In order to improve your workflow, in this article Edric Lapniramai provides a checklist to refer throughout the UX designer’s wireframing process. Divided in three sections — decisions to consider before wireframing, detailing the design elements, and annotations —, this guideline can help you perfect your wireframes and be practical with your time.
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If you don’t want your design to look like it’s made out of unrelated things, this article is for you. There is already a technology, called CSS, which is designed specifically to solve this problem. Using CSS, you can propagate styles that cross the borders of your HTML components, ensuring a consistent design with minimal effort. Today, Heydon Pickering is going to revisit inheritance, the cascade and scope here with respect to modular interface design. He aims to show you how to leverage these features so that your CSS code becomes more concise and self-regulating, and your interface more easily extensible.
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A while ago we asked on Twitter and Facebook what music the web community is listening to when coding and designing. The answers were as diverse as the community itself and Cosima Mielke has compiled those hand-crafted playlists, favorite artists, and loved soundtracks in this article to see which tunes fuel the web, and to provide you with some new ear candy to get you through lengthy coding and design sessions, of course. Get your headphones ready!
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth takinga a closer look at.
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To those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, we’ve got a nice set of 15 free icons created by the design team at ucraft for you today — all available in PNG, PSD, AI and SVG formats. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. Please provide credits to the creators and link to the article in which this freebie was released if you would like to spread the word in blog posts or anywhere else.
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Coming up in April next year, we have SmashingConf San Francisco 2017, featuring tasty front-end ingredients, UX recipes and neat design beats from the hidden, remote corners of the web. 1 track, 2 conference days, 8 workshops, 16 excellent speakers and just 500 available tickets, taking place on April 4–5, 2017. We’ve put aside 50 early-bird tickets, and if you book a workshop, too, you’ll save $100 off the conference and workshop price. That pretty smashing, isn’t it?
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Front-end fatigue is very real. Technology is evolving so rapidly, that it can be overwhelming. The worst thing you can do is reach the edge and become fully burnt out because once you are, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place. In this article, David Berner shares advice on how to avoid fatigue and stop your head from exploding. Once you’re fully burnt out, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place.
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Adobe Experience Design CC (Beta), has introduced the Repeat Grid feature to address the tedious aspect of a designer’s workflow. In this article, Elaine Chao will dig deep to uncover the true power of this time-saving feature. She’ll create and adjust a Repeat Grid, add content to it, and wire it up in Adobe XD’s simple and powerful Prototype Mode. If you’d like to follow along, you can download and test Adobe XD for free.
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After being surprised to see how little the topic of optimistic UI design is addressed in the community, Denys Mishunov brings you this article, where you will find out what concepts it is based on, and he will look at some examples as well as review its psychological background. After that, Denys will review the concerns and main points regarding how to maintain control over this UX technique.
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Depending on your browser, you may not be able to see all emoji featured in this article (especially the Tifinagh characters). Also, different platforms vary in how they display emoji as well. That’s why, in this article, Rob Reed always provides textual alternatives. Don’t let it discourage you from reading though!
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