Popular Design News of the Week: January 13, 2020 – January 19, 2020

Heart-warming or not, co-creation with a client—the utopian ideal of shared vision—has its drawbacks. There are only so many times you can hear the words “brand strategy” before actually chewing your own face off. In the age of Wordpress, Drupal and, dare I say it, Wix, it’s never been more tempting to pay lip-service to research and consultation. Instead of building a principles framework from scratch, why not roll out something...

One of the best things about the Internet is that it (mostly) doesn’t care where you are. The person you’re interacting with might be in Rio or Rhode Island, Bahrain or Birmingham. The Internet opens up the world. But opening up the world doesn’t mean removing it. The geographic independence loved by users can be a real headache for businesses, because nearly all businesses are constrained by geography. For business, having an accurate...

One of the problems with coining a term like “user experience” or its acronym counterpart “UX” is that it opens up the floodgates for other trendy experience-related acronyms to enter the web design lexicon. CX, DX, EX, HX, JX, PX, UX, (U)XD... Is all of this really necessary though? While I don’t think you need to go adding EX or JX to your vocabulary anytime soon, it’s still a good idea to educate yourself on what these X acronyms...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

We typically start the month with a roundup of new tools and resources for designers, but with the start of a new year (and new decade), we thought a roundup of things to help you get more organized would be appropriate. Some of these tools have been around for a while with features you might not be using. Other tools are on the new side and offer great functionality. How many of these tools are part of your kit? Which ones will you resolve to use this...

In our increasingly global world, people travel by airplane…a lot. With rapid turnaround times, unpredictable weather, and unexpected delays, airlines both domestic and international frequently adjust their flight schedules to keep us moving. If you’re building a website, a progressive web app, or even a native app that involves any kind of travel, the last thing you want to do is give users out-of-date information, and when it comes...

And let’s be honest: perfection is a high bar to reach for any development team, especially when building applications that enterprises rely on for day-to-day operations. But it is worth aiming for perfect UX for enterprise apps every single time. Why? Because research shows every $1 invested in UX brings a return of $100, and 90 percent of users have quit using an application because of poor performance. (Other issues harming app retention...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Are you experiencing full wanderlust with a side order of burnout in the first week of the new year? Has the post-holiday gloom got you down? Are you starting a new decade in your office, wondering if you’ll make it to the next? Would you love to see a bit of the world before you’re too old to enjoy it? Here’s the good (great) news: one of the best things about being a web professional is that we can pretty much work from anywhere — as long as there...

Inclusive web design is more than just building a website that’s accessible for impaired individuals. Inclusivity means creating an environment (physical or digital) that’s welcoming of all people regardless of their: Age; Race; Ethnicity; Gender; Sexual orientation; Socioeconomic status; Body shape; Physical or mental impairment; And so on… But let’s be honest: it’s not always easy to find photos that feel inclusive —...

We’ve all been there. It’s 4pm on a Friday afternoon, you’re already in your “weekend outfit” (underwear and hoody combo) and you get an email. It’s Client X: Hey, erm, I’ve just had a couple of thoughts, can we talk? Wearily, you reach for the phone. Sure enough, the “couple of thoughts” become a rambling monologue on the virtues of asymmetric grid layout, mouse-controllable content and parallax scrolling (“that shouldn’t...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

One of my mottos in life, and in business is this: “If Google tells you to do something, you better get it done.” And when it comes to using HTML meta tags for SEO, none of us should be messing around. That said, you know how it is with Google search. The algorithms are always changing and what Google deems important one year easily falls by the wayside the next. Which is why some of the meta tags you might run into are nothing more than legacy remnants...


Does adding multiple CTAs to your web pages just confuse your users? That’s a heavily debated question in the digital design space. Some web designers believe that multiple CTAs give visitors more choice on how they convert. Others feel that leads can only handle a single CTA at a time without getting overwhelmed and abandoning ship. So, what’s the truth? Well, that depends. Every consumer has unique browsing habits, and different...

Every month we roundup the best new portfolios released in the previous four weeks. This month we’re looking back at the whole of 2019, and picking out 19 of our favorites from the last 12 months. There’s a mixture here of colorful and restrained, experimental and expected; the one thing they all have in common is an attention to details that creates an exceptional UX. Enjoy! WTF Studio If you’re going to name your business WTF Studio, you...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

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....

Imagine the public excitement when, in 1951, William Edmund Hick (“Hickey” to his friends?!) and Ray (with an “a”) Hyman published research about people’s responses to a bunch of flashing lights. I’m sure no-one could imagine how important this work would be for the information age since, of course, at that time, a bank of flashing lights was pretty much the height of technological sophistication. More accurately known as the...

From some very tough competition, these are the 50 sites we liked the best this year. Each one has been chosen either because it took a unique approach, or because it was central to a design trend that was a big hit in 2019. There’s a lot of fullscreen video, a lot of illustration, and the emergence of a post-Brutalist maximalism trend that’s set to keep running into 2020 and beyond. Is your favorite included in the list? Nomadic Tribe Illustration...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Simply defined, customer engagement is when a customer interacts with a brand through social media, mobile devices, or even direct communication. What makes customer engagement so important and necessary when it comes to marketing a clients’ business? Keeping in touch with your customers is critical and gives you insight on who your brand caters to and it’s a great tool for increasing your conversion rates. What’s a good way to have...

It’s always good to have a set of guidelines to follow when designing a website — especially if you have little to no user data to go on. Over the years, we’ve been introduced to tons of these guidelines and design trends; some of which have fallen out of favor while others have persisted over the years. One of those web design guidelines that’s persisted is the F-pattern. But is it still relevant today, what with mobile-first design practices?...