I find working with the grid helpful. The grid helps to maintain consistency across the different layouts and make faster design decisions. Grids give more precise control over alignments and layout on different screen sizes.

Fixed-Width Layout Grid Setup

To set up a fixed-width grid, we use fixed numeric value for gutters and columns. I recommend 74px wide columns, 32px wide gutters and 16px side margins on each side.

Mobile View

For mobile devices, we use a fluid grid where gutters and side margins have fixed numeric values. I recommend 16px wide gutters and 16px wide side margins on each side.
We can design mobile interfaces at 360×640 sized artboard.
Mobile devices have a small screen resolution. If we display the 12 separate columns, gutters, and side margins on such a small resolution, it becomes quite cumbersome to design at scale.

If there's one button you use every time you open Spotify, it’s the play button. Today, we’re updating it significantly for better accessibility.

iPhone design guidelines for UI elements, typography, navigation, design patterns, and more · Downloadable resources · iPhone Sketch template

Choosing good colors for your charts is hard. This article tries to make it easier.

01 Broaden your understanding of colors
02 Don’t dance all over the color wheel
03 Use saturation and lightness to make your hues work
04 Use warm colors & blue
05 When using green, make it a yellow or blue one
06 Avoid pure colors
07 Avoid bright, saturated colors
08 Combine colors with different lightness
09 Make your colors similarly “colorful”
10 Avoid too little contrast to the background
11 Avoid too much contrast to the background
12 Choose a background that’s desaturated enough
13 Copy colors, or understand them

In this modern era of web development, we don’t really need a heavy-handed reset, or even a reset at all, because CSS browser compatibility issues are much less likely than they were in the old IE 6 days. That era was when resets such as normalize.css came about and saved us all heaps of hell. Those days are gone now and we can trust our browsers to behave more, so I think resets like that are probably mostly redundant.

https://github.com/andy-piccalilli/modern-css-reset

Design is problem solving

In a previous essay, I visualized it like this:
By focussing on the thinking part of design, design could move into a broader problem solving space. Hence the statement that design is problem solving. It is. Design solves design problems.

Design is making the world more beautiful

Design is question finding

But design is even more than problem solving and making the world more beautiful.

Most people see design as just the second diamond: problem solving. Most clients approach a designer with a problem definition a.k.a. a design brief. They already know what the problem is and w(previous essay)ant a (team of) designer(s) to solve it for them. If that is actually the right problem, great. Experience tells us that that is not always the case. More often than not, new insights about the problem at hand arise during the solving of the problem. That is why designers often propose to go into the first diamond first to investigate the problem and possibly redefine the problem. This prevents them from designing a brilliant solution for the wrong problem. That can be very expensive. The goal of the first diamond is to make sure we are solving the right problem, find the right question. Most innovations and complex problems benefit hugely from going through the first diamond. In his recent Harvard Business Review article, Art Markman argues that the quality of our problem framing determines the success of your solution.

It's that time of year again – where we consider what the color trends have been for the past couple years, and how those might change going into 2021.

Color scheme for UI design

Complete guide to the free font Libre Franklin. See beautiful examples, recommended pairings, OpenType features, and more.

https://larahogan.me/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-your-q3-roadmap/

The button state communicate its status to the user
Creating correct interactions and styles for your buttons is one of the most important parts of the process. Each state must have clear affordances that distinguish it from other states and the surrounding layout, but should not drastically alter a component or create a lot of visual noise.

Free, high-quality alternatives to: Apercu · Avenir · Circular · DIN · Futura · Gotham · Helvetica · Proxima Nova · Times New Roman

An accessible sortable table is not necessarily the same as a usable sortable table. Outline: Basics Let The User Know This Thing Has Sorted Screen Reader Announcement Sort Arrows Column Background Let The User Know This Thing Sorts SVGs Layout Windows High Contrast Mode Screen Readers Sort Hint aria-describedby…

If you want to make text better stand out against a background image, there’s a little trick: You can use a CSS linear-gradient overlay with a certain opacity on top of the image to improve color contrast.

How to determine the opacity to use for the overlay? The Optimal Overlay Finder helps you find out. You upload an image, enter your text and choose your overlay and text colors, and the tool shows you a preview of what the overlay looks like when applied to your image, as well as the optimal overlay opacity.

https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1365735686838493187

• The Main Element
• The Section Element
• The Aside Element
• The Article Element
• The Nav Element
• The Footer Element

HTML5 Doctor has a really handy flowchart to help answer that question:
http://html5doctor.com/downloads/h5d-sectioning-flowchart.png

Instead of using “Disabling” selectors, you should focus on writing “Enabling” selectors.

a:not(:last-child) {
  margin-bottom: 1rem;
}

or

a + a {
  margin-top: 1rem;
}

Learn how to handle text over images in CSS by taking accessibility in mind

Note: The Model, View, Controller pattern, or “MVC”, actually comes in many flavors.

Model—The application.
View—What the consumer (user) sees. Often HTML, JSON, or XML.
Controller—A thin layer connecting the View and the Model.

And that’s it! There’s nothing fancy, but it often requires explanation. The controller, as shown above, should be as thin as possible. The view should only have display logic and the model is ... what, exactly?

2. Tighten Heading Spacing

3. Loosen Non-Word Spacing

4. Use System Fonts for Inputs

Learn what it takes to ensure your buttons or button-styled links have accessible contrast across all states and surfaces, then use the generator to check and adjust your button palette.

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, te