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Exploring the extremes is an excellent way to find ideas that transform the status quo and improve user experience. It can also unlock innovation and creativity, resulting in breakthroughs. The best way to embrace extremes is to let go of what's familiar and comfortable, embrace constraints, and be open to vulnerability.
This is a new home for micro-interactions, Easter eggs, and other seemingly extra design details that infuse the web with life, personality, and fun.
Neat is a free tool that generates beautiful gradient animations for websites with a wide range of customization options.
Get inspired by exploring this library of real and fictional logos.
Instagram has revamped its app's motion design to add a more human and imperfect touch to its brand. Inspired by natural human interactions like tapping and scrolling, this comprehensive motion system, created by Studio Dumbar/Dept, was guided by design rules that embrace imperfection, incorporate techniques that mimic accurate camera movements, and integrate the creators' experience.
There's a disturbing paradox in the design industry. In most businesses, design managers have been explicitly trained to avoid getting involved beyond people and operations. On the other hand, many designers follow industry standards too much and need help thinking outside the box. Management needs to drive business outcomes actively and designers must create work that solves user problems and differentiates your product from the competition. Otherwise, all the people-oriented work will not matter since the product will only last for a while.
This article examines the differences between Apple and Android designs over the years. It reveals the UX philosophies that underpin their design choices and offers vital lessons for crafting products that resonate. Android values flexibility, adapting to user preferences while maintaining a cohesive user experience through collaboration with device manufacturers, unlike Apple, who emphasizes rigorous market research, extensive user feedback, and highly emotional and practical products.
This is an assessment (and a beautiful data visualization) of Rolling Stone’s approach to picking the best albums.
"Food Type" by Gabriel Pang, an expert in branding, graphic design, and illustration, transforms everyday edibles into stunning alphabet representations.
Peter Deng, OpenAI's VP of Consumer Product, dodged a question about artist compensation for training data, reflecting the delicate legal position that OpenAI and similar companies find themselves in when using data to train generative AI.
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Apple has secured a patent for a "Finger-Mounted Device with Sensors and Haptics," which hints at the potential development of an "Apple Ring" for an enhanced augmented reality (AR) experience where users can manipulate AR objects with fingertip sensors. This technology seeks to integrate users into an Apple AR ecosystem by providing haptic feedback that mimics real-life sensations, like catching a ball. The ring could function as an input device.
Pinterest has launched a body type filtering feature in the U.S. that allows users to search fashion and wedding ideas based on different body types and showcase size-inclusive brands. The tool, powered by Pinterest's computer vision technology, has led to a 66% increase in user engagement. Pinterest plans to expand the feature to men's fashion.
After months of speculation on the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales and future Queen of England, the Royal Family released an image on Sunday that appeared to have been edited. Middleton claimed credit for the edits, saying she was trying to piece together everyone's best expressions in the photo. However, there are other issues with the photo that continue to raise questions.
"Beautiful ugly websites" are lightweight, text-heavy, old-fashioned, basic HTML-styled websites that may not be visually appealing in a traditional sense but have a unique style and authenticity. They prove there’s no need to over-design - minimal designs can be just as effective as visually striking ones if they serve the ultimate goal of selling a product.
Modern design languages offer a lot of flexibility, focusing on fundamentals like typography, white space, and simplistic icons. However, sometimes, using an old-school real-world metaphor adds a lot of delight to an experience. For example, a tactile-looking button can be very satisfying.
The golden age of product design may be fading away as standardization increases. However, niche product design still offers exciting opportunities in product design. Going narrow allows designers to experiment and find new levels of authenticity using an opinionative approach, small teams, and a defined niche. An obsession with metrics and optimization causes blandness in design solutions. Going in the opposite direction is advantageous for businesses looking for competitive differentiation through authenticity.
Sip is a color picker that allows you to manage your palettes and collaborate with your team.
Create stunning line patterns with beautiful textures, icons, or cover images with Ruri Lines.
This collection features over 3,000 free SVG icons for popular brands.
Color is both potent and volatile. What’s vibrant to one person may be gray to another. A certain hue can mean good luck in one culture and “uh oh” in another. Designers should avoid using color as much as possible, treat interfaces as a white wall, and try using grayscale color palettes.
Jakob Nielsen’s controversial post about AI solving the accessibility problem keeps raising eyebrows. This time, Adrian Roselli concludes that the post is Nielsen’s way of trying to stay relevant by jumping on the fake AI grift. He compiles counterarguments for the statements Nielsen made so that he’s prepared for when a client cites his post arguing against accessibility.
AVIF represents a significant leap forward in image compression technology. While it may take time for widespread adoption, the benefits of AVIF are clear, making it an exciting development for web designers, developers, and users alike.
Outer margins extend beyond the UI border box. Components with outer margins can knock around adjacent components.
B2B software is ripe for design disruption since the design quality bar is low, and improving it has a significant impact.
Carefully designed terms can make complex user interfaces feel natural and cohesive.
The NYT Games app has launched a new design that features streamlined navigation and game card designs that facilitate game discovery and track players' progress. This update reflects the app's evolution from exclusively offering crosswords to providing a broad array of games. It aims to be both inviting for new users and functional for experienced players.
Apple is anticipated to revolutionize the MacBook lineup with a 20.3-inch foldable design expected for mass production in 2027. The potential of a foldable MacBook diverges from Apple's historical disregard for touchscreen laptops, creating intrigue for future hybrid device designs.
Adobe has launched the Adobe Express app for iOS and Android. It offers similar creative, editing, and AI capabilities, with additional features for Creative Cloud subscribers. The free beta includes access to premium tools like background removal during testing. AI features will require credits, with beta users receiving 25 monthly credits.
Nielsen's recent argument that accessibility is a hopeless industry and AI is the only viable solution for disabled people lacks data ignores the work of well-known and respected experts. The claim that accessibility is too expensive and inefficient provides more reasons for business leaders to ignore the issue. It fails to acknowledge that accessibility is not just about blindness and low vision but also about a wide range of user experiences.
To nail the tone in AI-generated text, designers should use prompts to rewrite existing content rather than generate new content, use multiple-tone words rather than one, and ask for alternative outputs. Sometimes, it takes ChatGPT multiple tries to write exactly what we want.
Logo Packer can generate multiple logo versions. Designers can upload their logos and export to PNG, JPG, PDF, and EPS.
Autoflow enables designers to create flow arrows in Figma to illustrate user flows, diagrams, or graphics in a hand-drawn or minimalist style. It automatically detects obstacles and auto-updates arrows when connected objects are moved.
Mapplic lets you create interactive maps from static images.
In a roundup of 10 innovative wearable technologies, Samsung debuts a smart ring with health tracking and AI, while products like a smart menstrual cup and an air-purifying collar expand the boundaries of health and digital integration. Among these wearables are devices for virtual reality, mobility assistance, worship, sexual health, voice synthesis, and spatial computing, all designed to enhance user well-being and experiences.
QX is an independent full-service advertising agency on a mission to foster purposeful interactions between brands and their audiences. It needed a new branding that would make all clients and projects feel welcome, so &Walsh developed a dynamic range of logomarks that purposefully adapted to each client's unique personality.
The Kirby effect is about sucking in features already available and delivering a worse experience. Keeping people in your app by controlling the whole experience is a dominant practice driven by business KPIs rather than the desire to improve the user experience. The path to valuable experiences is more about integrating mature solutions rather than creating your own (and worse) version of that feature.
Swiss furniture brand Vitra will reduce the impact of its existing lines on the environment by using recycled plastic, which produces a noticeably more speckled finish than virgin plastic, but the company says the change is necessary, even if it creates a different aesthetic from what customers are accustomed to.
This post explains why arranging form elements to reinforce a particular narrative in sentence-style forms isn't a good idea - it requires a bigger time investment, makes button labels confusing, eliminates inline errors, and introduces numerous other problems.
Figma has rolled out a transformative feature called multi-edit which significantly reduces the effort needed to edit across multiple designs by enabling simplified multiple-object editing in just a few clicks, aiming to blend seamlessly into the user's workflow. Developed by Sho Kuwamoto and Nikolas Klein, multi-edit diverges from conventional selection norms in design software. It is the result of an extensive process of ideation and refinement.
Wix's "Create with AI" button allows users to build entire AI-generated websites by answering a few questions from a chatbot. The process is completed in seconds, and you can edit the design, tweaking the theme and layouts. The website's content benefits from artificial intelligence. Wix offers prompts for creating images and text.
Most UX designer job applications get rejected by design-mature companies because they exhibit a linear design process in their portfolios, which are filled with cookie-cutter case studies where everything goes smoothly. To stand out, designers should include messy details and tell stories about how they adapted, grew, and became better designers because of the challenges they faced.
Although it can be uncomfortable for designers to seek feedback, it is often worse if they don’t seek it out at all and their career stalls. Asking many questions, trying to understand team members, and soliciting better feedback are critical for a designer’s growth.
A tool where designers can start generating color palettes by picking the basic colors and a style. Once generated, designers can edit the colors and preview them on multiple assets.
Animate, generate, edit, and finish designs with an AI-powered visual creative platform.
Lummi's collection comprises 13,000+ AI-crafted, highly curated images from global creators.
IKEA's collaboration with Dutch design duo Raw Color offers 18 pieces to bring vibrancy and joy to living spaces through the transformative power of color, patterns, and innovative design. The collection, embodying an experimental color philosophy, encourages self-expression and includes standout items like a color-blocked storage unit on castors, which creates an optical moiré effect and dynamic multicolored lampshades.
Embracing the concept of "working with the garage door up" enhances transparency and fosters a creative and efficient work culture by observing processes that unlock serendipity, create visibility, propagate ideas, enable early feedback, and develop shared knowledge. While teams often struggle with effectively managing transparent internal communication, tools like Campsite, designed for post-first team collaboration, aim to streamline the flow of information and idea discovery within organizations.