Ideas on a little slip of paper are cheap. They flow. There’s no cost to being wrong, so there’s no reason to self-edit. It’s easier to stay generative.

The minute you turn on the screen, you’re not generating. You’re editing.

Humans can’t endure boredom for a long time, which is why products that are built for non-exciting, repetitive tasks so often get abandoned and gather dust on computers and phones. But boredom, according to psychologists, is merely lack of stimulation, the unfulfilled desire for satisfying activity. So what if we use the interface to give them that stimulation?

• Gameification
• Humor
• Animation
• Art

As some of the finest fictional world-builders have understood, few things excite the imagination like a map. And despite the geographical limitation implied by its title, National Geographic’s maps have surveyed the entire globe and beyond. The magazine’s articles have not always presented an enlightened point of view, but for all its historical failings, the richly-illustrated monthly has excelled as a showcase for cartography, over which readers might spend hours, projecting themselves into unknown lands, journeying through the carefully-drawn topographies, cityscapes, and celestial charts.

The colors game in these are top notch.

 — via Elena Iv-skaya

#02ba94

I want to clarify my priorities
by defining my goals and the path to reach them.

The DIY Toolkit has been especially designed for development practitioners to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results.

Due to my belief in learning through self-discovery and my ongoing creative evolution, I've long put off doing any tutorials. However, after making pixel art for over 3 years I've established many solid techniques worth laying out in a concrete fashion. While I'm excited by the prospect of helping others with my experience, I still urge artists to explore things their own way. The wonderful thing about art is the unlimited number of solutions to a problem. I offer you solutions that have worked for me and I hope they work for you, but I will be even more thrilled if you discover a better solution along the way.

Like a swatch book, HSB provides a great scale for finding a color. It can be useful for pinning down a match for the color you’ve seen in your head, on a screen, or in the real world. Like a painter’s palette, RGB provides a great space for mixing color. It can be used to create organic and harmonious relationships between two or more colors in a palette.

"User experience is the net sum of every interaction a person has with a company, be it marketing collateral, a customer service call, or the product or service itself. It is affected by the company’s vision and the beliefs it holds and its practices, as well as the service or product’s purpose and the value it holds in a person’s life."

"Every detail of a company and its product says something about it. User experience strategy and design ensures that these messages are put forth with intention and purpose. Design extends into each and every detail, and each and every detail can indeed be designed."

"The job of a designer, just like that of a writer, is to twist and stretch and shape a conceptualized piece of work over and over again until it becomes the masterpiece the world needs it to be."

"A user's experience belongs to the user. An experience cannot be designed. It can, however, be influenced. A designer’s job is to be the influencer."

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

When I review icons submitted to Iconfinder, I have a responsibility to our designers and to our customers to make sure all premium icons on the site are the highest possible quality. But the difference between “not quite good enough” and “premium quality” is often very small and usually involves minimal changes. In this article I have distilled my design guidelines into Six Easy Steps to Better Icon Design. The steps follow the basics of sound icon design and should be seen as a guide, not a dogmatic rule book. The savvy designer knows when he or she can break the rules for the greatest benefit.

1. What does success look like for this project?
2. How can failure be avoided with this project? What are you worried might go wrong?
3. What will happen to your business if nothing changes?
4. Where do you see your business a year from now? Three years from now? Ten years from now?
5. What is the single hardest thing in your business right now?

By developing your taste and ability to identify strengths and weaknesses in designs, you end up setting a high bar for your work.

In user experience design we’re familiar with user research techniques like workshops and interviews. We synthesise our research into user stories and process flows. We communicate our thinking and solutions to our teams with artefacts like personas and wireframes. But somewhere in all of this lies the real people for whom we’re designing. In order to make our product better, we must understand what’s going on in their worlds and how our product can make their lives better. And that’s where storyboards come in.

Invisible space in the story of ‘The Purloined Letter’. Focused on the relationship between events, characters and the signifier

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.

Check out our design articles, interactive tutorials and awesome tips.

We asked some of our favorite professors and lecturers who use InVision in their classrooms to share their thoughts on design. Here’s what the educators shaping the next generation of designers had to say.

We run through the 11 steps of logo design, giving tips and tricks on how best to harness these themes in logos.

Whatever is the direction digital artists choose for their professional realization, one of the crucial and hardest challenges is finding own creative style. Today we are discussing this theme with Tubik graphic designer Yaroslava Yatsuba, now experienced in both traditional and digital art. She is keen to share some useful tips and practices helping designers to find and keep their own style in business and theme flat illustrations for various purposes. Let’s consider what graphic designers could do so that not to sink in the variety of styles and catch their own golden fish fulfilling professional goals.

1. Use color and weight to create hierarchy instead of size
2. Don’t use grey text on colored backgrounds
3. Offset your shadows
4. Use fewer borders
5. Don’t blow up icons that are meant to be small
6. Use accent borders to add color to a bland design
7. Not every button needs a background color