Type is everywhere. In the books you read, the products you use, and even in this very website you're on right now. But what is type? In the context of design, type is the style or appearance of text. It can also refer to the process of working with text. Typography can often be an intimidating topi
As a designer, it’s important to differentiate the color modes so you can optimize each stage of your design process. If you use the correct color mode in your design, you will also help get your message and tone across. In this lesson, we’ll define common color modes and help you understand when to
Ever sat through a presentation that felt like watching paint dry? You’re not alone. Most presentations miss one vital ingredient: Storytelling. And when it comes to telling stories that make people laugh, cry, or rethink their entire worldview… no one does it like Pixar. They’ve mastered the art of
A myriad of fields, skills and insights come together to create the overarching discipline of user experience design. Psychology and behavioral science play a big part in UX design because understanding people, the way their minds work, what they want and don’t want, will help us create better produ
Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as Sketching, Prototyping, Brainstorming, Cheatstorming, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, and a wealth of other ideation techniques. Ideation is also the third stage in the Design Thinking process. Although many p
Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas
Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t
Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown—because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerou
If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around
The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, you have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, you develop a prototype. Then you test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then you take what you learned fr
After more than 40 years in the field, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is already a well-established design discipline. Now, the pervasiveness of big data, new data collection and interaction techniques is giving rise to a new but related discipline: Human Data Interaction (HDI). This is likely to
User Experience (UX) is critical to the success or failure of a product in the market but what do we mean by UX? All too often UX is confused with usability which describes to some extent how easy a product is to use and it is true that UX as a discipline began with usability – however, UX has grown
It was Albert Einstein who said; “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it well enough.” Though it is often mis-reported as being; “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough.” What Einstein was driving at was a particular application of “keep it simple, s
Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J
Human Computer Interaction is the academic discipline that most of us think of as UI design. It focuses on the way that human beings and computers interact to ever increasing levels of both complexity and simplicity.It’s a Very New DisciplineIt’s perhaps easy to see that until the mid to late 1970s
Let’s look at three subjects that, at first glance, may strike you as being incredibly basic and self-explanatory. However, although they may seem like they should need no introduction, we should study them. By understanding these concepts, you’ll be able to apply them more effectively to captivate
Follow Ben Shneiderman’s 'Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design' if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among some of the highly successful companies whose well-designed products reflect Shneiderman’s rules. The characteristics
Mental models are important in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design because they provide information about how users perceive the world and interact with products or services. Let’s explore this concept more closely.Mental models indicate what a user expects to happen based on exp
Stand-out case studies for your portfolio are simpler to write than you might think. The not-so-secret “secret sauce” is storytelling—something humans have been doing for a long time. As a result, there is a multitude of frameworks, guidelines, and structures that UX/UI designers can take advantage
