Pixels of the Week – December 8, 2019 by Stéphanie Walter

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Every week I share a list of curated articles, resources and tools about UX, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, process inspiration and more…

This week’s selection: accessibility false aesthetics and myths, user research guide, Sketch library vs design system, toxic company culture, pantone of the year, designer tools survey, building trust as a designer, CSS focus tutorial, generative art in code, a 5 minutes design brief, CSS recent features, some fun drumbot and sweater graphic generator experiments, etc.

TL;DNR the one you should not miss

#Accessibility

There where 2 articles about accessibility on the UXmovement site that where quite controversial (to be polite) or if you prefer mostly rubbish. Here are two detailed replies to those articles:

Interesting article

#Design System

#Management #TeamBuilding

Building trust as a designer by Adam Silver, great read on simplicity over pixel-perfect design, pushing for the users while respecting constraints.
Being a designer is full of challenges and tradeoffs. But that’s why it’s a job. That’s why we call it work
“Core Needs: BICEPS” There are six core needs researchers find are most important for humans at work. Understanding those can help better communicate within the team and understand your team mate’s reactions

# UI

I was expecting yet another list of eye-candy but this is actually an interesting article that tried to understand how we got all those waves of trends. Nice. “What’s the next UI design trend?“
10 Rules of Dashboard Design, some smart UI tips that are not limited to dashboard design

#UXResearch

UX101: Complete Guide to In-Person User Research, a great introduction on the what why and how of user interviews and usability testing.

#Company Culture

WoW “Former Away employees describe a toxic work environment at the luggage company“, the conclusion “Never work for your dream brand, It’ll kill you.” is super scary. This is a hell of a shitty environment

#Design Brief

“The 5-minute design brief ” this could be turned into a really nice and cool little framework for people to fill when they have design needs, great tool!

#DevTools

“DevTools as the ultimate CSS advocate” yeees!! Remember the feeling when you messed up the CSS or the site for the first time in those dev tools? This is how my love story with CSS began (it was firebug at that time though, but all the same)

Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas

#Fun #Drum

A cool DrumBot to record your beats and have fun while creating music in the browser

#Sweater

A sweater graphic generator because we all need that 😀

#Pantone

The new Pantone of the year 2020 is a classic blue, I find it both nice because I like jeans but quite boring at the same time.

#Art #Code

Some cool generative art resources (and more in the replies)

#Art #Color #Fashion

Runway Palette by Cyril Diagne, a cool experiment to discover color palettes based on fashion show.

#Product

“A Dieter Rams-Designed, Jony Ive-Loved Citrus Juicer” I kind of love how building the perfect citrus juicer is a big design challenge 😁

News in the industry

#CSS

🔥Does JavaScript keep you too busy to care about CSS? Here are recent features you want to know about!

Tutorials

#CSS

Having a Little Fun With Custom Focus Styles

#UI

“Labels are a last resort” I don’t fully agree with last resort I think you still should test it to make it sure it’s obvious without label, that beeing said the rest of the article has good UI tips. Combined labels and values can be an elegant solution

Useful tools and plugins that will make your life easy

#Tools

2019 Design tool survey, some interesting figures about the design industry

Pixels of the Week – December 8, 2019