How to specify your components so that your team can implement them with ease.
Overview
As modern designers, we have a responsibility to design components that not only look good and behave correctly, but that our teams, devs specifically, can implement with relative ease.
Listen, you don’t want your devs to have to mess with styling, spacing, placement or interaction states more than absolutely necessary.
When you deliver styled, completely specified, flexible components to your devs as part of your design system/pattern library, they’re going to love you for it, and you will more than likely save your team a boatload…
Understanding and managing optionality to make your workflow actually work for your users.
Overview
Let’s face it: modern web applications are becoming monolithic, deep, complex, and are only getting larger.
A growing number of users, designers, and developers alike are finding themselves caught between rising demand for a native-like experience on the web that maintains simplicity, scalable/flexible design specifications that make sense, and robust programmatic solutions for user-centric outcomes.
This is a potential game-changer, and you need to know about it
Overview
In all my years of doing this, I have never once heard of this new style of continuous design/development hand-off that is now being referred to as “tokenized design.”
How to make sure that you are adding real, unexpected value; not fluff
TL;DR
Delight is unexpected value in the form of simplicity, convenience, and/or satisfaction. In order to add delight, you must make sure your core offering(s)/functionality is fully developed and serves your users’ needs well first.
Delight is the desert of the user experience, and everyone wants a piece whether they admit it or not.
Overview
If you’ve been in UI/UX for any length of time, you’ve heard the term “delight” thrown around ad-nauseam.
What does it mean? What creates delight for our users?
Let’s talk about it now.
Product as coffee
How to leverage modified user journeys and operational boundaries to map increasingly complex problems.
Overview
When designing modern systems, interfaces, and experiences, we have to constantly keep in mind not only the customer, user, and business goals of the application, but all the steps along the way that help us get there.
Today, I want to share with you an approach that I like to use when considering how to design a solid user experience that is resilient, and delivers consistent results.
Success States: The Declarative
Any time that we are designing for our users, regardless of what our given solution may be, either theoretical…
How to create robust gradients quickly and simply for your next project
Overview
For quite some time, practical UI design has been boxed in by various gradient types that, while workable, don’t always get you the result that you’re looking for.
Today, I’m going to show you how you can create advanced, scalable gradients that will look good on any screen, and don’t require in-depth knowledge of CSS.
Leveraging SVGs
Instead of relying on older tooling, we’ll be leveraging the full power of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) to get us where we want to go.
Create a new file
First and foremost, create a new file in…
Absolutely, and it's an excellent question, honestly.
Most of the time as designers (print, web, UI/UX, etc.) we are used to seeing the model of "work for hire," which is where we just sell our services as a one-off, and then the client owns all of the work that you've done and the copyrights to it as well.
This is the most common scenario with traditional employment, but is definitely not the only way that it can go down.
For a full breakdown of pricing models, I would definitely recommend the AIGA's article on it here:
You know Dominique that's a fair assertion, so I'll give you one here.
Let's say that you do work for a company that is not work for hire, that is that you were contracted and are being paid a risidual or royalty, rather than them owning your work outright.
From there, they sell your work to as many people as they can to make a profit, and then you get a cut based on your royalty or residual payment agreement(s).
This applies to UI/UX if you're designing interfaces or interface frameworks, and would be a prime example of how the…
An easy way to deal with type in your web-based designs.
Overview
Let’s face it: specking type can be challenging.
Even more-so when you consider that, if it’s for a web project, the type specifications that you make need to be web-complaint and browser-friendly.
Luckily, I’ve found a combination of tools and approaches that make it much easier to spec type for all of your web projects, and today we’re going to go over how to do just that, quickly, and easily.
The Tools
My two favorite tools when it comes to specking type for the web are
type-scale.com …
This may not be what you want to hear, but it’s what you need to hear.
Overview
I have been asked so many times that it’s not even funny anymore: how do you make it as a designer?
That can be both a tough question and answer for anyone; I should know, because I’ve done it myself.
Today I’m going to share with you how you actually make it in this industry, how to do it the right way, and how to do it without losing your mind.
Understanding the industry
The first thing you have to do in order to make it in…
Nick Lawrence
UI/UX designer with over a decade of experience in the design industry.
