Pixels of the Week – February 27, 2022
Every day, I share on Twitter and LinkedIn a list of curated articles I read, resources and tools about UX Design, User Research, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, some process, some inspiration, etc. This is an archive of everything I shared this week.
#Now – what I’m up to
Friday I was live talking about ” Designing reusable adaptive components for design systems”. You can find the replay on the Friends of Figma Washington page.
TL;DNR the one you should not miss
#Color
This is my new favorite color tool that lets you build step gradients, test blend modes, modify colors, etc.
Interesting article
#Complexity
- I currently work for an investment bank, I know too well how complex it can be to work on a product you are not familiar with. Here are some great advice by Marie-Astrid Molina on how to design a product you understand nothing about (at the beginning)
- This is good advice when you work on enterprise, employee and complex B2B products: 8 Design Guidelines for Complex Applications
#UX Measure
User Experience Is an Elusive Thing, or Conversion Rate & Average Order Value Are Not UX Metrics! Interesting read on how most of the metrics we use are actually not suitable to reliably measure the UX of a digital product.
#UX Research
- Wooohh I’m not the only one using Jira as a repository for UX Research, yeahy!! Here are some interesting tips and ideas in case you want to do the same
- Interesting article by Anna Demina on why you need UX researchers roles even if you have designers in the team.
#UI
A few UI differences between Chinese and English apps. A good reminder that design also need to take into account linguistic and cultural preferences. The perception of pop-ups is a nice example of such differences
#Psychology
- How IKEA used psychology to become the world’s largest furniture retailer
- Rather than assessing all solutions, we may be biased toward adding more things—more resources, more rules, more habits and responsibilities—rather than the opposite; which in some cases would worsen the problems we’re trying to solve.
#Culture
An interesting topic (totally safe for work): Space Sex is Serious Business: A Hilarious Short Animation Addresses Serious Questions About Human Reproduction in Space
Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas
#Typography
Ohhh, Hello gorgeous new Roboto Serif. Also yeahy it’s a variable font!!
#BrandIdentity
I’m a big fan of the Oji Sushi by Seachange Studio, I love the vibrant blue and the little eyes in the sushi rolls!
#Maps
This tool to generate Fantasy Maps is amazing
Useful tools and resources that will make your life easy
#Procreate #inkgangboss
If you want a nice Procreate starter brush pack I recommend @inkgangboss’s. I really like the 26 pages starter guide that goes with it to explain how to use each type of brush. This made all the difference for me 🙂
#Passport
This website lets you know where you can travel visa-free with your passport. You can also compare passports to other ones if you are curious.
#Diversity
The Centre for Ageing Better has launched a free library of positive and realistic images of people aged 50 and over.
Books
#Qualitative Analysis
Did you get a lot of qualitative data (like open question to a form) and don’t know how to analyze those? I recommend you read “Qualitative Data Analysis“, especial chapter 4 on coding the data segments
Tutorials
#CSS
Some creative and fun ideas for CSS link hover effects
#Favicon
Building a favicon that will adapt to dark/light theme in chrome by @argyleink
Videos and Podcasts
#Metrics
This is an interesting video on metrics: the top 100 scientific papers of all times, by one measure which is how often they were cited. But most of those are not ground breaking discoveries (that get cited less often)
News in the industry
#UXConference
@JoinLearners is organizing a Good Research conference hosted by Colette Kolenda. It will be remote and in NY, June 13 – 17. I’m looking forward to this
#Scam
This is scary, that person scammed a lot of designers and never paid them
