Design Thoughts / Visual Design

When designing your marketing materials and website, it can be easy to rest on your laurels. However, if you don’t keep up with market trends, your materials will quickly become dry and outdated. As we charge through 2021, it’s essential to consider what design trends are on the horizon and which are here to stay. For the rest of 2021,… Read More ￫

How to choose the right UI component for the type of message you want to deliver to your users.

Experimenting with transparency is a great way to add depth, create focus, and guide the viewer’s eye.

In my first article “Great interfaces are made of good typography”, I explained some principles to master in order to create digital interfaces which communicate effectively with good working typography. In addition to that, my other article “How art direction will help you create masterful web interfaces” shed some light on how the choice of typefaces can influence the art-direction… Read More ￫

The Problem It drives me crazy that the text bounding box almost always brings in extra space above and below the actual text. Therefore, when the bounding box is used to measure space, it ends up being bigger than you intended. The bigger the line height, the bigger the problem. In the example below, the design was created by measuring… Read More ￫

Problems can never be solved at the level they were created — Albert Einstein I will never forget remember as a young child being taught how to draw a tree. I was naturally gifted at drawing even at a young age, and was able to faithfully recreate anything that I looked at. Like most learning curves I eventually hit a… Read More ￫

I’d probably assume that most of us started in UI design with the littlest knowledge or nothing at all. But even though the odds were against us at the start, we managed our way through numerous design books and articles to understand how colors, typography, layout etc works. I remember how it is established in us at Make Technology, a… Read More ￫

If there’s one lesson that has been validated in every conversational UI product I’ve worked on, it’s that building the interaction is just the beginning. Testing and iterating are the most time-consuming and headache-inducing (but worth the effort!) parts. Here is what I wish I’d known about the design process: 1. Build with a clear objective. Remember: a bot excellent… Read More ￫

For a long time, using gradients was the biggest no-no in design. Designers tended to avoid gradients because they created a strong impression of design from the 90s. But that is no longer the case. If you open Dribbble or Behance right now, there is a strong chance you will see dozens of designs that use gradients. The gradients designers… Read More ￫

Creating your screens in grayscale before adding color forces you think clearly and prioritize right when it comes to UX design. 1. You focus on layout and spacing When you start designing keeping the B&W color palette constraint in mind, most of your thinking time goes into figuring out how to space things right to be able to seem like things… Read More ￫

Header image: Copyright MSTQ, Inc. Open Instagram, Airbnb, Apple Music, Twitter, Dropbox or Lyft and at first glance it might feel like it’s hard to tell the difference between which app is which: big, bold headlines with rounded sans-serif fonts; minimal black and white interfaces with lots of negative space; little to no color. The modern interface style feels so bare-bones…. Read More ￫

Digital interfaces make a huge impact in our lives. We frequently use websites or digital applications to accomplish certain goals. Indeed, when interacting with an interface, we are surrounded by typography and our experience is driven by the words and messages we read and understand. In one of his articles, Oliver Reichenstein confirms the importance of typography in all websites… Read More ￫