Icon design is a very specific skill that overlaps illustration, screen design and, of course, visual design. An icon designer needs to understand lighting, proportions and, most importantly, the context of the icon itself. Is the icon you are designing going to be used on the web? Perhaps in a mobile app? Somewhere else? These are the questions that icon designers must asks themselves before starting work on a project. The answer will affect the icon’s details, reflections, shadows, background and many other features.
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Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, Ala Ramildi and René Keller will share some insights on how they built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript! PixelMogul is the first game that they created entirely in house. Adobe AIR and Starling made it possible for them to carry over their experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform and to focus on development. The fast-growing and active Starling community was a big plus, too. They would definitively go the same route for another project of comparable scope.
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Showing that some things are the same and some are different is the first step in visual communication. It’s the primary way that viewers derive meaning. Contrast and similarity have different functions. They are used in varying degree and in combination. You’ll always see some of both because neither exists without the other. Changing one means also changing the other. They are clues to design elements. The goal is to contrast similar layers. The way we structure contrasting and similar elements creates hierarchy, flow and compositional balance.
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Dammed up inside our heads are creative waterfalls of fresh interactions, transitions, and animations. But how are we supposed to communicate them to our teams, our developers? How do we get them out of our heads? Through a game of charades? Not being able to “show” the interactions and animations that bring our designs to life is one of the common struggles plaguing our industry. Exacerbating the urgency of this challenge is the simple fact that we now design for screens that can be tapped, pinched, swiped, zoomed, and more.
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The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
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In the context of software development, a product is the website, application or online service that users interact with. Depending on the size of the company and its products, a product manager could be responsible for an entire system or part of a system. This is confusing because, in most contexts, a product is a thing you sell to people. Product managers often get confused with category managers, which are the team that sources and merchandises the products sold on an e-commerce website. So, yes, “product” isn’t the best word for it, but it’s what we’ve got, But do companies really need product managers? And, if we can agree on that, what are the characteristics of a good one? Also, where does this role fit in an organization’s structure? Let’s explore these questions.
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Visual-feedback and bug-tracking services are becoming ever more popular, and integrating one of them into their workflow would simplify the communication process of any web developer. Fortunately, today’s web provides various solutions to optimize the communication process. In this article, Lusya Galkina has selected her top five tools and compared their features, functionality and pricing. She hopes that this review will simplify your workflow and speed up communication between your team and clients.
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Depending on how a user browses the Internet, modal windows can be downright confusing. Modals quickly shift visual focus from one part of a website or application to another area of content. This scenario is more common than it should be. And it’s fairly easy to solve, as long as you make your content accessible to all through sound usability practices. In this article, Scott O’Hara has set up a demo of an inaccessible modal window that appears on page load and that isn’t entirely semantic. First, interact with it using your mouse to see that it actually works. Then, try interacting with it using only your keyboard.
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Shocking user interfaces costs companies in productivity, training and even the customer experience. People are fed up with inadequate internal systems. Many of those interviewed had given up on the official software. Instead, they use tools like Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote. Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way around. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how to fix this.
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In a previous article, Svetlin Denkov briefly mentioned another category of clickthrough prototypes: widget-based mockups that are designed on the target device and that expand on sketches by introducing user interface (UI) details and increased visual fidelity. These prototypes can be used to pitch ideas to clients, document interactions and even test usability. In this article, he will teach you how to use the iPad app Blueprint to put together such prototypes in the form of concept demos, which help to manage a client’s expectations when you are aligning your visions of a product.
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