How to run a remote brainstorm
The Figma team shares tips for running a remote brainstorm, based on what’s working well for us.
Visual Design Language: The Building Blocks Of Design — Smashing Magazine
We use language as a tool for communication with other people. Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users. Fonts, colors, shapes, visual elements such as icons — those are elements of design language. Effective design language streamlines communication. A robust visual design language is the cornerstone of good design. I
Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklists PDF — Smashing Magazine
A set of checklists to help you create smart interface design patterns. Totally free if you sign up for our friendly newsletter. These checklists are based on the work Vitaly has been doing for many years, exploring and examining examples of desktop and mobile interfaces. Learning what works and what doesn’t in usability tests and user interviews.
How To Increase Mobile Conversions With Category Page Design — Smashing Magazine
Recent research has found that e-commerce category pages have higher click-through rates in search than individual category pages. So, if your e-commerce site is struggling to attract shoppers and convert them, your category pages (specifically, those on mobile) might be in need of a redesign. Based on the following data, Suzanne Scacca will show you how category pages have a role to play — as the
Smashing Podcast Episode 12 With Paul Boag: What Is Conversion Optimization? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about the user experience around converting site visitors into customers. Can our selling techniques leave customers feeling cheated? And how can that be avoided? Drew McLellan talks to conversion optimization specialist Paul Boag to find out.
New Git Integration Settings
Thanks to an overhauled UI, managing the Git connection of a project or an entire account is easier than ever.
Adding the Fallback Pool to the Load Balancing UI and other significant UI enhancements
The Cloudflare Load Balancer was introduced over three years ago to provide our customers with a powerful, easy to use tool to intelligently route traffic to their origins across the world.
How Indigo.Design Usability Testing Takes The Guesswork Out Of Web Design — Smashing Magazine
There isn’t a ton of mystery when it comes to what makes for an attractive and modern-looking design these days. What’s not always clear, however, is the usability aspect of it. In other words, have the pathways you’ve designed for users intuitive enough? The truth is, it’s all really just a guessing game unless you start getting user feedback early on. Thankfully, Indigo.Design has a usability te
Building Dropbox’s New User Experience for Mobile, Part 1
The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile (Part 2)
Accessible SVGs: Inclusiveness Beyond Patterns — Smashing Magazine
We are fortunate to have robust patterns to choose from when optimizing accessibility in SVGs — but most people stop there, focusing on code compliance and not actual users and their needs. If true inclusiveness lies beyond patterns — what other factors should we consider when designing and developing accessible SVGs?
Streamline file collection with the file request API
Creating file requests manually from the Dropbox UI can be repetitive when performed often. The Dropbox API helps streamline these tasks.
Creating a culture of accessibility
Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook” — Smashing Magazine
It
Building An E-Commerce Site With October CMS And Shopaholic — Smashing Magazine
The Laravel-powered October CMS enables to extend the functionality of the application through the use of plugins. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will do a tour around October CMS: You will first see how to install it, then check some of its coding and usability features in a bit more detail, and finally get your hands dirty implementing an e-commerce website through one of its most popular plu
Finding confidence in design decisions
We have all doubted ourselves and our decisions at some point in our careers. This activity will help guide you through your confidence-building journey.
When You Find A Good Idea, Look For A Better One — Smashing Magazine
Prototyping helps to formulate the main trajectory of the design by framing your mind around a continuous pursuit of better concepts. Any team that makes a prototyping integral part of their design is motivated to search for a better solution. Today, Tony Kim will introduce you to ProtoPie, a tool that will help you prototype in the best way possible to validate an idea and bring it to life.
Inspired Design Decisions With Neville Brody: Design Cannot Remain Neutral — Smashing Magazine
In this sixth instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will explore how British art director Neville Brody and in particular his work on The Face Magazine inspires his designs for the web. How do we use blend modes to add depth to our designs? How do we use vertical text for impact? How can we use clipping paths to bring in character and energy to a design? In this article, Andrew Clar
Spotify’s New Podcast API: From Design to Launch
This week, we launched our ! Third-party apps can now connect to Spotify and manage a user’s podcast library, search our podcast catalog, or fetch detailed information about podcast shows and episodes.
Where Does SEO Belong In Your Web Design Process? — Smashing Magazine
The word “SEO” holds a lot of weight. We know how critical it is to the success of a website and, yet, it often becomes one of those things that’s left until the very end of a web design project to deal with. Or, worse, it’s pushed onto one person’s plate who likely isn’t capable of doing all that needs to be done. SEO should be a team sport — and that’s what today’s post is all about.
Upcoming Web Design Conferences (Jan 2025 - Dec 2025) — Smashing Magazine
Conferences are about gathering information and knowledge but are also opportunities to meet and learn from other like-minded folks in the web design community. Plus, you’ll be exposed to a lot of new information, which will help you advance in your career. Let’s dive into our list for January to December. Jan Constantin will keep updating this list, so make sure to bookmark this page and check it
Smashing Podcast Episode 10 With Trine Falbe And Martin Michael Frederiksen: What Is Ethical Design? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about Ethical Design. What does it mean for a design to be ethical, and how do we make improvements in our own projects? Drew McLellan speaks to Trine Falbe and Martin Michael Frederiksen to find out.
iOS 13 Design Guidelines, Templates, and Downloads
Erik Kennedy wrote up a bunch of design advice for designing for the iPhone. Like Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, only illustrated and readable, says Erik.
How To Design Mobile Apps For One-Hand Usage — Smashing Magazine
iPhone was built to be comfortably used for one-handed operation, allowing for a smoother thumb movement across the screen. 90% of the smartphones sold today have 5-inch displays. Bigger screen real estate presents newer challenges and opportunities for app makers and designers. In this article, Maitrik Kataria will show you how designing apps for one-handed usage can solve those challenges.
What To Do If People Hate Your Brand Mascot — Smashing Magazine
Does your website have a mascot that the audience isn’t responding well to or that outright hates it? Or maybe your new client has brought along a mascot that you’re unsure about? If a mascot’s design or messaging isn’t on point with an audience, there’s no sense in keeping it as is and losing business over it. Today, Suzanne Scacca is going to give you four options for turning your hated brand ma
Smashing Podcast Episode 9 With Stéphanie Walter: How Can I Work With UI Frameworks? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re taking a look at UI Frameworks. How can the custom needs of a highly usable application be met with a set of off-the-shelf tools? Drew McLellan speaks to UX Designer Stéphanie Walter to find out what we should be considering when building on a UI framework.
Design Systems Blogathon
It was fun watching a bunch of back and forth blogging between a bunch of smart people quoting a bunch of smart people last week. If you missed it, you might
New ways to create, collaborate, and share more openly
Live from Config 2020, here are all the new features from Figma
Meet “The Ethical Design Handbook”: How To Leave Dark Patterns Behind — Smashing Magazine
We need to craft better digital products that respect customer’s choices without hurting business KPIs. And we need to do so by taming data collection and abandoning dark patterns, from hidden checkboxes to ambiguous copywriting. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you our new practical guide on how to influence a positive change in your company and help your business grow sustainably. Without dark patt
Figma on Figma: How we built our website design system
A look at how the Figma marketing team built, and continues to build, the design system for figma.com
How To Design Powerful Narratives On Mobile — Smashing Magazine
Want to build a website or PWA that attracts a large audience and then converts as much of that audience into paying customers as possible? If that’s the case, what you need to do is use storytelling in your design — and there are a bunch of ways to do this. The key is to pair your client’s story, brand image, and goals with the style of story you decide to tell. There’s a ton of variation in how
Bad accessibility equals bad quality
Here’s a smart post from Manuel Matuzovic where he digs into why accessibility is so important for building websites:
Effective Collaboration with Product and Design
How we work with design can have a tremendous impact on our overall output, and yet we don't always treat it as very important. A look at how collaborating with design can supercharge our own productivity.
The Design Squiggle
I think we all have an intuitive understanding that, at the beginning of projects that require our creativity (be it design or code), things feel uncertain
Smashing Podcast Episode 7 With Amy Hupe: What Is A Government Design System? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re taking a look at the UK Government’s design system. How are design systems used within government? Is it any different to how we might work in the commercial sector? Drew McLellan talks to design systems advocate Amy Hupe.
Bringing the community together in Figma
There is a lot we are excited about as we look to the year ahead. At the core of it all is the community.
Op Color Plots
Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
Is Design Dead?
For many that come briefly into contact with Extreme Programming, it seems that XP calls for the death of software design. Not just is much design activity ridiculed as “Big Up Front Design”, but such design techniques as the UML, flexible frameworks, and even patterns are de-emphasized or downright ignored. In fact XP involves a lot of design, but does it in a different way than established softw
To Be Explicit
Often designs techniques are used to make a system more flexible, but end up being harder to work with. One of the reasons is that explicitness is a property that often gets forgotten in design.
Refactoring: Doing Design After the Program Runs
A short introduction to Refactoring.
Design to Accommodate Change
Table driven techniques to allow systems to change without major code changes.
The Most Important Design Guideline?
Everyone has their own list of important design guidelines. Scott concentrates on interfaces and how to design them so they are easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly.
Continuous Design
The rising popularity of refactoring, tools such as JUnit, and agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) has brought a new style of design into view. Continuous design is the process of using refactoring to continuously improve a program's design. In this column Jim discusses his experiences with continuous design, in particular with design issues that seem tricky such as internationali
Patterns
My IEEE column on the valuable contributions that patterns can make to understanding software design.
How .NET's Custom Attributes Affect Design
Jim and Alexei took a leading role in developing a new version of NUnit. From this they reflected on how design is affected by the new .NET language feature of attributes.
Avoiding Repetition
It's sometimes quite remarkable how the simple rule of avoiding repetition in software can lead into good design
HTML5 Video Playback UI
How Stripe builds interactive docs with Markdoc
Markdoc delivers a good user experience without compromising the authoring experience. It enables writers to express interactivity and simple page logic without mixing code and content.
Accessibility for teams
How to incorporate accessibility into your team's process.
Accessibility
Improving accessibility for web pages
Accessible responsive design
Design responsively to provide the best multi-device experience and for accessibility.
Android payment app developers guide
Learn how to adapt your Android payment app to work with Web Payments and provide a better user experience for customers.
ARIA: poison or antidote?
How lying to screen readers cures accessibility, when it doesn't rub salt in it!
<dialog> and popover: Baseline layered UI patterns
Learn how to build UI patterns for modal windows and prompts using the <dialog> and popover web features.
Color and contrast accessibility
Learn to make your pages more accessible by improving your color and contrast usage.
Improve dark mode default with color-scheme and a meta tag
Opt your pages in to theme-specific defaults of the user agent stylesheet, such as form controls, scroll bars, and system colors. This feature prevents browsers from applying any transformations on their own.
Improve page dismissal in synchronous XMLHttpRequest
It's common for a page or app to have unsubmitted analytics or other data when a user closes it. Sites use a synchronous call to XMLHttpRequest(), which hurts the user experience and ignores better ways to save data. Chrome 80 implements a recent spec change to address this.
Hands-on with Portals: seamless navigation on the web
The newly proposed Portals API helps keep your front-end simple while allowing seamless navigations with custom transitions. In this article, get hands-on experience using Portals to improve user experience across your site.
How to review for accessibility
How to review your site for accessibility issues.