03: Day-to-day practicalities
Sick of reading about design-theory and how to solve big problems? Let’s say mahalo to the all these practical posts—dealing with the day-to-day of making web designs and user interfaces.
Yes, sadly — responsive design is still hard in 2017.
We have been talking about how to do responsive design for years now and it’s still difficult. Kevin Vigneault offers a refreshing look at a way to think about designing for mobile, considering common viewport as a guide to creating more readable, mobile layouts. Thank you Flexbox.
Do Responsive Sites have to be so Tall on Mobile? • 3 min article →
Is that message really helpful?
I can attest, working at Trade Me for nearly a year, I’ve gotten good at saying sorry to the users. I’ve learned that translating word for word what the developers say (i.e. “Sorry, that’s not how the API works”) won’t fly when a user is trying to, for example, add their mobile phone number to the wrong landline field. The question that Rafał Cymerys poses: “Is that message really helpful?” is a perfect question to ask every time we craft these experiences.
How many ways can we make a button in Sketch?
There has been a massive influx of how to make really complicated nested symbols within Sketch in the past few months (probably because they recently supported it). Alberto Orsini’s article says this approach making buttons made his life easier while redesign HBO Go. I actually prefer Jonathan Moore’s article: It overall seems a bit more robust and he goes into details like adding icons and rounded corners. Jon Moore has a lot of great articles on being a master at Sketch. But seriously Bohemian Coding, if you are listening: please just add a color override.
Here’s a much better way to manage spacing, margins, and padding.
I love Samantha Zhang’s humble article on modular design because she admits this web stuff we are all trying to do is hard. Her solution, comparing at how lego bricks stack together, proposes that we remove all the spacing on structural divs like .row and .col, and apply the spacing only on the lowest-level web elements. Brilliant!
Learning from Lego: A Step Forward in Modular Web Design • 10 minute article →
Shooooots — that’s awesome.
Want to be an expert designer? You need to exercise, just like anything. Sharpen.design seems like a great website to help those on the path of mastery! I gave it a try, time boxed whatever I got to an hour, and experimented with Adobe’s new app, XD. Check out the work.
Don’t forget…
Atomic’s Product Design Weekly
Curated posts from Designer News
Muzli Design Inspiration
Welcome to Mahalo — a way to give thanks to those in the wonderful, awe-inspiring world of design, UX, and digital-experiences! I (along with periodic guests) will curate links from around the web for you to be stoked on. If you want me to check out what you’ve been up to or an article that inspired you, send me a message! — Cody Iddings
