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Common roadblocks for designers and developers include communication issues, messy handoffs, and ineffective collaboration. This article offers tips on how to enhance workflows and collaborate more effectively, like adopting design systems to create a shared language and considering technical constraints when building the design vision.
The demise of Flash was followed by the introduction of Muse, which also declined and was eventually discontinued. We are nearly 30 years into the Internet age, and Adobe, the leading provider of publishing tools, still has yet to provide web designers with appropriate web tools.
Boost your typography skills with these 11 simple and effective rules.
Iconic is a collection of 200 free stunning icons with weekly additions.
Experiment and design things daily in February using Figma to push your creativity limits. The first challenge invites you to create a landscape illustration of a city, skyscraper, or whatever your imagination leads you to.
Letterboxd is an app where users can keep track of movies they watched, share their lists with friends, and discuss them, like a social network on top of IMDB. The app needs to stand up to user expectations because of a lack of focus on two main jobs to be done: keeping track of watched movies and engaging socially with other users.
The “personalization paradox” refers to the clash between personalized experiences that save us time and concern about the personal data they require. However, privacy isn’t the only trade-off we make for the convenience of personalization. Personalized content recommendations are engineered to keep users on platforms longer and get users into a trance-like state.
Businesses can reduce single-use plastics by designing reusable packaging, but this has yet to be successful at scale. Consumer motivation for environmentally friendly behavior is high, but we shouldn't ignore people's tendency to prefer convenience, even when it has tragic consequences. While you can't control what people do with packaging once it leaves your premises, you can still influence them by considering behavioral psychology in packaging design.
Designer Jonas Daehnert has envisioned a new Apple Ring based on patents that suggest Apple may be working on a similar product. The ring features an exciting-looking OLED that is invisible when not in use and capacitive buttons that can be pressed to check the weather, monitor blood oxygen levels, and more.
24-year-old British artist Maisie Matilda is reviving the rare art of book fore-edge painting. She's got over half a million Instagram followers. Her process involves selecting a book, preparing it, and then delicately painting on the fore-edge.
The Brooklyn-based design studio created a system that amplifies the institution’s relevance, liberatory practices, and social consciousness. The project involved developing a new typeface and unified visual identity and creating greater consistency in the letterform design and spacing to align it more with the historical signage.
Reddit has launched a new mini-site offering marketing tips for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The site showcases Reddit's value for SMB promotions with user-trusted recommendations, specific ad tips, and downloadable resources to optimize campaigns on the platform. Ahead of its IPO, this is another attempt by Reddit to enhance its promotional offerings and create a more brand-safe environment to maximize revenue opportunities and improve engagement for millions of users.
Netflix’s advertising business is gaining steady momentum. The segment grew 70% quarter-over-quarter in Q4 while adding a chunk of new users to reach 23 million monthly active users. Live programming is a key piece of Netflix's CTV future as it aims to compete with offerings like Amazon’s Thursday Night Football. Netflix notably just unveiled a $5 billion 10-year deal to bring WWE’s Raw to its service beginning in 2025.
Launching at least 2 to 3 A/B tests per month enables you to increase your website conversion rate and revenue much faster. One strategy is to use the visual editor in your A/B testing tool to improve wording and imagery. You can also use a platform like Upwork to find individual A/B test developers. Alternatively, outsourcing the work to an A/B test development agency is sometimes the right call. If the development shortage isn’t improving, you’ll need to work on getting buy-in from senior management by proving the ROI and being specific about what resources you need.
Halara’s viral campaign began with organic content. It can be traced back to a March 2021 influencer post by Meg and Jack wearing Halara clothing. The brand also strategically utilizes paid advertising on TikTok, leading to over half a million sales in 2 months. It prioritizes UGC, collaborates extensively with creators, uses affiliate marketing, invests in a campus ambassador program, and plans pop-ups in New York.
44% of people use TikTok for search because the short video format is more informative and digestible. 18% of product or service reviews on TikTok outperform traditional SERPs. Its ranking factors include user interaction, video information, and device and account settings. Brands should research what their audience is looking for and then use TikTok Creative Center and the app’s search bar auto-complete feature to figure out what performs best. Keywords and hashtags in post descriptions are critical.
Stare contains an extensive, free collection of case studies and product teardowns from brands like Airbnb, Nike, Duolingo, and YouTube. The collection can be filtered by objectives like activation, engagement, gamification, acquisition, GTM, and growth.
This post breaks down how to create a storyboard using ChatGPT and Canva in 13 steps. The process won’t be perfect the first time around as it’ll take time to edit and finalize. However, it will be a large time-saver compared to the traditional way of video storyboarding. The post includes templated ChatGPT prompts and step-by-step Canva tips for using Grids in the “Elements” section.
A successful and marketable product solves a customer’s problem. To gauge if your product is actually marketable, ask yourself how many people are aware they have the problem being solved. Too often, startups try to solve problems that people aren’t aware they have. Next, ask how often the problem shows up. The more frequent the problem shows up, the more likely someone will pay to solve it. Finally, determine what the impact is of not solving the problem. If nothing bad happens when the problem goes unsolved, it’s a signal that no real market exists. Answering these questions helps you understand your customers better and plan more effective marketing.
Jam, a bug reporting tool, achieved 10x growth in 2023, going from 0 to 1 million users after 18 months of experimentation that included seven failed launches. In this article, the CEO of the company shares valuable learnings from his journey. The article covers how to conduct extensive internal testing, prioritizing quality over early launches, running small-scale focused pilots, and tracking retention metrics as crucial elements in achieving product-market fit.
This report spotlights brands excelling on social media. The highlights include Auntie Anne's clever engagement with Taylor Swift fans, Independence Village Senior Living's viral content, Topicals' unique celebration of Black creators, and Calvin Klein's successful campaign featuring Jeremy Allen White. It showcases campaign creatives and explains the strategies, with recommendations on how to replicate them.
10 questions to ask yourself when looking at an industry benchmark report to evaluate whether you should actually rely on its data.
A product marketing manager playbook in succeeding the first 90 days of the role. It includes a visual that outlines exactly what you need to learn and deliver and who to network with.
This post covers 9 differences between good vs. great content.
Stripe developed a “smart retries” tool that uses ML to determine the best time to retry failed payments. The tool helped some businesses recover over $100 million in revenue. This article goes into detail on how the tool was implemented and provides 4 key lessons on building and choosing the right ML model and giving customers control over how often payments are retried.
The team at SonarQube recently upgraded from React 17 to 18. In this article, they share the three biggest issues and lessons they learned during the process. TypeScript needs to be updated with React. There is a set of codemods released by the React Core team that helps to automatically update types, but they come with a couple of issues. React 18 enables automatic batching by default which can boost performance, but it can also break UI tests and uncover other underlying issues.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much a page shifts while it is being loaded. It can negatively impact both search rankings and user perception of site speed. Images are a common cause of CLS problems. To improve CLS, web developers can give the browser hints of what size images will be by giving images a width and height attribute separate from the CSS width and height attributes that are part of the style tag.
Scrum is often used as a process to manage teams, especially remote teams. However, it can add 8 hours of meetings per sprint, which is equal to 2 full days of productivity per month. Many projects can’t be easily forced into a 2-week sprint process. Using a collaborative document for each project that addresses the key questions is more efficient. Meetings can be held to address denser tradeoff decisions as long interactions over async communication can create long lead times.
Estimating project timelines in software is hard. Initial estimates are commonly disrupted by external pressures to deliver faster. Estimates are also pressured by cross-functional teams, upper management, and ego-driven desires for faster delivery. To deal with these pressures, it’s helpful to focus on project scope, use productivity metrics, and address optimism bias and black swan events.
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Inefficient code, resource bottlenecks, and slow database calls slow your app to a crawl. In this workshop, Sentry [10] engineer Tony Xiao will demo the latest feature he built for Sentry Performance – automatic regression detection for API endpoints [10]. See how to trace end-to-end requests, identify root causes, and nip endpoint
Zed is a high-performance multiplayer code editor from the creators of the code editor Atom.
Retriever lets you request secrets from anyone without any of the data going to a server.
Resend’s React Email 2 includes features such as a new preview experience, significant performance improvements, new components for displaying code, and the ability to deploy to Vercel. The preview experience has been revamped with new mobile previews, a revamped file tree, better user feedback, and improved error handling. New components, including a code-block and code-inline component, make it easier to display code in emails.
Jam, a bug reporting tool, achieved remarkable growth in 2023, going from zero to one million Jams created. It took 18 months and seven failed launches before it achieved product-market fit. To reach this milestone, Jam used internal testing extensively, focused on quality, had a small group of focused pilot users, and tracked retention.
Just like a house needs maintenance, so does software. Software requires ongoing maintenance and support, which varies depending on the model of software (open-source, on-prem, or SaaS). SaaS changed the landscape by offering fixed "rent" costs and reducing the need for in-house support. The “one-off” software model is unsustainable in the long term and it often leads to worse support, buggy software, and a shoddy product.
An entrepreneur gives up after having tried many things, with nothing working.
Fake spinners and loading bars often give users a better user experience by giving them confidence in the result after the progress indicator disappears.
A story about an obscure Apple flag for the DNS resolver on the system that broke one’s Spotify client.
Ollama lets you run LLM models locally. Python and JavaScript libraries are now available for Ollama.
The Rabbit R1 is a bright orange walkie-talkie for AI. It features one big button that users push to talk, a chunky scroll wheel to browse the screen, and a rotating camera with its own privacy door. At $199, the device can be programmed to control apps and websites. This article tells the story of how Rabbit and Teenage Engineering collaborated to create what may be the most successful AI hardware launch to date.
Pictures of what appears to be Google's Pixel 9 Pro flagship have been leaked. They show a device with completely flat edges and a redesigned camera bar. The Pixel 9 Pro features a three-camera setup inside an oval-shaped island, similar to the Pixel Fold. It appears to be slightly smaller than the Pixel 8 Pro with a 6.5-inch display. The SIM card slot now appears to be on the bottom of the device alongside the USB-C port. Google typically releases its Pixel phones every fall.
This article presents a list of cutting-edge robotics startups and labs that Bill Gates is excited about. The last year has seen advancements in artificial intelligence that have resulted in programs that can create, calculate, process, understand, decide, recognize patterns, and learn in ways that resemble how humans learn. However, many robots still struggle to perform basic human tasks that require dexterity, mobility, and cognition. The applications for robots are almost limitless. While there will be issues with robots taking people's jobs, it's less likely that robots will replace jobs that people love and more likely that they'll be doing work people don't want to do.
Scientists are on the cusp of developing therapies to restore immune tolerance in conditions such as diabetes, lupus, and multiple sclerosis. Tolerance refers to the immune system's ability to ignore antigens that belong to the body while appropriately attacking those that don't. Current therapies for these diseases don't always work, and even when they do, the improvement is often modest. Results from studies are starting to show that it is possible to create curative treatments for these diseases. This article looks at several approaches that scientists are looking at to make those treatments a reality.
TypeSpec is a language for describing cloud service APIs and generating other API description languages, client and service code, documentation, and other assets. It provides highly extensible core language primitives that can describe API shapes common among REST, OpenAPI, GraphQL, gRPC, and other protocols. TypeSpec can create reusable patterns that establish guardrails for API designers and make it easy to follow best practices. A playground is available for trying TypeSpec without installing anything.
This book aims to help developers kick-start their journey to more efficient and error-free coding. It shares essential insights and best practices in web development. The book addresses common challenges, simplifies best practices, and teaches developers how to create readable, maintainable, and scalable code. The tips contained within will help developers collaborate with each other and become more efficient.
2023 looked like one of the gaming industry's greatest-ever years to players and outside observers. There were many top-title releases, and hardware developments offered substantial improvements to the gaming experience. However, the year was brutal for those working in the industry. A record number of employees in the industry were laid off in 2023, and these layoffs have continued in 2024. Video game revenues are falling and development costs have grown considerably.