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?

Convert any major image format into a highly optimized JPEG
Drag your image into the dropspace below, and we'll convert it into a progressive JPEG
and then optimize it using an advanced JPEG optimization technology.

Imagine my surprise when he called me into his office that day and admonished me for being too efficient. My zeal to do everything on my to-do list—along with my reserved, even shy nature—made me come across as abrupt and cold. I started every meeting by jumping right in and left with every action under control.

"You have to wallow in it," he said. "Take time to get to know people. Understand where they are coming from, what is important to them. Make sure they are with you."

Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure -- I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Use your operating system's package manager to install most of them. (Thanks for the tips, everybody!)

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.

You’ve probably used the Clone Stamp tool in Adobe Photoshop CC to remove small distractions from photos. Did you know that the same tool also works on video frames? In this tutorial, I’ll show you how I removed a pesky seagull from a Golden Gate Bridge time-lapse by cloning from a good frame and painting over the bird.

Stop using this, it, that in your writing — next time you write, try to remove the words “this”, “it” and “that” your writing will be easier to understand and read.

Punch above your weight class

Say People not Users

Save time, use patterns 

You are not Aaron Draplin. find your own Futura Bold

Always talk to the person next to you

Design one for the stakeholder and one for you 

Sidework leads to your next job

Be impeccable with your word 

Success = 80% Sell, 20% Design 

15 Minute Meetings

Follow Up

Everyone’s job is hard 

One big thing each day 

Drink water — you will feel more alert, kind and patient.

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly."

Writing intrinsically champions and improves creativity, critical thinking, and clarity.

I’ve tried to show the relationships between all of these resources in the diagram below. As you can see, a Style Guide is it’s own entity, which overlaps the CSS framework, design principles, design assets, and documentation.

Today, we’re happy to introduce Dorota, an artist who created a fun little project last year that was inspired by Twitter’s new logo based on 13 circles. Below you’ll find the lessons Dorota has learned along the process, so maybe you’d like to embark on a similar journey as well?

1. Kern upside down
2. Blur it
3. Kern with balloons
4. Use 'o' to space words
5. Rough out headlines
6. Forget about small caps

Welcome to the D3 gallery! More examples are available on bl.ocks.org/mbostock. If you want to share an example and don't have your own hosting, consider using Gist and bl.ocks.org. If you want to share or view live examples try vida.io.