"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

Sketching is great, but before I start sketching, I start writing. Writing first has lots of advantages, regardless of the project you’re working on. Here are a few examples.

The Rules of Type Design

Here are my proposed rules for Type Design:

You can use lines or strokes.

You can use icons.

You can use typography.

You can change the color of the background.

You can use images.

Each year we learn something new about design and 2016 was no different.
After last year’s article had such a success we decided to make some predictions for 2017, so let's get started!

Design trends are influenced by media, technology, the fashion industry and, lately usability. A trend emerges slowly, gradually, making its way into all design branches, and then disappears in exactly the same way. Basically a design trend's life is no longer than one or two years. Design in 2017 will continue the trends that materialized in 2016 while adding some new influences, but the feeling is well known and familiar and you may have seen it in the past couple of years. The main influencer remains Google's Material Design, that suffers a few changes.

In conversation with Co.Design, the eminent design researcher Don Norman offers cutting criticism of Silicon Valley’s brightest.

The internet has shape preferences, and they’re more meaningful than you think

On Thursday, Twitter threw us a curveball (sorry) and smoothed out the once-square avatar photos into orbs floating around the timeline. The change is notable, but the circle vs. square debate is far from new. There are arguments in favor of both when applied to internet design; circles indicate a person rather than content, which typically comes in a grid-like shape. So what is the current state of shapes on the social web?

Yesterday’s graphic designers are today’s UX designers. Will tomorrow’s UX designers be avatar programmers, fusionists, and artificial organ designers? Yes, according to the illustrious roster of design leaders we spoke with here.

My favourite Mac app icons are simple enough to be easily read in the Dock, yet they contain interesting details when viewed up close. They have large vibrant areas of colour, yet they contain enough contrast and shading to give them a sense of volume.