Category: Web Design
(This is a sponsored article.) Everybody’s talking about design systems, but they are more than just a trend. They are a best practice for design consistency and efficiency between designers and developers. Back in the day, only large companies could afford the effort of building and maintaining a design system. Nowadays, with the growth of…
It’s a known fact that file selection inputs are difficult to style the way developers want to, so many simply hide it and create a button that opens the file selection dialog instead. Nowadays, though, we have an even fancier way of handling file selection: drag and drop. Technically, this was already possible because most…
In February of 2015, I began working on an iOS app called Air Lookout. The goal of the app was to simplify and remove any obfuscation of air quality information. After over a year of working nights and weekends, the total net income since it launched in 2016 has been less than $1,000. Even with…
(This is a sponsored article.) As designers working in an ever-changing field, it’s important that we develop an understanding of the timeless design principles that underpin everything we do. In the second article in my series for Adobe XD, I’ll explore the foundations that enable us to establish some universal principles of UX. These principles,…
In experience design, friction is anything that prevents users from accomplishing their goals or getting things done. It’s the newsletter signup overlay covering the actual content, the difficult wording on a landing page, or the needless optional questions in a checkout flow. It’s the opposite of intuitive and effortless, the opposite of “Don’t make me…
About two years ago, I begrudgingly opened Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for the first time. The only reason I even did so is that I was working on a TypeScript project (also quite begrudgingly) and I was tired of fighting with the editor and the compiler and all of the settings that I needed…
For such a small design element, buttons sure are a complicated one to tackle. It makes sense, what with call-to-action buttons serving as the next step in your visitors’ path to conversion. Mess that up and you might as well say “bye-bye” to business. Though we have a good understanding of the types of button…
Current and aspiring web professionals must continually grow in order to stay relevant. Our field doesn’t allow for stagnation. In part one of this series, I discussed the importance of project retrospectives in facilitating and documenting team growth. We don’t always have the luxury of engaging in team retrospectives, or even of working on teams….
It’s 2018 already, and countless front-end developers are still leading a battle against complexity and immobility. Month after month, they’ve searched for the holy grail: a bug-free application architecture that will help them deliver quickly and with high quality. I am one of those developers, and I’ve found something interesting that might help. We have…
Performance matters — we all know it. However, do we actually always know what our performance bottlenecks exactly are? Is it expensive JavaScript, slow web font delivery, heavy images, or sluggish rendering? Is it worth exploring tree-shaking, scope hoisting, code-splitting, and all the fancy loading patterns with intersection observer, clients hints, CSS containment, HTTP/2 and…