Understanding the true value of the work we do is one of the first lessons many of us learn. Turning away spec work, focusing on growing the skills that are important to us, and using those skills efficiently are among a few things we all go through early on. When it comes to valuing our expertise from person to person, there are so many variables that come into play that it’s extremely hard to give a good answer. Every situation is unique, and while...

Being able to quickly and efficiently one-line our skills and the focus of our professional life has a lot of value. The title that we use can effectively tell others what we do, and where our career is heading. Despite this importance, titles are something many of us have trouble with. It's definitely hard to find a title that clearly explains our skills and limitations as a professional. Understanding the full-stack terminology isn’t only...

Whether we’re self-taught or university educated, we’re all expected to keep learning as the industry evolves and advances. New development specs, constantly changing design trends, and new consumer needs require us to absorb new information at a rate previously thought impossible just a few decades ago. But despite that, even after years of product iteration with RSS readers and news aggregators, we’re still having trouble determining...

Our users are the lifeblood of the products and services we make. We take their needs, desires, and actions into consideration for even the smallest of design decisions. Serious time and resources are spent during weeks, or even months, of design direction for these users, but is it really worth it in the end ? Absolutely. Not only does user experience design give us an increased understanding of our users’ desires, but it’s also very easily...

Since the creation of the Internet, average file sizes have been steadily growing. What started out as kilobytes has progressed to megabytes (yes, plural), and our files are only growing still. While this phenomenon isn't disconcerting at first glance, the impact it has on performance and maintainability is awful. Add in aging devices, bandwidth restrictions, or slow speeds in general… and we have a much bigger problem. Thankfully,...

The last century has seen a tremendous shift in the value we place on artisans. Particularly in light of the mass market style production of products, craftsmanship is still sought after for its quality and distinct style. Today, web designers are amongst the list of professionals who are working with the constant threat of being automated and replaced. Luckily for us though, despite previous technological revolutions putting thousands...

Empathy arguably underpins user experience design more than anything else. Without it, we would all essentially be flying blind, lacking any clues as to what our users want or need from the things we create. Empathy allows us to imagine ourselves in our users’ shoes and better understand why they love (or hate) our creations, however it’s not their thought processes, but their emotions that we’re attempting to understand. Emotion...

Startups are notorious for bringing an idea from a concept to a finalized product fast. While there’s certainly something to be said for taking our time and doing in depth research at every milestone, sometimes we just need to get an idea up and running as soon as possible. Rapid prototyping in a startup culture slims the typical design and development process to hit the high points and retouch the lows after the fact. We can learn a lot from this...

Style guides of yesteryear are typically thought of as design-oriented documents focusing on branding and color usage. But with the advent of insanely large codebases for websites like Facebook or Google’s vast array of products, style guides have since evolved. These days, living style guides contain always up to date documentation of the current code base and its use cases. With these documents we can write much more maintainable and...

Interaction design has been around since we’ve been sophisticated enough to develop even basic tools. It’s the process of inventing, optimizing, and iterating on previous success to make things not only better, but also more familiar to our users. It’s a skill not limited to any one industry, and yet it has the reputation of primarily being a modern designer’s instrument. On the Web, we use interaction design principles to make things...

Responsive webdesign has become a catch-all term for making your website work well at low resolutions. Smartphones revolutionized the mobile web, and tablets are throwing another wrench into the gears with their growing popularity. With all things considered, a website today could be experienced on a low resolution smartphone, a medium resolution tablet, or a high resolution desktop or laptop. When you throw retina displays into the...

Infinite scrolling has became a common design pattern in recent years. With many high profile social networks adopting the solution, it’s come to be one of the most widely adopted patterns out there. Though however popular, every design pattern always has its own unique strengths and weaknesses we have to plan for. Done badly, and infinite scrolling will wreck your UX and guarantee total failure as users desert you in droves. Get it right,...

Pixel-perfect icons and typography stand out among the crowd online. Obviously we all want to strive for such refined work, but sometimes even after trying we still end up with something a little... less. Pixel Hinting is one of the skills that takes an automatic feature and improves upon its results. Despite the ultra high resolution of displays today—like Apple’s retina displays—we still need to “fake” smooth curves lest we...

User Experience has come a long way in the last decade, especially in the world of web design. Now more than ever, people are more focused on making sure the user not only has it easy, but also enjoys the product or service that they’re using. But whilst most people are working to form a more usable and enjoyable web for the user; some work to deceive the user and trick them with UX techniques known as Dark Patterns. What is a Dark Pattern? Dark Patterns...