation. In this article, Eric Olive will show
Figma Crash Course
Totally free course from Pablo Stanley. Can't beat that.
How Spotify Optimized the Largest Dataflow Job Ever for Wrapped 2020
In this post we’ll discuss how Spotify optimized and sped up elements from our largest Dataflow job, , for using a technique called Sort Merge Bucket (SMB) join. We’ll present the design and implementation of SMB and how we incorporated it into our data pipelines.
Web Design Trends 2021: The Report — Smashing Magazine
2020 was anything but normal. The world has changed, and so has our role as designers. We never know what the future will bring, but ultimately we shape it, and we can contribute more positive change to the world than we often think we can. Consumers had their lives shaken up and many businesses experienced new challenges as well as opportunities thanks to the novel events of the year.
Svelte and Spring Animations
Spring animations are a wonderful way to make UI interactions come to life. Rather than merely changing a property at a constant rate over a period of time,
Getting Started With The GetX Package In Flutter Applications — Smashing Magazine
GetX is an extra lightweight solution for state, navigation, and dependencies management for Flutter applications. Flutter is one of the fastest ways to build truly cross-platform native applications. It provides features allowing the developer to build a truly beautiful UI experience for their users, and in this article, Kelvin Omereshone will be looking at GetX’s benefits, features, and how to s
Geometric effects of certain system design choices
Inside Figma: a case study on strict null checks
A look at how we identify and address bugs
Three Ways to Distinguish a Site From the Norm
In an age where so much web design is already neat, clean, and simple, I can think of three ways to distinguish your site from the norm:
How To Design A Simple UI When You Have A Complex Solution — Smashing Magazine
Software and apps often solve very complex problems for businesses and consumers in the way of sales, marketing, finances, and so on. But offering a product that solves your users’ problems isn’t enough. If the UI is just as complex as the original problem, user churn is going to be high. Today, we’re going to look at some tips for designing a simple UI regardless of your solution’s complexity.
Ethical Considerations In UX Research: The Need For Training And Review — Smashing Magazine
Research is an essential part of creating good UX. We are often in roles where we interact with our users in order to collect data to inform our UX. We need to ensure our UX research is compliant with ethical standards of research conducted with humans. To do this, we need to have an awareness of potential ethical issues in research, training on how to conduct ethical research, and a systematic re
Under-Engineered Responsive Tables
I first blogged about responsive data tables in 2011. When responsive web design was first becoming a thing, there were little hurdles like data tables that
Smashing Podcast Episode 30 With Chris Murphy: What Is Product Design? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode, we’re talking about Product Design. What does it mean to be a product owner, and how can you learn the skills required? Drew McLellan talks to expert Chris Murphy to find out.
Weaving Web Accessibility With Usability — Smashing Magazine
You can provide access to people with visual impairments without involving them in the product development lifecycle, by formally adopting web accessibility standards... but does that mean the end product is usable? In this article, Uri Paz explains how a site complying with accessibility guidelines may still present usability issues when testing with real users. Find out how weaving accessibility
From The Experts: Global Digital Accessibility Developments During COVID-19 — Smashing Magazine
Robin Christopherson MBE, Head of Digital Inclusion at UK tech experts AbilityNet, has been hosting a series of monthly webinars with senior accessibility guests from global brands such as Microsoft and ATOS, and UK giants like Barclays and Sainsbury’s. They’re talking COVID, the challenges and opportunities the crisis brings, agile adjustments, digital inclusion and much, much more. Want food for
Best Practices For E-Commerce UI Design — Smashing Magazine
The goal of e-commerce design is to create interfaces that won’t get in the way of the overall shopping experience. In this post, Suzanne Scacca is going to look at three key parts of a digital store and show you what you can do to design each to help customers more quickly and effortlessly get to the checkout stage.
Internationalization And Localization For Static Sites — Smashing Magazine
Internationalization and localization is more than just writing your content in multiple languages. You need a strategy to determine what localization to send, and code to do it. You need to be able to support not just different languages, but different regions with the same language. Your UI needs to be responsive, not just to screen size, but to different languages and writing modes. Your conten
Chasing the Pixel-Perfect Dream
Is it possible to create an implementation of a design that matches to-the-pixel? Well, not really, but that shouldn't discourage us! In this article, I'll show how I became designers' best friend by leveraging a series of tricks to get my implementation looking near-pixel-perfect.
Bridging design and code with Variants
Today we're launching Variants and updates to the Inspect panel to power up your design system
Reflections on Figma’s inaugural Student Fellowship
What Figma Fellows accomplished, and our plans for next year
Power up your design system with Figma’s agency partners
Learn more about the eight agencies we’ve partnered with
Some Industry Podcasts
It's called The Clearleft Podcast if you can believe that. It gets into new (at least to me) concepts like Design Ops and Design Sprints, which are loaded
Building an open and inclusive design process
Takeaways from Config Europe
5 Ways Google Analytics Helps Web Developers In UI/UX Design — Smashing Magazine
Ever wondered what all those Google Analytics code snippets are for and why your marketing team regularly asks you to add a new one? For most web developers, their involvement with Google Analytics ends with just installing the base code for pageviews. In this article, Clara Buenconsejo will look at 5 features in Google Analytics that can help web developers and designers in making a better user e
Squirrels, Ghosts, And Moonlight: Tales From October (2020 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine
Get ready for autumn and the upcoming Halloween season with beautiful and inspiring wallpapers. Created by the community for the community, the wallpapers in this post all come in versions with and without a calendar, so no matter if you want to count down the days to a big deadline or stick with your favorite design after the month has ended, we’ve got you covered. Speaking of favorites: As a lit
Make Your Own Dev Tool
Amber Wilson on making bookmarklets to help yo-self. She shows off one that injects an accessibility script — I like this approach, as it means you don't have
Different Ways To Design Digital Product Pages — Smashing Magazine
Digital content (eBooks, stock media and courses) can easily be advertised and sold through online marketplaces. But your clients won’t make as much money that way and really can’t control how their products are marketed. By designing digital product pages for smartphone users who are in that early discovery and research phase, your clients can make more money off of their products. Today, Suzanne
Intuitive Design? No Such Thing! — Smashing Magazine
“Intuitive design” is one of those overused phrases that we as designers hear all too often from stakeholders and their requirements. In this article, Carrie Webster explores what intuitive design actually means, why it doesn’t make sense, how we can better approach design solutions, and what the future of interfaces might look like. It is aimed at user experience designers and anyone interested e
Six integrations to help your product team collaborate in Figma
How Figma works with tools like Confluence and Avocode
Inside Figma: my time as a new grad
Advice on finding the right role and making the transition to the working world
The many dimensions of trust in design
How trust powers open design, and more takeaways from Config Europe
How To Build Rapport With Your Web Design Clients — Smashing Magazine
Building positive relationships with your clients is the secret ingredient to delivering better work, earning more money, and creating lasting partnerships. In this article, Matt Saunders is going to teach some strategies for managing client communication and processes that have helped him to run less stressful projects and achieve better results, as well as draw upon some best practices to help y
