Popular Design News of the Week: July 30, 2018 – August 5, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Evolving the Firefox Brand

 

The Age of the Wordless Logo

 

How I Built my Side Project and Got 31,000 Users the First Week

 

Art and Copy: Bridging the Gap Between Design and Content

 

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Staggering Data Visualizations

 

Educational Website Design Trends to Follow in 2018/2019

 

Six Lessons Learned by Creating a Design System at a Fast-moving Start-up

 

CSS Color Playground

 

Amazon Dark Patterns – Censuring Unhappy Customers

 

Stripe Issuing

 

Why We Decided to Drop LESS for SCSS

 

Feediary – Your Favourite RSS Content, with Zero Tracking & Zero Ads

 

Sketch Vs Adobe XD: Which One Should You Use?

 

How to Get Users Hooked on your Interfaces

 

The Impact WordPress has Had on the Web

 

The Software Design Trends that We Love to Hate

 

Evaluating Best Buy’s Website Design – A UX Case Study

 

Slack Copywriting: What They Say to 9.6 Million Pageviews Every Month

 

Napkin Note – Email Yourself Quick Thoughts on the Fly

 

Emojicom: Giving Feedback Doesn’t Have to Be Boring

 

“Painterly Pantones”: Photographer Edith Young on her Art History-inspired Series of Colour Palettes

 

You SHOULD Learn Vanilla JavaScript Before JS Frameworks

 

Digital Psychology

 

The Myth of Human-centered Design

 

Pattern Journey – A Process for Extending Design Systems

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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Comics of the Week #438

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Time is money

Time machine

 

Designer boot camp

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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5 Ways to Keep Designing When the Power is Out

There’s a certain peace to be found at night, when the world goes dark and silent. You might settle down on the couch for a moment, and just soak in the absence of noise and bustle. However, if you’re at work, and the world goes dark and silent, it’s a lot less comforting.

At the very least, it means a delay in your work. If you’re a freelancer, that could very well mean a delay in getting paid. It’s stressful, and it can happen anywhere, to anyone. First world countries can’t always prevent power-outs. Countries like Mexico can set their clocks by them. How do you know it’s rainy season? The power’s out. Oh, and the rain.

Now, this isn’t always a terrible thing. A break might be just what you need to gather your thoughts, relax, and get ready to work like mad when the power’s back. Or, you know, you might just relocate to a place that has power and wi-fi, if that’s an option.

But what if it isn’t? Let’s say all of your machines are desktops, and you’re expected to stay in the office. I mean, power-outs don’t usually last all day. And maybe you have a tight deadline. How can you stay busy, and perhaps actually make some progress before the lights come back? Well, let’s start with the more practical ideas:

1. Brainstorm

If you’re lucky, or at least less unlucky, then this is happening during the planning stages of your design and development cycle. So start planning. There’s nothing stopping you from grabbing your coworkers (if you’re not a one-person studio), and brainstorming the time away. Throw some ideas around!

Now, assuming you already have some plans, you could go over them. Well, if you printed them. Or, go back and revisit ideas that you might have decided to talk about later. Well, it’s later now, and you don’t have anything better to do.

Go over the core of your current plans, see how they could be improved. With the ability to jump straight into the work taken away from you, you might see something you missed, or you might come up with something better.

2. Wireframe on Paper

Now, assuming this isn’t already a part of your process, grab a pencil and some paper, and start drawing out ideas fast. If you’ve already done some of the actual mockup work, try drawing out bits of the interface from memory. Use these drawings in your brainstorming session to see if you can’t come up with something better.

If you already have some hand-drawn wireframes, haul them out and keep iterating. Even if you don’t use the new or updated designs, they might help you to remember why you made certain design decisions in the first place. If nothing else, affirmation is motivating.

3. Develop a Paper Prototype

If you have a lot of downtime, why not try your hand at some arts and crafts? Paper prototypes are basically layers of paper designed to imitate a digital interface. Putting one together will give you a prototype you can actually touch and (to a very limited extent) interact with. All you really need is a paper, a pen(cil), and some scissors. Heck, work on it enough, and perhaps you could show it to your boss or clients later, to help answer any questions they might have.

Here’s a great article on how to make paper prototypes, with examples.

4. Grab a Book

Okay, so you’ve done all the planning you’re ever going to do. Or there’s no point because the plan has gotten sign-off from above, and everything is set in corporate stone, for now at least. What next? Grab a book. Specifically grab a book on web design, typography, accessibility, branding, graphics, or anything else you can imagine!

And don’t let anyone tell you that continuing to educate yourself, grounding yourself in basic principles, or just seeking inspiration isn’t a practical thing to do. The results will show themselves when the power comes back on, and you tackle the project with new vigor, and perhaps some new insight.

5. Try your hand at predicting the future

Okay, I am not one of those guys who will tell you that visualizing success is the key to achieving it. Doing stuff and not sucking at it is mostly the key to success. However, taking some time to visualize the future of what you’re building is still a useful thing to do in small doses. Just sit there, alone or with colleagues, and imagine the thing is already built. Picture your users, and the way they might integrate your product into their lives. Make it a meditative thing.

Spend five minutes on this if you’re a normal person. If you’re an over-thinker like me, maybe schedule a solid hour. Either way, you may very well come out of this exercise with a renewed will to make it happen. Or better yet, you might identify some previously unforeseen issues, and address them before they ever become a problem.

And hey, this is something you can do even if you don’t have enough natural light for most of the other things on this list.

Conclusion

A power-out doesn’t mean your work has to come to a complete, screeching halt. Mind you, it’s not a terrible thing if it does. Unexpected breaks are good for people. But if you just have to keep going, you can often make tangible progress with a little creativity. Otherwise, you can at least make sure you’re ready to tackle your work with a vengeance as soon as the lights come back on.

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Reading Waterfall Charts to Focus on Page Speed

There’s no question that making your website’s pages load fast is important. Research shows that people start to lose focus on something after a single second, and lose interest completely somewhere between 4 and 10 seconds. There’s even a direct correlation between slow load times and losing sales, according to Amazon and Kissmetrics. But who has time for complex tools like reading waterfall charts? The easy solution would be to just keep files small and design simple, right?

Maybe not. Modern design trends are heading towards animation and detailed, fullscreen images. If you don’t have these assets, your site may look washed out next to your competitors. And while these features may increase user engagement and sales in a vacuum, they don’t do anything for you if they bog down your site so much that nobody ever sees them. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that Google started including page speed in their ranking algorithms.

Big media isn’t the only things that can slow a website down, either. This is where a skill like reading waterfall charts can come in handy, as these tools provide a powerful analysis of every step between DNS connections and a full page render.

The Best Starting Point: Reading Waterfall Charts

Tools like Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights can give you a decent idea of where to start, but the truly best starting point in a waterfall chart, like the ones provided by Web Page Test. These in-depth tools give you an impressive breakdown of everything that’s loading on your site: when they start, when they’re visible, when they finish, and how they relate to every other file. While Pingdom and Google may point you in the right direction, a waterfall chart will show you exactly where to go.

After you run your test, you’ll see a general score at the top of the page, just like other tools.

It’s important not to get distracted by this, though. The true power of this tool is a simple scroll away, by reading the waterfall chart itself. Below you’ll find the first one third or so of the same site’s test.

While the chart may seem overwhelming, it’s not too difficult to read. Every element is classified, and every class is color coded. On the left is the name of the file or resource (hovering over it while provide the full file name and location), and on the right the time is tracked in seconds, from when it starts loading to when it’s visible to when it’s done.

Even though this site scored an overall “A,” we can see there are some images that could tighten up the load speed significantly if they got some attention. If we want to go ever further, we can see that some fonts are taking a while to load, and something is spitting back a 404 error as well. Looking at the entire chart, we can start to pinpoint the exact files that are slowing our site down, and address them accordingly.

Addressing Issues Accordingly

Every website is different, and will require different fixes and maybe even different paths to those fixes than the next site. However, there are a few general tips for keeping your site lean and quick.

Optimize Media

Optimizing media simply means reducing the file size of images or video without sacrificing quality. This means they don’t take as long to transfer to a user’s browser, which means they don’t take as long to load. The actual process is pretty technical, but you can find tons of free tools online (Google PageSpeed Insights will even offer to do it for you when you run a test).

You can even preserve quality across devices by using the srcset attribute in your image tags. This lets you provide the tag with multiple images of varying resolutions and sizes, and the browser will choose the best one to serve to each user.

Minify Files

Like media optimization, minifying files is all about reducing file size. Most sites pull from a wide array of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other files. All it takes to minify them is to cut out unnecessary characters: spaces, line breaks, comments, etc. It’s generally best practice to keep two files: a “pretty” one for development purposes and a minified, “ugly” one for production. You could do this manually, but it’s much easier to run your files through a free tool instead.

Defer Loading of Files

If even a minified Javascript file is slowing your site down, you might consider deferring its loading until the rest of the page is loaded. For external files, you can accomplish this with a simple attribute on your script tags. Though if a plugin grabs these files automatically, and you don’t even see the script tags, things can get more complicated. For internal files, you can separate your code into “necessary for loading” and “unnecessary for loading,” put the unnecessary code into a separate file, then put this script near the bottom of your closing body tags.

Object Caching

Object caching is when files like HTML and images are temporarily stored on a user’s browser after they load. This is great since it means the page doesn’t even to reload fresh every time somebody hits the back button, or even when they come back a week later. There are tons of plugins on the market to help cache automatically, but it’s possible to do it yourself using APIs (like in WordPress or Drupal) if you so desire.

GZIP Compression

GZIP compression is fairly standard practice, but isn’t totally universal yet. The details of this practice could take up a blog post by themselves, but there’s a quick way to see if this even needs your attention with the “Check GZIP Compression” tool.

These are fundamental techniques for keeping your site loading fast, but there are more complex means available. It all depends on what exactly your site needs to reach those snappy load times. Hopefully learning about reading waterfall charts has pointed you in the right direction!

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How to Design for IPhone X

Designing for the iPhone X will bring some new challenges, but also some new design opportunities. In this article, I’ll share a few suggestions that will help you design apps and games that look and feel great on iPhone X.

Display Specifics

iPhone X has a new high-resolution, rounded, edge-to-edge Super Retina display has a resolution of 1125×2436px. While it gives designers more space for display content and allows them to create a genuinely immersive experience, there are a few things that should be considered when designing for this device:

1. 3x Image Scale Factor

iPhone X has 3x image scale factors (@1x,@2x, and @3x). When rasterized images are needed, be sure to include both 2x and 3x image resolutions in your app image resolution catalog. Also, it’s recommended to use SVGs for glyphs and other flat artwork that requires high-resolution scaling because they are resolution-independent.

2. New Display Dimensions: More Screen Space, More Content

iPhone’s X display dimensions are 375pt width * 812 pt tall. On a 3x display this equals 1,125 px @3x width * 2,436 px @3x tall. In portrait orientation, the width of the display on iPhone X matches the width of the 4.7″ displays of iPhone 6, iPhone 7, and iPhone 8 so there shouldn’t be any difference in the amount of information presented along with the narrow dimensions of these devices. But the display has a different height: the 812pt height is 145pt taller that 667pt of 4.7” displays. This additional height of iPhone X provides 20% more space for content.  

3. Consider Aspect Ratio When Creating Background Images

When designing background images keep in mind that iPhone X also has different aspect ratio than a 4.7” display. Background graphics created for iPhone’s 8 16:9 aspect ratio needs to be adjusted to satisfy the technical requirements of iPhone X . To prevent the negative outcome, it’s better to compose images so that critical visual information remains visible regardless of display aspect ratio.

4. Don’t Position Elements In Display’s Edge Corners

Rounded corners bring another challenge for designers: every element that is positioned too close to the viewport’s edges may get clipped or covered by the sensor housing. It’s critical to inset controls and other elements to avoid this.

5. Use Safe Area Layout To Display Content

Safe Area layout helps avoid underlapping system UI elements when positioning content and controls. On iPhone 8 the Safe Area is the same size as the viewport when no bars are visible. On iPhone X the Safe Area layout is inset from the top and bottom of the screen edges even when no bars are visible on the screen. This helps you to prevent interface elements from getting clipped or covered.

However, there two exception for the Safe Area: the app’s background and vertically scrollable views. Vertically scrollable views, such as tables and collections, should extend all the way to the bottom of the display and extend to the edges rather than be constrained to the Safe Area zone.

6. Don’t Worry About Native Components

If your app uses native iOS component (such as navigation bars, tables, collection views, tab bars, etc.) and you worry about how they’ll be adapted for the iPhone X, don’t worry! They will be inset and positioned automatically.

Home Indicator

iPhone X changed one of the iPhone’s interactions basics, the home button is legacy now. Before iPhone X users who wanted to access the app switcher or the Home screen clicked the iPhone’s home button to do that. For iPhone X the same process is available when users swipe up anywhere along the bottom edge along the display. Swipes are the new clicks.

In the attempt to replace the home button with a gesture and make it intuitive, Apple offers information about the interaction in the format of an indicator at the bottom edge along the display; a small line that lives on the bottom of a screen.  This indicator is displayed over iPhone X app’s interface. You’ll need to account for this when designing your app.

Notice a white line at the bottom, that’s the new home indicator. It notifies you that you can swipe up to go back to your Home screen or into multitasking.

7. Avoid Placing Interactive Elements Near the Home Indicator

It’s best to avoid placing interactive elements such as buttons in close proximity to the indicator or you’ll risk having them overlapped with the Home indicator. Simply leave some whitespace near the home indicator by placing non-scrollable elements within the safe area.

8. Don’t Draw Special Attention To Home Indicator

The home indicator isn’t a decorative element. Don’t mask it, and don’t call special attention to it.

9. Use Auto-Hide For Full-Screen Experiences

When presenting full-screen visual content such as videos, it’s possible to use auto-hide to hide the Home Indicator.

Notch Area

The notch area is perhaps the most controversial part of the iPhone X design. Some people think it’s visually appealing; others think it’s ugly. But as designers, we can use the screen space available in the notch area for good.

10. Don’t Mask the Notch

Some designers try to make the experience on iPhone X look like similar to the experience on iPhone 8; they place black bars at the top to make it look like an old-school app. It’s better to avoid that – this will only make your app feel inconsistent with other apps on iPhone X. Your app or game should always fill the entire display it runs on.

11. Don’t Hide the Status Bar

If you currently hide the status bar in your app, it’s better to reconsider this decision. Since the status bar area is taller (previously is was 20pt high, now it’s 44pt) and you have more estate to display your content. Add content that is useful for your users.

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Firefox Working on a Rebrand

Hey guys, remember Firefox? Remember the Mozilla Application Suite? That second one isn’t relevant, but everyone knows that nostalgia is an attention-grabber. Now that you’re here, let’s move on with that first item: Firefox. It’s getting a logo change… eventually. The Mozilla foundation wants your help deciding which direction to go.

The Firefox logo as we know it was a collaboration by Daniel Burka, Stephen Desroches, and the inestimable Jon Hicks. It was they who introduced us to that little blue ball, and the weirdly-charismatic-even-when-we-can’t-see-his-face fox.

Over the years, though, it has been changed, and simplified. As our collective Western aesthetic evolved, and as screens got smaller and smaller, it needed to change with the times. And now, once again is changing, because Firefox isn’t just a browser anymore; it’s the head of a product family, as Mozilla themselves put it in their own post on the topic.

Since a product family needs to more or less match, visually speaking, Firefox’s logo needs to change to allow more flexibility. It needs to be adaptable to other software. To this end, the branding team at Mozilla has come up with two different branding systems, and is looking for feedback on them.

To have your say, leave them a comment on the blog post linked above.

Note that neither of these systems are anywhere close to finalized. Mozilla even refers to them as “a work of fiction” at this point, which should tell you about how close they are to being implemented. Every icon has yet to undergo quite a bit of iteration before any decisions are made.

System 1

This first system emphasizes thick geometric shapes, and a strongly yellow-to-red palette, though there is some variation in the color. Of the two, this almost feels a bit more “classic Firefox”.

System 2

The second system introduces a bit more color variation, with thinner lines.

My Opinion

These design systems both seem very, very corporate, which I suppose is appropriate, now. I do not think, however, that they are devoid of personality or history like some other recent logo redesigns have been. This is an actual evolution of the brand, rather than a surgical removal of everything fun and/or dated.

Like many in the comment section of the original post on Mozilla’s blog, I think the Firefox icons from System 2 should be combined with the other icons from System 1. It just seems to fit better that way.

The only thing that worries me a little is this quote at the end: “With your input, we’ll have a final system that will make a Firefox product recognizable out in the world even if a fox is nowhere in sight.” I don’t think they actually have any plans to remove the fox imagery; but if that question ever comes up, here’s my community feedback: Keep the damn fox, mmmkay?

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