Compilation of best (biased?) UX/UI articles and tools of 2016
A slightly mellow monument to my information hoarding
As a UX designer I find myself constantly reading everything on the topic and around and usually I end up with some 40+ tabs of “I’ll need this later this week” articles. I used some alternatives such as robust, multiplatfrom Evernote ( which of now is quite in a pickle )and in my opinion the best option Dragdis which is neat and lightweight, but it didn’t give me much closure on the things I read. So I decided to put it out here on Medium, here’s a compilation of stuff I bid useful and inspiring.
User Experience // Theoretic things
The Baseline Journey by Adaptive Path
Neat model to define core value proposition and have a coherent “baseline journey” for all user types.
No UI Is The New UI by Tony Aube
On UI’less interaction, messaging-based apps and a particularly nice thought about technological tiller.
Design machines by Travis Gertz
Opus magnum on the state of design and designers in modern context
uxdesign.cc by Fabricio Teixeira
Huge database of all things UX: tools, practices libraries etc.
How to Create Visually Effective Calls-To-Action by Rafal Tomal
Detailed and informative read about how CTA’s should be disruptive and some practical advice.
Motion with Meaning: Semantic Animation in Interface Design
by Tobias Bernard, Amin Al Hazwani
An extreemly satisfying read on UI animation, provides very useful insight
for approaching design with animation in mind from the very beginning.
Driving more valuable customer journeys with emotion mapping by Mind Candy
A two part look at how traditional psychological principles can be used to enhance our user experience decision making and influence user’s decision making on an emotional level.
User Interface // Practical things
Design patterns by Anders Toxboe
Library of UI patterns, nice to look at when you are starting thinking about layout and how to break a feature into UI.
4 tips on typography in UI design by InVision Blog
Some advice on typography, content importance and text-as-UI thing
Jedi Principles of UI Animation by Kit Oliynyk
Indeph and practical view on principles of illustration with lots of examples
Setting Type for User Interfaces by Billy Whited
In-deph workflow of setting type for efficient and legable UI
The Art Of Mixing Typefaces Google Fonts Edition by Shaun Pagin
A cheatsheet of combining Google Fonts for those who are using free typefaces
Top Typographic Resources for UX Designers by jdallcaps
Tools, pairings, foundries iconfonts etc. Feels quite meta posting a compilation to a compilation.
Size Matters: Balancing Line Length And Font Size In Responsive Web Design by Laura Franz
Neat read on optimizing typography for readability, also has nice followup reads
WEB DESIGN IS 95% TYPOGRAPHY & REACTIONS TO 95% TYPOGRAPHY
A sortof manifesto for type as interface & some resource links
Practical typography by Matthew Butterick
Long list of advice on typographic style and best practices
Design principles by Melissa Mandelbaum
Several core interactive design principles beautifully presented, nice for when you start a project.
Content strategy// SEO
The Fundamental Guide To SEO In 2016 by Jayson Demers
Always a good idea to design around content, thus its a good idea to be familiar with how the content is indexed while designing.
Work organisation // Self-esteem
Atomic design methodology
Methodology for designing and developing user interfaces
Lessons Learned from a Young Designer by Evan Ames
Neat read about what to expect from the industry on the organisational/relationship level and how to tackle some of the problems.
I’m an Impostor by David Walsh
Mozilla dev reflects on his carrier path and professional self esteem.
Imagining your future projects is holding you back by Jessica Abel
An argument for doing stuff against dreaming of stuff with a nice twist of having old ideas is an act of being your past self.
Uideo
A compilation of design talks
The right way to end an email to a client
How to write actionable emails
Tools
Flinto
My fav prototyping tool, ultra fast, amazing animations, standalone Mac app and superior Sketch integration.
Craft for Sketch
Amazing plugin for designing with real data which is pulled from all over the web, you can ever tap the exiting pages to leech text & photos
Pixate
Crossplatform app prototypes with animations and interactions
Framer
Web and app prototypes with animations and interactions backed by coding
Marvel
Quick and dirty prototypes, similar to InVision, free with branding applied on prorotype.
Lookback.io
User experience recorder for research
Hotjar
All in one analytics tool with recorders, funnels, heat maps and all the shebang
Full List of UX Prototyping Tools
Not so full list of said tools
Frontify
Lazy persons styleguide creator
Zeplin
Export sketch artboards for development
Principle
Prototype interaction & animation, export gifs
Relay.io
Feedback plugin integrating Photoshop/Sketch to Slack. It’s in beta now (also it just got acquired by InVision), and it’s not clear when what happens, but it looks like its well worth the wait
Resources
Web Framework
Microsoft’s material design — sort of.
Material design
Google’s material design
Semantic UI
Out of the box UI toolkit, useful for MVP
Style Guide Inspirations by Muzli
An obscene amount of styleguides
Misc. Inspiration
Dribbble // Kit Oliynyk
Collection of UI animations, sorted in a witty way.
Samuel Medvedowsky
Minimalistic & Detailed UX designers portfolio
