My first experience in the design world came through an internship at a small motion graphics studio called Motion Theory. I was fresh out of school and had never worked with so many talented people before. It was intense, difficult and nerve-wracking. And I loved it. It made me a better designer. And the lessons…
More and more of our experience online is personalized. Search engines, news outlets and social media sites have become quite smart at giving us what we want. Perhaps Ali, one of the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed about our emotional attachment to technology, put it best: “Netflix’s recommendations have become so right for me that…
Have you heard of Docker but thought that it’s only for system administrators and other Linux geeks? Or have you looked into it and felt a bit intimidated by the jargon? Or are you silently suffering with a messy development environment that seems to break all of the time in various mysterious ways? Then read…
In part 1 of this tutorial we started building our iOS app from scratch. We started out by setting up a blank React Native project. Then we pulled data from the Unsplash.it API. Because downloading data takes time, we built a loading screen. In the process we went over positioning UI elements with flexbox and…
What would a page look like if it had no designer? This odd question occurred to me in the 1980s, while overseeing the transition from lead-based typesetting to computer-based phototypesetting of an Indian newspaper, The Patriot. Like many Indian newspapers then, The Patriot had no designer. Its very distinctive layout seemed to emerge from the…
JavaScript is a wonderful language. It’s rich, it’s dynamic, and it’s so tightly coupled to the web nowadays. The concept of writing everything in JavaScript doesn’t sound so crazy anymore. First, we started writing our back end in JavaScript, and then Facebook introduced JSX, in which we mix HTML markup with JavaScript. Why not do…
I write about it often, but it’s a topic that makes me love my job, it’s the reason why communities work and why great people are great. I’m talking about honesty and ethics in everything we do, in how we live. Reading about corruption, tax avoidance tricks, wars, and also about poorly written code or…
The modern logo has to work harder than ever before. In the past, a company logo was perhaps intended simply for a shop sign and printed in local newspaper adverts. Today’s logos have to work with a growing plethora of smart devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions, displaying responsive websites. Often logos end up…
I once worked with a digital agency that didn’t know how to hold a kickoff meeting. And they didn’t even know that they didn’t know. Weeks into every project, they’d simply find themselves frustrated over how they’d ended up in a position of following rather than leading. They would fight to get their good ideas…
There are over two million iOS apps and almost as many Android apps in the growing app economy. However, for every Flappy Bird app that gets lucky and goes viral, there are thousands of apps that take time and hard work to launch and persistence to maintain, grow and avoid the app graveyard. While we…
