November 4, 2016 — How can you be sure you’re moving your design problem in a straight line? That you’re moving directly to a solution? From client to payment, from product to audience? How certain are you of what the second step in your process is? Or the third? Or how long each … Read More…

October 22, 2016 — So you’ve attended a conference, listened to some truly inspiring talks, made quite a few valuable connections, maybe even attended a hands-on workshop and learned a thing or two. What now? How do you bring back the new knowledge and ideas and connections to your team and to … Read More…

October 18, 2016 — We might not realize it, but as developers, we build inaccessible websites all the time. It’s not for the lack of care or talent though — it’s a matter of doing things the wrong way. In our new book, Inclusive Design Patterns, Heydon Pickering explains how we can … Read More…

August 30, 2016 — Designers, developers and managers often work with compressed timeframes and multiple projects simultaneously. A team must be able to respond quickly to feedback on their product from clients, project managers and developers. Each minor revision in the UI or UX needs to be … Read More…

August 17, 2016 — It’s been almost five years since Photoshop Etiquette launched, which officially makes it a relic on the web. A lot can happen on the web in a few years, and these past five have illustrated that better than most. Read More…

August 15, 2016 — Criticism is easy. It seems like everybody has an opinion, but, as the author Harlan Ellison points out, “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion.” To become informed, though, requires exploration. Design critiques are an … Read More…

August 9, 2016 — We’ve all been there. You spent months gathering business requirements, working out complex user journeys, crafting precision interface elements and testing them on a representative sample of users, only to see a final product that bears little resemblance to the … Read More…

August 4, 2016 — It’s been quite a journey for this very sentence to wind up on this little website. Not many people know it, but every single Smashing article goes through a thorough editorial review, including multiple passes for editing and refinement, before being published. In this … Read More…

July 28, 2016 — The first question clients and stakeholders seek answers to with any digital product and/or service today — and rightly so — is how to establish an effective user experience. We, as designers, however, know that good design and a good user experience are rarely achieved by … Read More…