Articles by Ben Moss

Adobe Typekit has just released a long-overdue update to its font browsing interface. Currently still in beta, the new UI makes finding, and using fonts substantially easier. This is the biggest update to Typekit’s UI in 5 years and comparing the old with the new offers a fascinating insight into the way design priorities...

In the last few years the term User Experience has come to the fore, and with it we’ve seen the rise of the UX Designer. Every few months someone tweets a pair of images, one will be a biscuit (labeled ‘UI’), and the other will be a smug face eating said biscuit (labeled ‘UX’). A few weeks later a heartfelt post will appear...

One of the biggest bugbears of social media is trolling: attacking individuals based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or politics. If you’re a woman with the temerity to hold an opinion of any kind you’ll be subject to abuse, threats of sexual violence, and even the murder of your children. If you have the...

Launched this week, Atomic’s new plugin for Sketch is a free addition that streamlines artwork transfer between the two for a much accelerated workflow. Atomic is one of the most popular examples of the new breed of design app, focused not on how design looks, but on how design behaves. Launched last Summer it’s a favored...

In the last couple of years we’ve noticed more and more websites following the same basic format. This is typically referred to as design convergence; two designers, approaching the same problem, might reasonably arrive at the same solution—even more so, if they’re aware of each other’s work. It’s common to hear...

Adobe has just released a major update to its Creative Cloud apps. Updates have been made to Adobe Stock, and Creative Sync, meaning that almost every application in the ecosystem is affected. The updates include additions to Adobe’s flagship Photoshop application, as well as further enhancements to Adobe Stock. However...

More than any other medium, the web offers the opportunity to redesign, republish, reedit, revamp, and redo our work over and over again. Print designers hit the deadline at 5pm on a Friday, send the artwork to a printer, and forget it (at least, that’s the plan). Web designers hit the deadline at 5pm on a Friday, push the...

Website builder Wix has just announced the release of a system it has dubbed “Artificial Design Intelligence”—or “ADI” for short—that it’s marketing as “The Future of Website Building”. Wix ADI claims to be an AI-driven service that not only designs your site for you, it will even gather your content....

Despite valiant efforts to come up with an alternative approach, pop-ups still infest the web. It seems like every site you visit wants you to sign up for a newsletter, take advantage of an offer, visit a sponsor, or provide feedback—all before you’ve actually reached the content you arrived to see. The value of the pop-up...

In the brief history of web design, few issues have been as contentious as the question of whether designers should code. It’s beyond question that to design for the web you need an appreciation of how sites work, but does that understanding need to be in-depth enough that you can write code—after all you expect developers...

Design is about problem solving, whether that be visual, structural, conceptual, or any other ‘…al’. If there’s a problem, it follows that there is a solution. When Steve Jobs hired design legend Paul Rand to design the brand identity for what would be named (by Rand) NeXT computers, he was expecting a few options....

One of the biggest buzz phrases at the moment is “Conversational UX”. It refers to a user experience in which your interaction with a company, or service, is automated based on your prior behavior. Contrary to the implication in the title, a conversational UX doesn’t have to be a literal conversation, the term refers...

Successful web design hinges on good research, targeting the right demographic, identifying key problems and developing appropriate solutions. But how you start when your target demographic is literally, everyone? How do you structure a site when it serves a vast array of disparate needs? How do you set about...

It’s just four years until the Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympics, and while the eyes of the sporting world may currently be set on Brazil, attention will turn to Tokyo once the torch is (literally) passed in 5 months. For any city, even bidding to host the biggest sporting event in the world is a huge expense. To justify...