Note: I’m proud to have co-authored this post with Jason Hreha. Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succombs to her… Read More ￫

At Marvel, we love speaking to designers from across the world, working at leading companies and driving the future of design. We caught up with Joel Califa, Senior Product Designer at GitHub, and discussed how his career took shape, got some advice on how to lead design teams and picked his brain on where he thinks the future of design… Read More ￫

In this article I’m going to tell the story of Color Hunt, a curated collection of color palettes. I started Color Hunt with the goal of sharing my passion for colors, and provide a go-to resource for designers, artists, developers, illustrators, and basically anyone who needs a fresh color combination for their design project. The Idea It all started from… Read More ￫

“If only I moved that column 5 pixels to the left.. then that would have made our design a success!” — No designer ever. If we can all agree that the above statement is a bit nonsensical, then why does it come up so frequently? How do we get teams and organizations to stop focusing on the minutiae and, instead,… Read More ￫

This reading list is for anyone who wants to learn or deepen their knowledge in the disciplines of User Research, Usability, Information Architecture, User-Interface Design, Interaction Design, Content Strategy or Experience Strategy. The list is broad and includes books that exemplify design thinking, processes, methods, principles and best practices. Some of the books on this list are over 20 years… Read More ￫

After working for five years as a product manager, I wanted to learn how to build new products myself to prototype some ideas. As a PM, I was fairly comfortable wireframing and doing some designs, but I’d never needed to build it. However, this past year, a few of my peers who had come from computer science backgrounds mentioned it… Read More ￫

Designing is easier when you start with the answers. The ability to ask meaningful questions is a fundamental yet often overlooked skill in the UX Designer’s toolkit. I’ve begun to notice a clear correlation between the number of questions a designer asks throughout the process and the quality of the final design output. It’s much more than creating, it’s about understanding… Read More ￫

Last November, I decided to transition out of freelance user experience design. During my job hunt, I found myself needing to answer the same questions again and again. I collected my favorite questions and wrote thoughtful and exhaustive answers, creating a list of frequently asked questions. They served me in two ways: I linked to my FAQs in my cover… Read More ￫

Have you guys heard of Inktober? It’s a drawing challenge developed by fellow illustrator, Jake Parker in 2009. Every October, artists and art-enthusiasts around the world create an ink drawing daily for the month, sharing their work each day online with the #Inktober hashtags. Sounds pretty easy, right? I mean c’mon, we’re all creatives here. How hard can it be… Read More ￫

Lots of product marketers feel that their hands are tied when it comes to selling a product. There is probably already a visual style defined for the product itself and for the online shop website, which makes you think the idea that there’s no additional effort required for an online product presentation. Wrong! First impressions are everything when it comes… 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 ￫

If you’re new to Sketch then check out this epic free course from Learn UX has you covered with how to get up and running and turn your designs into a prototype using Marvel. The free course takes you through the basics of Sketch, such as artboards, typography, symbols and designing for different screen sizes. Once you’ve mastered that, you’ll… Read More ￫