Design Thoughts / Visual Design

When it comes to selecting a pattern for the primary mobile navigation, product designers usually choose between two options — side drawer (also known as a hamburger menu) and tab bar. Both navigation patterns have their pros and cons. Since this article is about tab bar, let’s start with its advantages over sider drawer: Visibility of current user location. No… Read More ￫

Luckily there are a lot of articles about why psychology is important in UX/UI design. But unfortunately, only a few of them provide practical knowledge. What I mean by practical knowledge is those daily designs that exemplify the impact of psychological rules on design. Collecting more examples and techniques that can immediately be applied into designs is why I started… Read More ￫

Buttons are an essential element of interaction design. They have a primary role in the conversation between a user and the system. In this article, I’ll review seven basic principles you need to know to create effective button design. 1. Make buttons look like buttons When it comes to interacting with user interface, users need to know instantly what is ‘clickable’… Read More ￫

Life can be tough sometimes for UI designers. While they get to create great designs, they also get to deal with pressure from clients or PMs. They’re required to consider user experience and user flow. And they often struggle to find an effective way to communicate with developers. To relieve some of the pressure from my fellow designers, I want… Read More ￫

As hardware begins to fade and software experiences come to the foreground, it is essential to focus on the way we design the interfaces that users will see and interact with. Over the last decade, interface design has seen a turn from replication of the physical/material (referred to as skeuomorphism) to a much more flat, abstract aesthetic. While this new… Read More ￫

What Are UI Guidelines? While working on UI design, few principles and guidelines are required to follow that help you design a standard and consistent experience throughout your products. UI guidelines explain the best practices of UI components and understanding of their behavior by giving real examples. These guidelines are usually defined at organization level and equally helpful for designers,… Read More ￫

Overcomplicating things is not doing you any favors. Particularly with digital design, there are countless examples that are a loud and complex mess of elements that seem to evade, at all costs, the primary goal of the design itself — to clearly communicate something. On the flip side, there’s a major trend nowadays with minimal design. Loads of whitespace, small… Read More ￫

Can you name all 24 events at the Winter Olympics at PyeongChang from memory? Of course not, nobody can. But I bet you could do really well if I showed you illustrations of each event. You can try it here. Imagery and easily-understood iconography is a necessity of an event like the Olympics, with so many cultures coming together in… Read More ￫

Whitespace (or “negative space”) is an empty space between and around elements of a page. Although many may consider it a waste of valuable screen estate, whitespace is an essential element in design: “Whitespace is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background” — Jan Tschichold Today, I’ll cover how you can use whitespace in your designs… Read More ￫

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and heard someone who was about to ask a question saying something along the lines of "..long time fan, first time caller…" and for some reason that got me thinking about Medium. I’ve been consuming content here for a long time but have never contributed myself with my 2 cents. Today is the… Read More ￫

Communication plays a vital role in design — it’s essential to establish a clear connection between the website and user and to help your users accomplish their goals. When we talk about communication in web design context, we usually mean text. Typography plays a vital role in this process: “More than 95% percent of information on the web is in… Read More ￫

In the first part of this article, “Are Grid Systems Still Relevant in Digital Product Design?”, I took a look at the history of grid systems and their practical advantages. In short: grids are still useful for interface design, but the screen is much more complex than the printed page, as both the output media and content are highly variable…. Read More ￫