Why they don’t read it

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Several years ago, I believed the best documentation should be nicely formatted, concise, well-illustrated, and written in clear language — and this is not wrong. But all these features make little sense if the documentation isn’t regularly used by those for whom it has been created.

If the team doesn’t react to anything you publish, I have bad news: this documentation (specs, reports, guidelines, etc.) might be already “dead.” Here are several typical scenarios of what may have gone wrong:

1. “Approved and forgotten” — design guidelines were created without team involvement and then approved by stakeholders. After the official presentation, someone checked them out, while others didn’t. Since the guidelines were comprehensive, they looked like a huge reading that would take a lot of time.

2. “A perfect monolog” — amazing design knowledge base inspired lots of team ideas and questions, but commenting was either absent in the tool or disabled. As a result, the discussion occurred elsewhere, in Slack or MS Teams, and soon this chat became a more valuable “source of truth” than the knowledge base itself.

3. “Lone warrior” — design system documentation was detailed and well-structured but didn’t include any links to what other team members (engineers, QAs, UX researchers, etc.) were doing. As a result, it remained just the designers’ resource, and designers had to answer the same repeated questions in the chat or team meetings.

Documentation is a digital product no less than the actual product you are designing and being paid for.

Dieter Rams, Vitsœ's furniture designer. Ten principles for good design (sometimes referred to as the ‘Ten commandments’).

A UI design case study to redesign an example user interface using logical rules or guidelines

Use space to group related elements
Be consistent
Ensure similar looking elements function similarly
Create a clear visual hierarchy
Remove unnecessary styles
Use colour purposefully
Ensure interface elements have a 3:1 contrast ratio
Ensure text has a 4.5:1 contrast ratio
Don’t rely on colour alone as an indicator
Use a single sans serif typeface
Use a typeface with taller lower case letters
Limit the use of uppercase
Use regular and bold font weights only
Avoid pure black text
Left align text
Use at least 1.5 line height for body text

Illustration placeholders for developers. Powered by Blush

When designing for digital spaces, it’s natural to default to digital mockup tools, but doing so cuts out a world of possibilities. Analog drawing can unleash your imagination and allow you to focus on what’s most important at the start: the ideas.

• Use near-black and near-white instead of pure black and white
• Saturate your neutrals
• If you saturate your neutrals you should use warm or cool colours, not both
• Use high contrast for important elements
• Everything in your design should be deliberate
• Optical alignment is often better than mathematical alignment
• Lower letter spacing and line height with larger text. Raise them with smaller text
• Container borders should contrast with both the container and the background
• Everything should be aligned with something else
• Colours in a palette should have distinct brightness values
• Closer elements should be lighter
• Make drop shadow blur values double their distance values
• Keep container colours within brightness limits
• Make horizontal padding twice the vertical padding in buttons
• Nest corners properly
• Don’t put two hard divides next to each other

5 ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR HACKS to improve your illustrations in Adobe Illustrator CC.

Shape Builder Tool for Beginners: https://youtu.be/AMqc3sRQ_-M

Pen Tool Tutorial for Beginners: https://youtu.be/SlUZaoGO9zU

• Sketch and gather references
• Use the tools Illustrator has to offer
• Plan out your color palette
• Add contrasting shadows and highlights

Revolutionary Snake Ensemble poster

James Weinberg is a designer, illustrator, and screenprinter out of Somerville MA. With a hands on approach he creates everything from illustration, brand identity, bookjackets, hand silkscreened posters, packaging and murals. His work has been featured in The AIGA BoNE Show, Communication Arts, Print and Uppercase.

Illustrated tips for making your UI and web designs more visually interesting · Backgrounds · Borders & dividers · Shadows · Text · Other techniques

When you have Screen and Multiply, there is no good reason to use Lighten or Darken.

A set of real-world challenges to practice crucial UX design skills. Train yourself in product design and take away portfolio-worthy deliverables.

Create animated videos in your browser like never before 🎥

Motionity is a free & open source motion graphics editor for the web 🙌 Browse assets, add keyframes with easing, mask layers, apply filters, text animations, Lotties, audio, and much more.

https://www.motionity.app/

https://twitter.com/alyssaxuu

Sonuum is an upcoming feature-packed audio editor for the web 👀 Contextual feedback, shared team libraries, sleek design, collaborative features, and much more.

👉 https://sonuum.com

Color Lisa is a curated list of inspiring color palettes based famous work of the world's greatest artists. Each palette was painstakingly created by color obsessed designers, artists, museum curators, and masters of color theory.

Any one of these 11 book cover mistakes could ruin all your other book marketing efforts. Learn how to avoid them.

lousybookcovers.com

Mistake-proofing or Poka-Yoke is a process analysis tools that either makes it impossible for an error to occur or makes the error immediately obvious once it has occurred.

More broadly, the term can refer to any behavior-shaping constraint designed into a process to prevent incorrect operation by the user.

"Idiot-proof"

Graphic designer Eugène Grasset’s 1897 book, Plants and Their Application to Ornament, vividly demonstrates the ways in which nature was distilled into popular decorative motifs at the end of the 19th-century.

What I have come to realize is that the trough of despair isn’t just normal, it’s essential. The negative feelings you experience in the trough tell you whether the work you’re doing is hard or complex enough to deserve your full creative attention. Only challenges that don’t have easy answers require you to take the kinds of difficult creative leaps that lead to breakthroughs. Only work that requires you to push yourself to develop new skills—not just deploy the ones you already have—keeps you on the edge of your own learning curve and, therefore, reaching toward your full potential.

The difficulty in drawing from a photograph is knowing what to omit. The photograph contains too much information and generally too many contrary sources of light. Drawing from a photograph is a matter of selection and editing. Degas used photographs in an appropriate way. That is to say, he was not dominated by the material contained in the photo, and felt free to depart from it at will.

Illustration means to shed light on, or to make clear. Drawing suggests the idea of revealing something that is contained within an object and can be drawn out, rather than something that is on the surface. This may explain why those who begin to draw often start with the bones. Both activities require intelligence, perseverance, and talent.

Meet the Extendabox-rule

The four strokes making up a box end at each intersection. But in our unconsciousness, every one of those lines draws out an imaginary line much further, through the entirety of your design.

A grid works the other way around: you define a set of columns, gutters, and rows to make up certain sections of your design, and you then position all of your objects onto that grid.

Do yourself a favor. Write down the story of your project.

By writing, you’re making sense of things.

You will untangle what is on your head and make it explicit.