Design Thoughts / Visual Design

As you probably already guessed this article is dedicated to blue color. Without a doubt, blue is one of the best colors in UI design, and one of the most frequent. Just look at your smartphone app icons, and you’ll see that a lot of them are blue: Facebook, Twitter, Shazam, Safari, etc. So why is blue the best-chosen color?… Read More ￫

There is this belief that the hand cursor means “clickable”, but this is incorrect and potentially problematic. My hope is that by the end of the article, you’ll never want to use the hand cursor for buttons ever again. The hand does not mean clickable It’s no accident that browsers don’t give buttons (and other elements) a hand cursor —it’s… Read More ￫

UI vs. UX Design If you’ve done any kind of research about software design, you’ve probably heard of the terms “UI” and “UX”. But what separates UI from UX? At their most simple forms, UX design is what makes an interface useful, and UI design is what makes an interface beautiful. For UI, this includes a blend of visual hierarchy… Read More ￫

Since the first iPhone, standard screens have been the medium for which we’ve been designing for most – usually apps and websites. As technology has advanced though, new avenues have slowly emerged (e.g. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) through which we can consume media and information in different ways. “VR and AR are just 2 realms we can design for… Read More ￫

How to design for your iPhone X to create a full-screen experience for your users including best practices.

Colors are one of the most important and powerful elements in design. Since design is an evolution, our perception of colors (and the ways we use them) is ever-changing. I’ve noticed that there is a new and fresh trend in design that involves a prominent use of gradients in UI, branding, illustration, typography and more. It seems like we got… Read More ￫

The rules for mixed reality content creation are still in flux. This is an exciting time to be working in mixed reality because there isn’t a standard way of designing yet. Once more content is created, the audience for mixed reality will grow, and we’ll be able to see which designs work and which don’t. Working as a group named… Read More ￫

Last week, one of my readers sent in a question: How do I become a better visual designer? As I was thinking about how to answer this question, my mind wandered to my experience with learning Mandarin Chinese. Recently, I decided to teach myself Mandarin. When it comes to learning a new language, you first have to start with the… Read More ￫

Body text is the key component in communicating the main bulk of a message or story, and it’s probably the most important element on a website, even if people sometimes read just the headlines. Why would we limit the effectiveness of body text by minimizing its size to a browser-default that’s now over 20 years old, even on large displays?… Read More ￫

If you’re working on digital products, you have already read dozens of articles describing how and why the hamburger navigation on mobile (and desktop!) hurts UX metrics due of its low discoverability and efficiency. (You can read some of best articles on the topic here, here, here, and here.) Luckily, more and more sites and apps are experimenting with alternative,… Read More ￫

You can build the best product in the world, but if nobody knows it exists can it really be the best? Getting discovered can be as important as creating a great product nowadays. This has lead to many startups creating products the other way round: instead of ‘build it, and they will come’, it’s become: ‘go to where they are,… Read More ￫

Can we design invisible interfaces to be useful smart products? Last year saw an explosion of a special kind of smart products: home assistants, driving devices, lighting & security systems, etc — all devices activated by voice, gesture or automated through a chain of conditions. Major topics in media technology and Google searches were “IoT” and “Bots” — and this… Read More ￫