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A COLLECTION OF NICELY DESIGNED PRESENTATIONS

Get inspired by a collection of standout slides, keynotes, and guidelines, all carefully selected for their design excellence.

WHY YOU SHOULD CURATE, NOT CREATE, A DESIGN SYSTEM

Creating every component from scratch might seem the right way to go, but it often leads to unnecessary complexity and inefficiency in practice. Selectively combining existing elements with your custom creations is much more effective.

WHY ARE WESTERN APPS MORE MINIMALISTIC THAN ASIAN APPS?

It’s a matter of individualist versus collectivist culture. People from individualist cultures tend to finish one task before moving to the next while quickly jumping from one task to another is considered easier in collectivist cultures. This means that Western UIs are often focused on one call to action, whilst Asian UIs can have multiple.

SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT NEW CSS SELECTORS

:is(), accepts a comma-separated list of selectors and matches any element that can be selected by one of the items in the list, :not(), represents elements that do not match a list of selectors, :has(), is a way to select a parent element based on its children or siblings, and :where(), behaves like the :is() selector, but its specificity is always zero.

HOW AI COULD SILENCE USERS

Users are not just data. They can and should be seen and heard as individuals. As AI becomes more prevalent, human-conducted research becomes more crucial.

EXPLORING SHAPES, COLORS, AND MATERIALS TO EVOKE FEELINGS AND EXPERIENCES

The designs of Takeda Katsuya effortlessly create a harmonious combination of Japanese heritage and the spirit of Milanese innovation. In this interview, Katsuya discusses his unique design philosophy, illustrated through his retail designs for many renowned companies.

ALANA JONES-MANN CREATES COLORFUL CAKES AS A FORM OF MEDITATION

Baker and stylist Alana Jones-Mann creates stunning cake designs that amaze with their beauty and meticulous detailing. She started designing her colorful, retro-inspired tactile cakes as a calming and meditative experience to help her mind realign during a stressful job.

ARE DESIGNERS HAPPY? OUR NEW “STATE OF THE DESIGNER” REPORT AIMS TO FIND OUT

The "State of the Designer" report by Figma explores the impact of changing work styles on designers' job satisfaction, productivity, and relationships. Despite the challenges of the past three years, including a shift to remote work, 69% of designers report greater job satisfaction, with individual contributors feeling the most positive.

GOOGLE CHROME MATERIAL YOU REDESIGN WIDELY ROLLING OUT

Google Chrome's 2023 redesign for its 15th birthday introduces the Material You design language with rounded corners and taller elements like the tab strip and address bar. Significant changes include the removal of the lock icon from the Omnibox, replaced by a site control icon, and a focus on legibility with outline-style icons and reorganized menu items.

INTERVIEW WITH HUMANE COFOUNDER

Imran Chaudhri, cofounder of Humane, speaks about AI Pin, an AI-powered game-changing device announced last week. The former Apple designer discusses everything from privacy and partnerships with "frenemies" to the end of the App Store.

10 DARK PATTERNS IN UX DESIGN AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

Common dark patterns include confirm shaming, fake urgency, bait and switch, privacy suckering, nagging, sneaking, disguised ads, intentional misdirection, the roach motel pattern, preselection, price comparison prevention, trick questions, sneaking into the basket, friend spam, and forced continuity. To avoid dark patterns, designers should prioritize transparency, user control, and ethical design practices, fostering positive user experiences and long-term customer loyalty.

BUSINESSES DON’T HIRE DESIGNERS FOR THEIR GOOD WORK

As a designer, it is your job to contribute to the business's success. However, you should sometimes ask yourself if you want the business to grow and who is profiting from it.

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UNDERSTANDING ACCESSIBILITY

A collection of accessibility guidance that helps designers use colors, typefaces, media, and layout in a way to create accessible experiences.

MONASPACE

A superfamily of five fonts for coding with three variable axes: Neon a neo-grotesuqe sans, Argon a humanist sans, Xenon a slab serif, Radon a handwriting font, and Krypton a mechanical sans. All of them use "texture healing", a feature that improves the spacing between letters to make reading an easier and more pleasurable experience.

DESIGN WEBSITES WITH AI (FIGMA PLUGIN)

Musho converts prompts into near-complete, developer-ready websites with simple layouts, excellent copy, and stunning imagery.

HOW THE GUARDIAN DESIGNED ITS THOUGHTFUL NEW LONG-FORM MAG

A new magazine from The Guardian dedicated to long-form journalism hits newsstands on November 11. When designing the magazine, a lot of attention was given to packaging its large volume of text – clocking in at 55,000 words – to make the reading experience as relaxing as possible, from body type size to column widths.

DESIGN VALIDATION GUIDE: PLAN, PROCESS, EXAMPLES

With design validation, you can ensure your design is user-friendly and considers the business goals. In this practical guide, you will learn how to formulate a design validation plan, tools, and common mistakes to avoid.

HOW TO USE CHATGPT IN YOUR DESIGN WORK

AI-assisted design is poised to change design forever, but most people are stuck on the beginner level. To become proficient, they should try to use it for rapid prototyping of conversational interfaces, user persona generation, generating and iterating on design ideas, copywriting and content creation, usability testing scripts, accessibility and inclusive design, personalized user experience, and microscopy.

CREATING INCLUSIVE AI: A STRENGTHS-BASED APPROACH TO ACCESSIBLE DESIGN

AI-powered systems often overlook people with varying cognitive abilities and disabilities. Researchers are looking for ways to create more accessible intelligent systems that empower users across the spectrum of human ability.

FONTS FOR RENDERING LINES AND BARS FROM DATA

Google Fonts now provides two open-source fonts by Dmitry Ivanov (Linefont and Wavefont) that let you make simplified, small to medium line and bar charts based on data. These might be useful when you want to embed small charts in body text.

SPOTIFY’S REDESIGNED TV APP WORKS MORE LIKE YOUR PHONE

Spotify is releasing a redesigned TV app that simplifies content discovery. The updated app features a new homepage resembling the mobile and desktop versions, displaying most-listened-to content, Made For You playlists, and recent albums or podcasts. It also includes a playback queue, dark mode, and the ability to switch between accounts. This update aims to improve the user experience on smart TVs, gaming consoles, and media streaming devices for both free and Premium users.

HUMANE OFFICIALLY LAUNCHES THE AI PIN, ITS OPENAI-POWERED WEARABLE

Humane has unveiled its first device, the AI Pin, a $699 wearable with a square device and a magnetic battery pack. The AI Pin, powered by a Snapdragon processor, offers voice control, a camera, gestures, and a built-in projector, and it connects to AI models through Humane's AI Mic software. The device is designed to simplify technology interaction by allowing users to communicate with it naturally.

INVESTORS DOUBLE DOWN ON SNAPTRUDE IN CHALLENGING LEGACY BUILDING DESIGN PLATFORMS

Snaptrude, a startup that plans to compete with traditional platforms in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), including Autodesk, Trimble, and Nemetschek, has raised $14 million in a Series A round just ten months after raising seed money. Like Figma functions for designers, Snaptrude offers a modern, cloud-based software suite targeted at architects, designers, developers, and contractors.

SCALABLE DESIGNS ARE A BUSINESS PROBLEM THAT DESIGNERS CAN HELP SOLVE

Designing for scale in specific fields, like Healthcare Technology, Financial Technology, and Enterprise UX, is critical. Often, these fields need to display hundreds of items on well-designed websites and do it in a way that's easy to understand. Simplifying your designs is the best place to start if you're designing for these situations. This article provides a solid foundation for that.

VISUAL DESIGN RULES YOU CAN SAFELY FOLLOW EVERY TIME

A practical set of visual design rules can significantly impact a design's overall aesthetics. Some things on the list include adopting near-black and near-white instead of pure black and white, saturation of neutrals, high contrast on critical elements, and opting for optical alignment instead of mathematical alignment.

50 FONTS THAT WILL BE POPULAR WITH DESIGNERS IN 2024

In 2024, we can expect even more bespoke personalized type, higher quality open-source fonts, crude and quirky sans serifs with lots of personality, and a general move away from typography perfection. The creative community has fully embraced variable fonts so we can expect even more dynamic and experimental types.

YOUR AI-UX ASSISTANT

Using UX Pilot, you can gather requirements, extract user intelligence, run workshops with your team, analyze and ideate, and define your product's look and feel.

PAPER WIREFRAME KIT (FIGMA PLUGIN)

This lofi wireframing kit allows designers to work more quickly and collaborate more efficiently by mimicking the analog process of paper prototyping.

WHY YOU SHOULD USE PX UNITS FOR MARGIN, PADDING, AND OTHER SPACING TECHNIQUES

Content is most important to users when customizing their viewing experience. In many cases, spatial spacing is less important than the content for users to accomplish tasks. That's the logical use case for px units.

TRULY SEMANTIC

A token is semantic when it possesses certain qualities. Semantic tokens don't suggest values. They're always generic and don't depend on each other.

DO THE DESIGN DIGGING

A research and design team that forgets or fails to dig around what’s been learned before is doomed to repeat the learnings. How do we avoid this? A good design process starts by digging around and learning what’s been learned and done before.

A COLOUR-GUESSING GAME FOR HEX CODE FANATICS

Hexcodle is a daily Wordle-style hex color-guessing game.

EXPLORING BAUHAUS INFLUENCE IN 3D ILLUSTRATION

Leonardoworx LWX is a digital artist whose creations combine Bauhaus principles with modern 3D illustration. Three sections of his artworks translate historical artistry into modern visual language: Rationalism, Color Theory, and Less is More.

LAND-BOOK

Land-book is a collection of websites, components, and templates. Items can be searched or browsed by categories and added to a shortlist.

INTRODUCING AI TO FIGJAM

Figma has introduced new AI features in FigJam to enhance visual collaboration. These features aim to lower the entry barrier for users and offer assistance in generating templates, summarizing brainstorming sessions, and automating tasks, making FigJam more accessible and productive.

GOOGLE ADDS NEW SHOPPING FEATURES TO LEVEL UP HOLIDAY GIVING

Google revamped its shopping experience to help its users find good deals. The new features include a dedicated deals page, active promotion notifications on "Resume browsing" cards, price insights in Chrome on the desktop, and price tracking on products you're searching for.

THE 2024 STATE OF THE WEBSITE

A survey conducted by Webflow in partnership with Vanson Bourne surveyed 500 marketing leaders in the U.S. and North America about their current websites. On average, marketing teams spend $1.6M on website teams and software each year, making websites an increasingly expensive and time-consuming asset. Most respondents affirmed that other teams and developers currently restrict their teams.

THE GULF BETWEEN DESIGN AND ENGINEERING

The way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

BUILDING A DRAWER COMPONENT

How to rebuild the Apple’s Sheet component but for the web using React. To close it, users can just “flick it” instead of dragging it down. Dragging it upwards beyond its size will cause a minor slow-down animation to reflect how items move in real life. Scrolling inside the drawer is also made possible and the background gets animated just like it does on iOS.

SYSTEMS OF HARM: 3 PRINCIPLES FOR CREATING SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE DESIGN SYSTEMS

Proponents of design systems emphasize their efficiency, consistency, and scalability. Nevertheless, efficiency is only valuable if it enables us to improve our products and services faster. Consistency is only valuable if we standardize things to a high standard. Scaling things is only worthwhile if they are worth reproducing. Our work is irrelevant and even harmful if we don't reorient the design system practice towards real value.

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BUTTONS.COOL

A collection of free buttons to copy & paste into your project.

ANIMATED ICONS FOR THE MODERN WEB

This collection includes over 1,100 free and premium animated icons you can download as Lottie Animations, MP4s, and GIFs.

SITEMAP GECKO (FIGMA PLUGIN)

Create sitemaps from scratch or import them from a website's URL, all within Figma. After the sitemap is built/imported, it's displayed as editable frames.

FROM IMAGE ADJUSTMENTS TO AI: PHOTOSHOP THROUGH THE YEARS

From simple cropping and image adjustments to layers and cloud support, Photoshop has been on a long and winding road over the last three-and-a-half decades. With twenty-four versions, over a dozen logo changes, and a rich history of updates, Adobe’s magnum opus has cemented itself as the one true king of image editing platforms. And yet, despite the platform’s rich history, Generative AI will likely enter the records as the most significant Photoshop update ever.

ORGANIZING YOUR CREATIVE WORK

Organization and communication are unavoidable inefficiencies in work processes, but you can minimize their impact. A system of organization, especially when powered by AI, lets you focus on creating rather than moving stuff around.