Those Things You Must Do When Ending a Freelance Design Project

It sounds so simple, right? You do a good job on a design project, the client loves it and pays you on time, you both walk away feeling good about the exchange. But if you simply disappear off your clients’ radar once the work is done, you’re missing massive opportunities for more work, as well as ..

What is Good Design?

Design matters. It enables us to understand, communicate and improve the world around us. When done right, design has the power to improve the everyday lives of users. When done wrong, design can disrupt and frustrate users. As a designer, you have the power to improve the everyday lives of your users if you practice good design.“You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.”— Dieter RamsSo, what is good design? Are there any instructions on how to create it? Dieter Rams, a German industrial designer known for his “less but better” approach to design, attempted to answer these questions. Let’s watch.© Gary Hustwit and Film First, Fair-Use (Link)Dieter Rams is considered...

What is Type?

Type is everywhere. In the books you read, the products you use, and even in this very website you're on right now. But what is type? In the context of design, type is the style or appearance of text. It can also refer to the process of working with text. Typography can often be an intimidating topic, but it doesn’t have to be. You only need to understand the basics to make an impact in your designs.So, let’s begin. Designer and educator Mia Cinelli will discuss type classifications, type families, and help us understand the difference between a font and a typeface.[[video:1124]]What Are Type Classifications?According to Ellen Lupton, author of “Thinking with Type,” type classifications are...

What Is Type Anatomy?

Typography has its very own language. It’s full of typographic terms that make up its basic anatomy. Just like it’s vital for your doctor to learn human anatomy to make an informed diagnosis, it’s important for you to understand the anatomy of type to use it effectively.Let’s begin with the basics of anatomy. Designer and educator Mia Cinelli will help us understand.[[video:1126]]Understanding all these terms can be a bit confusing, so we’ve created a comprehensive list that will help guide you through the common anatomy of type terms. Anatomy of a typeface. © Daniel Skrok and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0Anatomy of Type TermsAperture: The partially enclosed space of a let...

Understand Color Symbolism

Color is powerful. It has the power to persuade, evoke, express and communicate. It can also be an effective tool to communicate with your users. However, color is subjective and must be used in the right context. The context of our relationship with color is a complex one, rooted in biological, cultural and personal associations. So, as powerful as color is, can it affect your mood?“If one says ‘Red’ – the name of color – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.”— Josef AlbersCan Color Affect Your Mood?The answer is yes and no. Unfortunately, there is very little res...

Chapter 10: Browser Wars

In June of 1995, representatives from Microsoft arrived at the Netscape offices. The stated goal was to find ways to work together—Netscape as the single dominant force in the browser market and Microsoft as a tech giant just beginning to consider the implications of the Internet. Both groups, howev..

The Current State of Checkout UX (18 Common Pitfalls)

(Note: Unfortunately, e-mail and RSS don’t support advanced layouts and features. If the graphics in this article look strange, you may want to read the article in your web browser.) Key Takeaways Our late-2021 benchmark of 71 e-commerce websites shows that the performance of Checkout UX is mediocre to decent overall. The average site has 31 preventable usability issues in the checkout flow Avoiding the 18 common UX issues discussed in this article is a good first step towards improving users’ checkout experience After e-commerce sites have invested vast resources in “first in mind” strategies, Pay Per Click campaigns, beautifully crafted homepage imagery, perfect category taxonomies, faceted search logic, etc., it seems almost unbearable that 69% of users — after having added items to their cart — then choose to abandon their purchase. During Baymard’s 12 years of large-scale checkout usability testing we have also consistently found the checkout design and flow to frequently b..

Despite Its Critics, jQuery Forges Ahead

A web technology rarely maintains a continually growing user base over a long period. WordPress has done it, as has Bootstrap. But even they don’t have quite the market penetration of jQuery. The venerable JavaScript library first debuted in 2006 and (as of this writing) is used by over three-quart..

Proxying Third-Party JavaScript as First-Party JavaScript (and the Potential Effect on Analytics)

First, check out how incredibly easy it is to write a Cloudflare Worker to proxy another URL: addEventListener("fetch", (event) => { event.respondWith( fetch("https://css-tricks.com") ); }); It doesn’t have any error handling or anything, but hey, it works: Now imagine how some websites give y..

GUI Challenges

I keep bookmarking Adam’s GUI Challenges posts/videos and, before I even have a chance to review and link them up, another one is already published! Fortunately, the homepage for them on web.dev is a nice roundup. For example, a recent one is the split-button component (article / video / demo). It..