As I sometimes dig inside my work process, trying to understand what’s going on inside my head while I design, I started to realize what drives my decisions and thinking process. Pushing pixels, placing objects in the space, and adjusting colors, sizes and shapes, are not an easy tasks. How should a designer know what to do? Are there any rules… Read More ￫

Over the past few years I’ve learned a lot about building delightful products that hopefully people love. Some have taken off. Some have been acquired. And some sort of went nowhere. More often than not, these learnings came from mistakes as I worked on a handful of web and mobile products. My experience set only comes from working with small… Read More ￫

Hey there, tech designer person. Have you noticed the increasing number of vague specializations we’ve invented for ourselves? Here are a few I grabbed from a job board 10 minutes ago. UX Designer UX/UI Designer UI Designer Graphic Designer (UX & UI focus) Visual Designer Digital Designer Product Designer Presentation Designer Front End Designer Web Designer Bleh. What’s the difference between… Read More ￫

Identify your purpose Before you do anything else, first identify the purpose of your design. What information do you want to convey? What is the medium for your design? Good design aligns its typography with its purpose. This is because typography is key to setting mood, tone, and style in your designs. For example, if you are designing a greeting card… Read More ￫

Have you ever felt the magic of working with a small team to execute on a project and it went so well that you think, why can’t it be like this all the time? Sometimes it seems like the stars have to align in order to have the chance to do great work with great people. There’s more that goes… Read More ￫

Software designers and developers are all about NEW. We like to experiment with far-out ideas and make shiny things. Our livelihood depends on it. We’re so addicted to NEW that sometimes it clouds our judgment. We love NEW and everyone else should too, so we force heavy-handed product changes onto our customers without much explanation. And if they didn’t want… Read More ￫

A guide for making your career in UX design.

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 ￫

Illustrations should be embraced in product design because they can make a large difference. I know that the “making a difference” cliché is so over-used in product design in general, but in the case of well-used illustrations applied to user interfaces, it happens to be true. Having said that, I don’t mean that illustrations will work for every single product out… Read More ￫

Right now is a very interesting time to be a copywriter in the UK. As an industry, copywriting seems to be going through something of an identity crisis. On the one hand, you have the copywriting old guard: extremely skilled and experienced craftspeople who cut their teeth in the Golden Age of Advertising or have followed in the footsteps of… Read More ￫

This March, we were super proud to sponsor Design Club – the event where the creative community figure out what’s next. This time the loyal crowd of designers and creatives flocked to Hackney House and piled inside in their masses for insightful discussion and some drinks on to go with it. This one sold out in record time of 2… Read More ￫

The essence of digital product design lies in identifying problems, solving those and improving user experiences; the visual part of things should merely be an enhancement to it all, not a blocker. One way to stop spending time fiddling with font sizes and spacing, whilst improving consistency, is to build a comprehensive collection of highly-reusable design elements and decide on… Read More ￫