How do you get the most out of both your career and your personal life? The most important thing to note when thinking about work-life balance is that it is different for everyone. While there may a perfect solution for an individual in any given time, place and work situation, it is almost certain to be different for another individual – by a degree that can be tiny or enormous. Ricky Onsman asked the community to share their tips and advice on achieving a healthy work-life balance, and this is what they had to say.
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Productivity tips always make for a popular topic for an article, as everyone is looking for the silver bullet, that one weird trick that turns you into a productivity machine. So, we asked the community on Twitter and Facebook to share their best productivity tips, and in this article Racheal Andrew is going to round these up alongside some things she’s learned that work well for her. Let us know your own advice in the comments, or tell us the popular tip that would never work for you!
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The world is a stressful place. That’s probably why if you search for articles about dealing with stress you’ll find lots of great advice. But the problem is that most of it is pretty generic. Is there anything more specific to the profession of design? In this article Ollie Campbell takes some of the academic research on stress and applies it to the challenges designers face every day. If you’re a designer who feels stressed from time to time, then this article is for you. It takes some of the academic research on stress and applies it to the challenges designers face every day.
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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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Conversations about ethics are often difficult and awkward. Nevertheless, designers can play a vital role in finding new ways for people to relate to and communicate with each other. In this article, Ciara and Samantha set out to understand how ethics is used in contemporary design.
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A design sprint allows you to see into the future to learn in just five days what customers think about your finished product. As a UX consultant and in-house design strategist, Claire Mason has facilitated dozens upon dozens of design workshops (ranging from rapid prototyping sessions to, of course, sprints). The sprint is by far the most effective process she’s seen to drive customer-first decision making in a design thinky way.
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When Denys Mishunov was invited to speak at one of the best front-end conferences in Europe, he felt like he did not deserve to be at that conference. And he didn’t even know that those feelings of his had a name! This is called impostor syndrome and it is a real psychological issue, rooted deeply in many of us. If we do not pay attention to its symptoms, if we blindly follow its triggers, then we can get into real psychological trouble. The good news is that, even though there is no pill for it, we can change out attitude towards it. Simply acknowledging the feeling can help to neutralize its effect.
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In the previous article, David Tucker introduced the concept of user management and how complicated it is in our current digital landscape. If you regularly create new web or mobile applications, then Amazon Cognito is a powerful tool that can cut 90% of the time it usually takes to set up a custom user-management solution. David believes that whether you are a web, iOS or Android developer, this toolset will prove to be a valuable one. Feel free to use the sample code to help you in that process. Happy coding!
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In the last few years, traditional computers have ceded dominance to smaller screens, including tablets, mobile phones, smartwatches and more. As the craft has evolved, so has its toolset; and from one app to rule them all, we have gotten to a point where it seems like a new contender among UI design tools crops up every month. And many of the new UI design tools look pretty good and promising. At the moment, Sketch has grown in popularity and for a good reason: The developers of Sketch have figured out exactly what interface designers have been looking for and have steadily added functionality to address those needs. The pace of development of Sketch has been phenomenal, to say the least.
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