Here are the rules:

Light comes from the sky (see Part 1)
Black and white first (see Part 1)
Double your whitespace (see Part 1)
Learn the methods of overlaying text on images
Make text pop— and un-pop
Only use good fonts
Steal like an artist

The Art of Designing With Heart
How to make useful, friendly software for real people.
One of the things I love about making software is that it’s a deeply mental exercise, chock full of heady processes, abstractions, and interconnected pathways.

YOUR SOFTWARE EXISTS TO HELP PEOPLE!

The aspect of using dark colors and shades in backgrounds of user interfaces still belongs to highly debatable issues. No wonder it's so actual: choosing appropriate background plays vital role on all the product efficiency as it can become a key factor enhancing or, vice versa, killing other design solutions around the layout and functionality. Today our article will be devoted to benefits and pitfalls of using dark background in UI design, so let's move on the dark side.

Congratulations. From this day forward, you will no longer squander your time trying to work out the perfect regex to validate email addresses. You will also never again run the risk of rejecting what is, in fact, a strange, valid email address.

The upshot
There is no point in trying to work out if an email address is ‘valid’. A user is far more likely to enter a wrong and valid email address than they are to enter an invalid one.

Therefore, you are better off spending your time doing literally any other thing than trying to validate email addresses.

A look at the colour trend taking the world by storm
The modern web is full of colour-from subtle to bright ‘in your face’ tones. I’ll be taking a look at the latter. Meet duotone-the hottest colour style of 2016.

Pure duotone & other tonal groupings

Love it or loathe it-duotone is everywhere right now. As the name suggests, duotone is an image made up of two colours, usually vibrant shades are used but you can select more subdued ones if you wish.

Why would we limit the effectiveness of body text by minimizing its size to a browser-default that’s now over 20 years old, even on large displays?

I recently came across an article titled “Web typography is broken. Here’s how we can fix it”. A mix of emotions rushed through me while I read through it. I realized that the biggest argument Tom was making in the article was that web typography is broken because type doesn’t sit perfectly on a baseline grid.

1. They’re Smarter Than You Think
2. They Have Other Things To Do
3. They Have a “Doing Mode”
4. They “Satisfice”
5. They Don’t Use Your Software The Way You Intended
6. They Rely On Patterns
7. They See What’s There
8. They Lie
9. They Don’t Know What’s Possible
10. If You Improve Their Lives, They’ll Love You
11. They Blame Themselves for Mistakes When It’s Your Fault
12. Their User “Experience” Is Based On Far More Than Your Website

It has come to my attention that one of the more noticeable traits in my design work is my willingness to use what is perceived to be an excessive number of typefaces. I’ve seen countless articles written on typeface pairing and systems, and nearly all of them push towards using fewer families in any given design. I’ve seen similar comments made towards my own work, implying that they are pleasing despite the number of typefaces they use.

How’s it going, compadres? This month’s roundup hand-picked from all across the web includes icons, design assets, illustrations, vector artwork, UI kits, some really cool code snippets, fonts, templates, some awesome tools, and much much more.

Create beautiful apps with modular and customizable UI components.

Flexbox cheatsheet

There are two basic questions you need to ask yourself at the start of any UX project. Let’s break it down.

WHAT DOES THE USER WANT?

WHAT DOES THE CLIENT WANT?

DESIGN FOR THE USER
Have you come across designers who seem to design for other designers, but not for the end user? I know I have. I’ve also come across designers who design for the client instead of the end user. And, if we’re going to be completely honest here, I’ve also come across designers who design for their own ego exclusively. It fills me with cringe.

4-Second Rule
If you want users to stay on your app, don’t use spinners for processes that take longer than 4 seconds to load. A research study has found that most users’ tolerable wait time is 4 seconds. This means that their behavioral intentions begin to change after 4 seconds.

Today we want to share some neat grid navigation effects using jQuery. In our examples we will show you ten ways how to navigate through a set of thumbnails. We’ll take a look at some of the possibilities and how to apply the effect.

Digital experiences are emulating real life more and more every day. This may seem counterintuitive, considering the hate that rains down on skeuomorphic visual design, but there’s a lot more to emulating real life than aesthetics. Interface designers can emulate real-life physics and movement on a digital screen. This type of motion is becoming more common, which is why it’s becoming easier for people to understand computers. We’re not getting better, the interfaces are!

Menu -> X transition

In a way or another, pretty much everyone has used Bootstrap at least once. Millions of websites, prototypes, and themes for well-known CMSs (such as WordPress) are based on Bootstrap. The framework is simple to install, easy to use, and incredibly time-saving. It's built on high quality HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that allows you to create good-looking designs with a minimal effort.