An important part of our job is staying up to date. Technologies don’t really change that fast — HTML5 and CSS3 take a long time to be specified and implemented. But the ideas surrounding these technologies and the things we can do with them are constantly evolving, and hundreds of blog posts and articles are published every day. There’s no way [...]

    I hear a lot of people talking about the importance of sketching when designing or problem-solving, yet it seems that very few people actually sketch. As a UX professional, I sketch every day. I often take over entire walls in our office and cover them with sketches, [...]

    In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits! Your hands are the original digital devices — Lynda Barry People often ask how I arrived at a finished illustration. Honestly, it’s different every time, but it always starts with a hand-drawn sketch. [...]

    Right there in the center of my boilerplate for design proposals is a section that I glare at with more resentment each time I complete it. It’s called “Deliverables,” and it’s there because clients expect it: a list of things I’ll deliver for the amount [...]

    Right there in the center of my boilerplate for design proposals is a section that I glare at with more resentment each time I complete it. It’s called “Deliverables,” and it’s there because clients expect it: a list of things I’ll deliver for the amount [...]

   I was a competitive road cyclist for four years. My bikes were good, but my race results were much less impressive. Instead of medals and trophies, all I had to show for it were shaved legs and a farmer’s tan. Regardless, on the road to becoming a competitive athlete, I followed a rigorous training plan with concrete goals. These goals were specific, measurable, [...]

   In part one of this series, we looked at the consequences of designing and developing software in isolated environments. Some people work in lonely silos where no process exists, while others work in functional silos where too much (or the wrong) process makes innovation and progress difficult. So, how do we break down the artificial walls that keep us from creating [...]

   Are you fed up with hearing about yet another Silicon Valley Web application built with fairy dust and funded by magic pixies? If so, this post is for you. Most of us will never get to work on a Web application that is funded by venture capital and for which the business aims are a secondary consideration. For us, developing a Web application is about meeting a [...]

  Where do good ideas come from? It’s a question that matters a great deal to designers, yet seems to be curiously discounted in the common perception of graphic design. Any time I talk with, say, an uncle at Thanksgiving about my work, I’m reminded that, in most people’s minds, the job of being a designer is mainly a matter of learning a set of computer applications — programs [...]