Nowadays, it is very rare to see a one-to-one ratio of designers to developers in any software company. From what I’ve seen, the number of developers working on a product tends to be significantly higher than the number of designers. I am aware that by the nature of both roles, most of the time, this makes sense. However, this brings an additional challenge for the designers: handling multiple tasks/projects at the same time.

Development teams almost always work on multiple features at a time. On paper, this shouldn’t really affect the work of the designer as most of the time…

I’ve been working on accessibility quite a lot recently. I’ve been following the usual advices given by the community, having a good contrast ratio, making sure we use semantic HTML, picking color blind friendly colors, using aria-label’s where appropriate and verifying that the tab order of items are logical. These are all very important aspects and there are many more that I didn’t name here.

And to test what I designed, I was using some tools that would allow me to evaluate these things. For example, I would use an external tool to tell me if there are any contrast…

When working on a product for a long time, it is very easy to start seeing it as a set of features. As the team always works to get the next feature out, it becomes very common for people to forget the initial goal: solving users’ problem.

We always talk about “What do we build next?”. We start coming up with features, that seem to be the “common sense” for such a product. But I think this is one of those times where common sense doesn’t really work.

As the people building the product, we have a completely different perspective…

Recently, I’ve been creating some animations for the project I am currently working on. Before I started with the main work, I wanted to make sure that I knew what deliverables I would need to provide to the developers for the handoff.

While figuring things out, my findings eventually led me to change the way I create animations and I wanted to share what I came up with.

The gap between design and development

There have been a ton of new design tools emerging recently. It is now easier than ever to create great looking animations and transitions with all the details you could ever want…

We’ve all dealt with the issues when someone is trying to talk about “that light blue button just below the thing with the sliding images” or when you feel the need to open the design document just to make people understand which component you are talking about.

The main reason we have these issues is the lack of proper names for the things we are trying to refer to. What starts with a small annoyance in daily discussions can turn into one of the biggest contributors to the poor communication between product, design and engineering teams.

A solid design system…

Recently I started seeing a trend where fellow designers skip wireframing/low-fidelity-mockups and jump straight into their UI work. While for “some” tasks this might be okay, I believe for majority of your tasks, this will hurt your final design.

First, what do I mean by wireframing?

When I say wireframing, I am not really talking about fancy wireframes built pixel perfect with nice colours and everything, like the stuff you see on Dribbble.

What I am talking about is any kind of quick sketch of the layout. How you create it is completely of your own choice, you can use pen&paper, Sketch, Balsamiq Mockups etc. …

Every designer faces hard to make design decisions throughout a project. Making the right call in these circumstances is what separates a great designer from a good one.

Yet, design decisions shouldn’t be always coming from the gut feeling of the designer. As gut feeling can result in unexpectedly good results from time to time, there is always another option if you are looking for a more stable option; using data.

Being able to present a solid reasoning of why one design is better than another would both help you sleep better at nights, and also make your team/manager/client to…

Recently I’ve been experimenting with different design workflows to improve my productivity when working with other designers in the same project. Today, I want to talk about my experience working with another designer in two different projects using two different design workflows.

Projects

Both these projects were redesigns of existing websites and both were mostly focused on UI work. So I will be mostly talking about UI here, however almost everything is completely valid for UX flows as well.

The first project was for a client so I won’t be able to share much about the content of the design. However…