July 29, 2016 — 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 taking a closer look at. Read more…

July 29, 2016 — Nic Raboy is an application developer that has been developing mobile applications as a hobby for the past five years. In this article, Nic is going to tell his story about mobile application development. He will look at some of the common problems with developing mobile applications, both native and hybrid, and how NativeScript by Telerik fills the gap. He’ll proceed to develop a NativeScript Android and iOS application from scratch, and then convert the same application to use the bleeding-edge Angular 2 JavaScript framework. Read more…

July 28, 2016 — Does writing microcopy need to be considered an essential part of the design process? Most definitely, yes. The tendency among most clients and design teams is first and foremost to establish on-screen interactions, pattern libraries, wireframes and workflows and to release the latest and greatest features — to the point that, at times, they’ll defer the copy (specifically, the microcopy) till the latter stages. While the general consensus is that content matters and should be central to any design undertaking, the opposite tends to be true. Words, for the most part, still form the backbone of communication on the web, even with the emergence of new technologies such as Voice User Interfaces (VUI). Read more…

July 27, 2016 — As an icon creator, Manuela Langella tried to use XD to create icons from scratch and to apply them to a new user interface. In this tutorial, Manuela will guide you through the steps it took so you can follow along. She’ll take a look at how to create a set of office icons for a new app. Plus, she’s going to show you how you can use XD’s features to interact with your newly-created user interfaces during the prototyping phase. So, let’s get started! Read more…

July 26, 2016 — How far can we push SVG animation? At the time, designer Chris Halaska and Michael Ngo were colleagues working on an illustration-heavy campaign website. While aesthetically pleasing, the designs lacked the required “oomph” that all creatives search for. Their idea was to create a data-driven process that enables designers to quickly prototype animations from static illustrations. In this article, Michael will take a look at how you can use SVGs to create seemingly complex animations from simple illustrations. Read more…

July 25, 2016 — Documentation easily gets misplaced, and we find ourselves hunting around for it. Even once we have our hands on it, locating the test details can be a challenge. Some gateways seem to love providing multiple PDF files, all mysteriously titled, with the test card details buried deep within one of them. Andy Carter has found himself working with a lot of different payment gateways over the years, from the more familiar ones like PayPal and Stripe to some lesser known ones. Here are the test card numbers for some of the major payment gateways and a few lesser known ones. Read more…

July 22, 2016 — 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 taking a closer look at. Read more…

July 22, 2016 — ProcessWire is a content management system distributed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0 and MIT License. It is designed to tackle the issues caused by exactly this kind of opinionatedness by being non-opinionated. At its heart, it is based on a few simple core concepts and offers an exceptionally easy-to-use and powerful API to handle content of any kind. ProcessWire is a good fit if you want to develop a JSON REST API, an image-resizing app for employees, a front end for managing millions of products, a web application for displaying the financial results of companies, a simple blog, a website for a big university, or just a simple one-page informational website. Let’s get right into it! Read more…

July 21, 2016 — Parents are less willing to let their children play outdoors without direct supervision. As a result, children spend most of their free time in organized sports, music and arts activities. This results in less time for unstructured play than in previous generations. Digital technology is often blamed for children not going outside. Yet studies have shown little difference in the outdoor time of children who follow the American Academy of Pediatrics media guidelines and those who do not. When done right, digital technology can help solve the unique challenge of motivating children to go from indoors to outdoors and then to connect with nature. Read more…

July 21, 2016 — Wouldn’t it be great to have a set of consistent icons for all sports-related activities? This set of 45 icons was created by the design team at Icons8. 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. A big thank you to Icons8 — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts. Keep up the brilliant work! Read more…