Interactive Design articles

Every industry has its jargon, and almost its own language, in some cases. God knows web design has a lot of jargon, even if half of our made up phrases are fancy and nonsensical job titles. But for all of the silliness that comes with having to invent our own words and acronyms for things, jargon plays an important role: it allows us to communicate more efficiently with other designers and devs. Sometimes, the person who (more or less) comes up with...

Your portfolio is often a company or client’s first impression of you. Yet while we would dress up and prepare our talking points for an interview, we tend to neglect our portfolio or follow design trends that don’t represent us well. In my work with Semplice, a portfolio system for designers, I’ve seen hundreds of design portfolios over the years. And I continue to see common trends that could be holding designers back from their dream...

Push notifications are an essential part of mobile marketing. They get users’ attention faster than any other means of communication. At the same time, push notifications are one of the most challenging things for implementing. Badly implemented push notifications can easily harm your bottom line. According to an Appiterate Survey, 71% of all app uninstalls are triggered by a push notification. To create good user experience, it’s...

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...

Sticky menus, sliding navigations, fixed navbars…there’s quite a few names for this trend. But they all mean the same thing: a navigation that follows you around the page while you scroll. Not everyone likes this design style because it takes up extra space on the page. But it also gives users direct access to all nav links from anywhere on the page. If you’re looking for sticky menus with eye appeal these examples are sure to get you excited....

It’s here, people! NBC has gone (more) digital, because we as a society have decided that this was better for the environment, and also because the news gets to our phones so much faster. It’s also cheaper. Okay, I’m going to stop messing with the print guys—they’ve done nothing to me—suffice it to say that the industry has changed, and NBC is still changing with it, on the design front. Back in June of 2017, we said that NBC was working...

Nobody wants to create bad design, and yet it happens all the time. And while the cause of bad design varies, the final result is the same—bad user experience. Bad user experience frustrates users and often leads to abandoning the product. In this article, I’ll focus on one particular aspect of bad design—using UI techniques that lead to bad UX. 1. Pop-Ups If I ask you to name the single most irritating thing on the web, the odds are that you’ll...

Spring is in the air with plenty of new tools, particular color and CSS options. We hope that the change of season has you inspired to create and that these new design tools can make your work life just a little easier. If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered! Abstract Acrylic...

When we design our products, we often design for the happy path scenario, ideal user flow without any obstacles. But in real life, there are situations which don’t go to plan. Such conditions are called “edge cases”. Edge cases might be pretty rare, but they have a significant impact on user experience. Users rarely remember positive interaction, but they often remember negative experiences; if you fail to prepare for such situations,...

Across all disciplines of design, from fashion to architecture, trends largely define the styles and directions of an industry at a particular time. Trends are often determined to be a reaction to a previous style. Whether that’s swaying from maximalism to minimalism, or colorful to monochrome, trends by their very nature focus on short termism rather than the larger picture. They also tend to be cyclical, meaning across design industries,...

Simplicity Beyond Complexity is essentially the point at which the complications of a product, and its code, become obscured to the end user. It’s a design process different to simplicity, in that it does not look to simplify the core product. Rather than reducing functionality and feature sets, it looks to ways of making the product simpler and easier to use which do not include stripping back elements of the product itself. It’s a more...

Holistic web design: it just sounds so... ’60s counter-culture acid-fueled epiphany-like. But it’s worth looking at anyway. I mean, everyone here has either read the Dirk Gently books, or at least watched the latest Netflix adaptation, right? No? Well, here’s the crash course: Everything is connected. That connection might be tenuous or obvious, but everything is more or less connected somehow. You can find elements of this idea...

It seems like innovation just can’t leave designers alone. At first, it was the computer revolution; As Adrian Shaughnessy put it, the introduction of Macintosh meant “no more mechanical artwork, no more paste-up, no more typesetters, no more expensive retouchers” for designers. The second major shock to the field was the explosion of the Internet. No longer designers had the comfort of fixed-size, one-format print publishing....

As a freelancer, there are times when you need to fill the gap between clients, or up your income a bit by completing micro-gigs. Micro-gigs can be ideal freelance projects because they typically don't take much time. It's also relatively easy to impress the client, and you may even wind up developing a long-term relationship with them. At the very least, you’re sure to learn some new skills. Micro-gigs also work well for parents who are trying...