Design

Sunday, 29 December 2019 20:01

Sunlight, Fresh Air and Exercise

The autumn air is fresh and clear, the light is soft and uplifting and the autumnal forests are at their most beautiful. Combined with some smooth Swiss tarmac under my wheels, cycling conditions are perfect and I’m often out enjoying the hills in the middle of the day. But I’m not skiving, this is an important part of my work routine. Cycling doesn’t require a lot of engagement of the brain, so it’s a great time for thinking. The rhythmic motion of feet on pedals seems to literally crank up my brain, so that soon it’s racing way ahead of the road in front of me, seeing angles in stories nobody had realised were there, or picking quotes that offer the key to explaining a complex issue. With creative tasks, inspiration is crucial and most people can’t achieve that…sat in the office When I return home to my desk, I often hit the keyboard straight away. Showers, food and checking emails can wait: I have words in my mind that I want to get down. Whether you’re a web designer, writer, marketer or programmer, you need to feel refreshed and positive in order to do your best work. With creative tasks, inspiration is crucial and most people can’t achieve that for 8 hours a day, sat in the office.

Published in Lifestyle

Sunday, 29 December 2019 19:45

18 Tips For Running a Design Sprint

Development time is a precious resource. In order to be more efficient and responsive, product teams continuously try to use advanced techniques for product creation. One of the most popular frameworks that help the product team to achieve this goal is a design sprint. A design sprint is a framework that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing. Basically, it’s a shortcut to learn without building and launching a real product. In this article, I want to highlight key things that should be taken into account when running a sprint. Preparing for a sprint is one of the most critical steps in the process. Proper preparation will help make the best use of the time you’ll spend on this activity.

Published in Design

Sunday, 29 December 2019 19:02

How to Design for 3D Printing

3D Printing is a revolutionary new technology that allows you to realize, well, just about anything. The most common form of 3D printers use a special form of plastic filament to print durable, hard ABS plastic components or items. However, there are 3D printers—industrial mostly—that can work with materials like concrete, glass, titanium, steel and more. The tougher materials aren’t really necessary for design, but it’s still a great thing to know especially when you need to consider material design guidelines.In design and graphic art, you mostly work with hand sketches, digital content and imaging software, and flat, 2D-style designs. How would a 3D printer offer you anything new? Maybe you dabble in the occasional 3D modeling from time to time, or maybe you don’t. Whatever the case, the two mediums just don’t seem to correlate. We’re going to explain some design tips you should be aware of and how that applies to your particular industry: graphic and visual design.

Published in Design

Sunday, 29 December 2019 16:26

11 Secrets of Actionable UX

Designers and developers working on their projects, have a lot of questions: What do our users expect to see on this screen? How are users supposed to interact with our product? What should our onboarding feel like? These questions are commonly asked during product development. Every team wants to reduce the risk of incorrect design decisions and as the complexity of products increases, the digital product design industry puts usability practitioners in high demand. Usability practitioners are people who help product teams make informed decisions. In most organizations, the primary role of usability experts is design validation—making sure that a product is usable. But many usability practitioners (particularly those who are new to the field) complain that product teams don’t act on their research results. While this could be due to many different issues, most often it is due to poor usability reports; if product teams have trouble understanding findings, or don’t know what to do with the findings, they’ll simply ignore them. That’s why it so important to make reports actionable. In this article, we’ll share eleven tips that help usability practitioners to reach this goal.

Published in Design

Sunday, 29 December 2019 15:54

3 Tips for an Effective User Flow

Purpose of almost every web design is to entice customers into buying your products, or subscribing to your services. However, your website can’t accomplish that goal without providing a superior user experience, which is largely defined by a great user flow. User flow refers to a series of steps that will help your prospects interact with your website without any distractions or hindrances. Thus, it improves your conversion funnel and reduces the bounce rate. The better the user flow is, the higher the sales conversions will be. However, designing a great user flow is easier said than done. It is a complicated process that involves creating and evaluating different stages. However, if you keep a few things in mind, you can enable a superior user flow quickly.

Published in Design

Sunday, 29 December 2019 15:42

6 Tips for Writing Content

Okay, you need three to five new ideas for articles, all on the same general topic. Go. Now here’s where we separate the people who have to come up with regular content all the time from the people who don’t. The people who have things they want to write about but can never get around to it can probably start listing ideas off the top of their head. The people who have to do this for a living, or at least as a part of their job, just groaned in mock agony. Generating new ideas regularly can be rough, whether you’re doing it for blog posts, social media posts, videos, memes, newsletters, art, or anything else you can imagine. Waiting for inspiration to strike is, for the most part, a sucker’s game. If you want that lightning, you’re going to have to make like a scientist.

Published in Design

Tuesday, 16 January 2018 07:48

5 Things Nobody Tells You About Freelancing

Starting out on your own as a freelancer is exciting. You’re making your talents available to the world, and are ready to make your mark. While this career path can be very rewarding (monetarily and otherwise), it’s not all kittens and unicorns. There are going to be challenges and days when you wonder why you ever wanted to do this. It’s not necessarily the care-free lifestyle you may have been lead to believe. As someone who has been freelancing for almost two decades, I’ve experienced a whole lot of ups and downs. Here’s a look at some of the joys and pains of freelancing. You know, the stuff nobody tells you about!

Published in Business