Road-tripping along the line between engineering and spirituality, Robert M. Pirsig’s musings on the arts, sciences, and Quality ring as true now as they ever have. I think we, as engineers and designers, have a lot to gain by stepping outside of our worlds. That’s why in previous pieces I’ve been drawn towards architecture, newspapers, […]
Designers love to craft, but polishing pixels before the problem is solved is a time-sink. This article pinpoints the five traps that lure us into premature detail — being afraid to show rough work, fixing symptoms instead of causes, solving the wrong problem, drowning in unactionable feedback, and plain fatigue — then hands you a
Adobe InDesign is the primary application of print designers for laying out multiple pages and assembling print documents. In this post, Matthew Potter gives you, Web-based developer, a look at some of the tools in InDesign that translate directly into what you currently use. Over the past several years, there has been a big divide
A round-up of the best Portfolio Web design showcases we have published on Smashing Magazine over all the years. This is an overview of the best Portfolio Web design showcases we have published on Smashing Magazine over all the years. Meet Smashing Email Newsletter with useful tips on front-end, design & UX. Subscribe and get
The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries. However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability (which we wrote about
A selection of some of the best Smashing Magazine articles related to some of the best high quality free fonts which have been introduced on Smashing Magazine. Here you will find posts featuring some of the best high quality free fonts which have been introduced on Smashing Magazine. Quick overview Every now and then, we
The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being
Considering that most carousel implementations lack many usability details, one can understand why strong wording is often used in discussions about carousels. But there are alternatives to a home page carousel that both perform well and are vastly easier to implement. In this article, Christian Holst will go over the 10 implementation details he’s found
Today, many apps make assumptions about user preferences based on personal data. They use this information to make decisions on your behalf, without any direct input from us. This type of design pattern, where user choice is removed, has recently been coined “anticipatory design”, which leverages data on user behavior to automate the decision-making process
Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly
