The way many of us create content-driven websites isn’t quite optimal, and we need to do something about it. When designing a website, it’s important to focus on better understanding the folks who will visit the website. If you haven’t allowed user feedback to influence the design and content of your website, then it’s probably time you did. Paul Boag explains why.
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There are a good number of benefits and reasons why you should consider integrating design workouts into your team. In this article, Arturas Leonovas shares some exercises which are worth trying out with your design team and get you all to train before the big game — together. Doing this at least once a month is a fun way for everyone to polish skills that they use every day. Not only that, the added benefit of team-building and knowledge-sharing will help everyone become the best versions of themselves.
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Integrating prototyping deeply into your creative process can be transformative. It can make for a more positive, enriching team culture. In this article, Jamie shares his experiences and advice on how prototyping can help you work on a wider variety of projects much faster. He’ll provide some prototypes that he created for a game he made, Melody Jams, which got featured by Apple in 130 countries and was the number one kids app in the store for a brief time.
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(This series of articles is kindly supported by Adobe.) User Experience (UX) is evolving rapidly, and as designers, we need to ensure our knowledge keeps pace with the changes. This article, the first in a series of ten sponsored by Adobe XD, gets the ball rolling, exploring how UX is evolving.
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As software designers, your work deserves to be protected as much as any other author’s does. Thanks to headlines featuring big companies like Google and Oracle, copyright law is an often-discussed but frequently-misunderstood topic. This article was created specifically with software developers and designers in mind. Though this article Kimberly Bond will provide an overview, perhaps this information will be helpful to those of you who work each day to create and improve the software programs that enrich our lives.
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Building a mobile app usually costs a lot of money and takes months to launch. Well, there’s a fast and more simple way to create your own native app. In this article, Nick Babich explains how you can use Dropsource (a free visual platform for building mobile apps) by creating an Android app for a chain of restaurants.
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In this article, Huijing Chen covers known and obscure features of Firefox DevTools that can come in handy when you’re building and debugging CSS Grid layouts. You may have heard quite a bit of talk about a CSS feature called “Grid” this year. If you are someone who cringes when you hear the words “CSS” and “grid” in the same sentence, then I highly suggest you check out this new CSS module called CSS Grid.
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How do you get insight into all of your content at a glance? WordPress’ admin area does not show you much about your pages, posts, users and comments. In this article, David Mosterd and Jesper van Engelen will demonstrate some simple custom solutions and a ready-to-deploy plugin to overcome this problem. In this tutorial, they’ll tackle this problem by showing you some easy-to-implement custom code. For those of you who don’t want to code, they’ll show you how to configure the Admin Columns plugin to do the job for you.
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What better way could there be to celebrate the last few weeks and the upcoming holiday season as with some cheerful wallpapers? To get you in the right mood for December and the upcoming holiday season, artists and designers from across the globe once again got their creative ideas bubbling and created festive and inspiring desktop wallpapers for you. Wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the usual crowd and that are bound to add some holiday cheer to your screen. You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendars series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
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Building your own app really gives you the ability to create anything you can imagine. If you are a designer, surely you have seen plenty of designs that are not perfect, and you should feel OK with your app’s design not being perfect too. You have to start somewhere, and with the help of other designers and developers, you will improve. In this tutorial, Craig Clayton is going to look at one page of an existing app and teach you how to get the design into Xcode. The design for this app was done using an app called Sketch. Sketch allows you to design anything from websites to mobile apps. It is my preference for designing mobile apps.
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