Pixels of the Week – September 15, 2019
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: cooperative design systems, mobile UX, image compression, Apple’s design consistency, better search results, design ethics and doing the right thing, sliding hero images UX, robots and captchas, performance and data loading, making meetings better, dealing with people who don’t get design, cancel vs close design pattern, illustrations design trends, CSS hack, etc.
#Now – what I’m up to
I’m currently preparing 2 workshops:
- I will also give a whole day of workshop on Mobile UX on March 6, 2020 in Brussels; tickets are available in early birds!!
- I will give a free workshop (split in 2 sessions of 2 hours) for Women in Digital Empowerment (WIDE) in Luxembourg (via Maltem Impact) This is beginner level. I will introduce the concepts of UX and UI design and we will build a small project to better understand some UX methods (create some user journeys, prototype and test them) and why understanding your users is important when you launch a product or a service. Session 1 – 22/11/2019 and Session 2 – 29/11/2019
TL;DNR the one you should not miss
#Design
How to deal with people who don’t “get” design — design and strategy
A practical guide on minding other people’s business, a great article by the amazing Morgane Peng 🙂
Interesting article
#Designsystem #UI
Interesting and pragmatic article on design systems divergence and convergence: Cooperative Design Systems
#Mobile #UX
“Large Devices Preferred for Important Tasks” people still tend to do their most important online activities on larger screens, based on the findings mutli device is still an important use-case. The study is on American population (apparently USA based), I wonder about the rest of the world.
#Carousels #UX
Designing Effective Carousels for Websites and Mobile Apps – Sliding hero images that rotate through a set of promotions, news, or the like on the top of webpages are often annoying to users and are definitely error prone, unless they are designed according to usability guidelines
#UX #Designer Patterns
Cancel vs Close: Design to Distinguish the Difference. Distinguishing between these two actions is critical to avoiding losing users’ work.
#Design #Search
Better Search Results: displaying the page size and if it will have ads is a nice idea for the experience of users, I hope some search engine will try this but I’m quite pessimistic about it, especially with the ads part, too many sites rely on it.
#Design #Illustrations
“How the Illustration Design Trend Caught Fire & Why Every SaaS Is Rebranding”
A great article on brand identity and trends. I also suspect that illustrations are + popular because there’s also some sites (like undraw) that make them accessible to everyone
#Ethics #Design
Dear Designer: If You Want to Make the World a Better Place, Start With Your Day Job – the Interesting story of Ethical offsets (going all back to Catholic church)
#Apple #Design
Less… Is More? Apple’s Inconsistent Ellipsis Icons Inspire User Confusion, Interesting long read on what happens when a product grows so complex that you lose consistency
#Front-End #CSS
“Why You Need a Dedicated CSS Developer” yes yes and yes you need some of those people on your project!!
#Accessibility
Contrast and Accessibility – interesting guidelines for button accessibility. The “User interface components need to have a contrast of at least 3:1 against adjacent backgrounds” is a tough one though, it ads a lot of constraints regarding button color
#Performance
Less Data Doesn’t Mean a Lesser Experience – an interesting article on web performance and using the Save-Data header
#Meeting #Management
What we get wrong about meetings – and how to make them worth attending
Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas
#Robots #Captcha #Fun
It’s happening, robots are now able to check the “I’m not a robot” captcha box
#Video #Cute
Mood swings, a cute little video
#dataviz #names
“The Most Gender-Switched Names in US History” that’s a cool dataviz. I also wonder if some historical figured had influence (like if the peak for girls named Jackie is after the Kennedy area)
Tutorials
#Illustrator
Illustrator Guides & Grids explained
#UX #Strategy
UX Strategy Fundamentals – A short course that introduces you to the principles and processes of UX Strategy work in an organization
#CSS #Typography
“Styling Links with Real Underlines” han looks like I have some CSS to update, brb 😉
#CSS
“My favorite CSS hack” haa this one is nice for debugging!
Useful tools and plugins that will make your life easy
#Performance
“Automatically compress images on Pull Requests” ,a really cool little tool
#Figma #Mac
Figmac – a Mac app to make Figma feel more at home on your Mac with touch screen integration, native tabs, etc.
