A little less than three years ago, Uber rebranded as the cab-service of choice for dystopian sci-fi pac-man fans. It was a move reportedly intended to recast the startup as the choice of every day people; it actually stripped the brand of all personal connections. This week, a little less than three years longer than it should have waited, Uber have unveiled a far more coherent, far more appealing identity. Designed by the “Uber Brand Experience”...

The hotly anticipated Smashing Book 6: New Frontiers in Web Design, is released today. Dedicated to some of the thorniest problems we face in our professional lives, it takes a swing at some of the biggest headache-triggering issues in contemporary web design, from the accessibility of single-page apps in React and Angular, to designing for Smart watches. You’ll find solutions to problems with CSS’ latest layout tool CSS Grid, as well...

A few weeks ago a frustrated face appeared around the corner of my desk. “Sorry mate, you don’t do any printing do you?” “Well yeah, sometimes,” I said. I have a dedicated desk in a co-working space, we share a printer, and it was this shared printer that was frustrating the face in question: “I’ve been trying for hours to get this bloody thing printed, I’m absolutely desperate, I can’t find the right driver anywhere…”...

In a step clearly intended to maintain dominance in an increasingly competitive market, Adobe have announced that XD CC (eXperience Design) is being released to the community as a free application. XD is amongst the most well-rounded, reliable, and innovative UX design applications available; by making it free of charge to both Mac and Windows users, Adobe are hoping to make it the de facto choice. Intriguingly Adobe executives are now openly...

Reddit, the self-proclaimed ‘front page of the internet’ is getting its first redesign since the heady days of IE7, and George W. Bush’s presidency. First announced over a year ago, the challenge for Reddit’s in-house team of 22, has been how to update the platform to appeal to new users whose expectations are much evolved from the early web, without alienating old Reddit users comfortable with the status quo. Reddit has often been...

Side projects are the wellspring of many a creative career. Industry changing concepts, technology leaps, companies, entire communities, have all sprung from a simple idea developed in a designer’s spare time. Sadly for many, being freed from the ‘tyranny’ of a client brief, also means being freed from the tyranny of a regular paycheck. Ideas that could come to fruition in months, take years to realize—or are abandoned altogether—because...

Happy New Year! At this time every January we try to predict what’s going to happen in our industry over the next 12 months. I hope that 2018 will be a great year for inclusive design, for standards-compliance, for ethical practices. I hope for those things every year, and annually it does feel like we’re inching closer. However this post is about unexpected trends, changes, and an attempt to predict the landscape ahead of us, because it feels...

Framer is known as a prototyping app, but in an unexpected move they have just announced the launch of a fully integrated, visual design tool. Aimed at creative professionals, the new Framer is designed to rival established options including Creative Cloud and Sketch, new kids on the block Affinity and Figma, and is timed to steal the thunder of InVision, whose own much heralded design app is expected next month. We’re betting on something...

Pantone have unveiled their official color of 2018, Ultra Violet (Pantone 18-3838 to be precise.) Pantone have been nominating a color of the year since 2000, and it’s often seen as a barometer for the prevailing cultural mood—although with designers jumping on the annual selection as an easy option for an on-trend palette, it has frequently been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Violet is not, as commonly perceived, a shade of purple but...

It has often been asserted by fans of pop-wisdom that there are only two distinct plots in the whole of western culture: a person goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. A brief flick through your bookcase will disprove the rule—unless you permit metaphorical journeys, in which everything fits—but the frequency with which the idea is repeated, and the sense it seems to make, speaks volumes about the centrality of the unknown in...

Dropbox has launched a controversial redesign of its brand identity, intended to help the SaaS standout in a market increasingly packed with pretenders to its throne. What they’ve unveiled seems certain to split opinion. On the one hand, the previous identity was business-like and sat comfortably alongside other tools in your GUI; on the other hand, that identity is tied to a business model that Dropbox, it seems, no longer aspires to:...

Yesterday YouTube launched a major UI revision to all its channels, from mobile, to games consoles. At the same time it’s made the first significant revision to its logo since its launch 12 years ago. The revised logo has been made live on mobile and desktop, and will begin to appear across all channels in the coming days. Some companies are for ever launching redesigns, others release minor iterative tweaks on a regular basis. YouTube is one...

Omnipresent publishing platform Medium has rebranded, launching its third logo in as many years. The new logotype is heavily influenced by Medium’s original slab-serif identity, which suggests that the last logo wasn’t performing as hoped. Medium’s 2015–2017 logo was an oddly drawn, pseudo-isometric effort, combined with an inoffensive middle-of-the-road sans-serif; it always felt like an idea compromised by too much management....

Google’s minimal search page has consistently been heralded as a minimalist masterpiece since it first appeared in 1996. It’s been argued by numerous designers—myself included—that it was the perception of Google as a ‘pure’ unadulterated search was more central to Google’s rise and eventual dominance, than the merits of its (in)famous algorithm. So it’s something of a surprise to learn that Google is abandoning...