For the purpose of this two-part series of articles, we’re going to assume the answer for “Should designers code?” is “It depends.” If you’ve started and never finished courses in some online coding school — or if you’ve finished the courses but found it difficult to apply this style of learning in your day-to-day work, these two articles will provide a few different learning methods and will highlight different opportunities for their everyday application. In this first part of the series, we’ll take a look at getting comfortable with the command line and text editors.
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How do we know if we are truly impactful as a design team? Are we seen as a vehicle to deliver a solution that moves a needle? The business value of design has been proven at scale by the McKinsey Design Index. and the study shows the best design performers increased their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts. It’s time to empower our design teams and give them one voice to show how and when design really adds value.
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How do you move faster when adding folks to a project supposedly slows it down? Mailchimp’s CPO takes the reader through some considerations for preserving momentum while scaling up. Software is difficult to build with lots of complex interdependencies. And everyone needs to work together to get it done. As you work to manage dependencies and introduce tools to help scale, make sure you clearly communicate the why behind the practices.
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Sprint 0, and its close cousin the design sprint, came about to solve real, everyday challenges. But do they deliver real value or just an illusion? In this article, Shamsi Brinn proposes an alternative first sprint that supports agile teamwork and delivers measurable results.
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Skipping servers and using the JAMstack to build and deliver websites and apps can save time, money, and headache by allowing us to deliver only static assets on a CDN. But the trade-off of ditching traditional server-based deployments means that standard approaches to dynamic, asynchronous interactions in our sites and apps aren’t available anymore.
Does that mean that JAMstack sites can’t handle dynamic interactions? Definitely not!
JAMstack sites are great for creating highly dynamic, asynchronous interactions. With some small adjustments to how we think about our code, we can create fun, immersive interactions using only static assets!
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Having a face-to-face meeting with your client can cause anxiety for those of us that push pixels for a living, but even the simplest kind of sketching can help. The sitemap meeting can be a minefield of multiple stakeholders, multi-dimensional categories, historical analytics, new products and mobile-first demands. Using a live illustration of a customer site journey, you can create a meaningful sitemap with which site visitors will resonate.
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“If you build it, they will come.” That’s certainly true when you put a lot of time and effort into building websites and PWAs for clients. But what happens when “they will come” becomes “too many of them came all at once and now the site’s gone down”? Traffic surges do happen. But rather than let your website become victim to them, Suzanne Scacca will show you how you can set it up to be the victor, with this guide.
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Today, Tom Čakloš will show you how to create limits and rules to follow throughout the entire design process. There is an unlimited number of ways in which you can combine elements in a user interface. You may be struggling with all of the possibilities and trying to pick the best option among many “correct” options. This article is intended for beginner UI designers who want to learn how to make their designs more consistent and user-friendly. You don’t need a lot of experience in order to be able to follow the tips and tricks shared in it, so let’s dig in right away!
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Development workflows can easily get out of hand and start causing confusion and friction within teams — especially as they get bigger in size. There have been too many times when our code review was just about noticing that missing comma or the failing tests that never run before pushing to a remote repository. Thankfully, there are tools that can take this friction away, make developers’ workflows more straightforward and help us concentrate on the things that actually matter the most. Thanks to git and the hooks it provides, we have a great variety of automation with which we can set our development workflow and make our lives easier.
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Rather than do a round-up of the best deals available this Black Friday, we decided to do a round-up of the best independent products and makers. If you have money to spend, why not send some of this to folk creating great stuff in our community. We asked the Smashing community for their suggestions, and so here, Rachel Andrew brings you a list covering pretty much every kind of product you can imagine. We hope you can find something you need in these, and help support these hard-working folks.
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