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.

User X-perience has been the focal point of modern web development for quite some time now. This is influenced by several factors, including page loading speed, readability, usability, and design. But now that more users prefer mobile web browsing over using desktops, any website—be it a niche blog or an e-commerce store—should start prioritizing mobile friendliness. Nowadays, it’s easy to apply a mobile-responsive theme and use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to receive additional recommendations on how to optimize your site. But if you want to take things to the next level, you can develop a Progressive Web App (PWA) to deliver fresh and memorable new experiences to your mobile users.

Everyone who’s up on technology has heard of mobile web design and content marketing—two terms used with increasing frequency in the online world. Can mobile design and a great content marketing strategy be combined without sacrificing either content or design elements? Or does the content of a website suffer because of the restrictions imposed by design for small screens? The truth is that great content does not have to be sacrificed for mobile design and can even be enhanced by the capabilities of new devices. A properly integrated responsive design and content marketing strategy should produce a phenomenal user experience for visitors to your client’s website.

Now just when we were starting to get used to the tools, frameworks and methodologies needed to design good mobile apps, we find the device landscape is changing again: smartwatches and other connected wearables, sensors and everything under the “Internet of Things” umbrella are bringing new complexity to our field, and makes it very difficult to tell where “mobile” or an “app” really starts and ends. And we designers are having a hard time getting used to it. Given that many of us first approached mobile design through responsive web design, it’s been much easier to approach mobile design as if it were some kind of “smaller web with touch support and camera access”. But the upcoming products and services are meant to live fluidly across a range of devices, sensors and network connections. So I believe that mobility, rather than mobile, defines much better the kind of environment we will have to design for. Rather than a focus on a specific device, designing for mobility is a broader approach to design; one that delivers value because it can be transmitted by any combination of devices. Mobility forces us to think broadly and zoom out from specific devices to look at the ecosystem in which we will be designing.

Building trust occurs when our physical, emotional and logical responses combine into one confident, positive intuitive feeling. When we trust companies or brands, the feeling—or “experience”—is often carefully cultivated and consumers uphold a level of expectation when visiting the business. This remains true online, as there are a number of cues that can reaffirm trust, or completely ruin visitors’ experiences; and their reaction will no doubt be reflected in the company’s revenue and customer retention.If your website gives visitors confidence in their security, is designed with a clear hierarchy, and visitors are able to navigate with ease to find the answers or solutions for their problems, you are reinforcing and creating trust. The same set of standards that creates an ideal customer experience holds true for visitors to your company’s website.

Now You spend weeks, months, maybe years, creating a product with an amazing UX. Doesn’t matter if it’s an app, a website, a client project, or something else. You’ve put all this time and effort into creating something awesome. So why aren’t you giving any thought to the UX of the emails you’re sending about that product? You just throw some copy into an email and send it out. Sure, maybe you hired a copywriter to write the perfect copy, but content alone does not make a good user experience. Peter Morville’s famous user experience honeycomb can be applied to email as well as anything else on the web (though the importance of some facets shifts). Each facet of the honeycomb fits with the others to guide you in creating a fantastic user experience.

User experience should be the number-one priority for mobile developers. Really successful mobile experiences are not compromised, stripped-down versions of their desktop counterparts — they’re better than the experience on a desktop computer. Successful mobile developers “go mobile” first to create an engaging, satisfying user experience, and a large part of a great UX is making the user’s attempts to communicate as effortless as possible. Realistically, user interfaces can make or break a business, and with our increased focus on mobile technology, the user experience of mobile apps is more important to a company’s bottom-line than ever before. Consider the disastrous effect the subpar user experience of Facebook’s mobile app had on the company’s stock price versus the increasing success of Path following the positive user response to its app’s interface.