Category: Blog Design

As logo and brand designers, our work starts long before the first concept sketches, and finishes long after the last perfectly placed pixel. Our work requires so much more than just creative ideas and technical skills — it compels us to be a marketer, strategist, psychologist, salesperson, showman and project manager at the same time. It’s difficult, but it’s also exciting and challenging!

The goal of my article is to help you rethink your (logo) design workflow. Some of these tips are mine, others are borrowed from world-famous designers. All these tips and tricks are tested and proven, and are tailored to improve your workflow for (re)branding projects.

The post How to Get a Logo Accepted: Eight Steps To a Better Design Workflow appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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Remember all of the wisecracks about executives and their BlackBerry addictions? Back then, constant contact was limited to the few and the mighty — relatively speaking, of course. But now, the last laugh might be on us. In record time, our smartphones have become indispensable, and as mobile technology has become integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, our smartphones are shifting from device to dependency.

But while it’s now clear that we are locked in an intense relationship with our smartphones, one has to wonder why this courtship hasn’t turned into a love triangle with tablets. After all, no matter how sleek our iPhone 6 is, our iPad or Android tablet is equally smooth and packed with life-organizing apps.

The post Why We’re Addicted To Our Smartphones, But Not Our Tablets appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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Product teams in startups and mid-sized and large companies are all implementing usability testing and prototyping as a way to de-risk product development. As the focus shifts from engineering to prototyping, it is becoming increasingly important for anyone who creates prototypes to understand the differences between a prototype and a product build.

By optimizing the prototyping process, you can produce mockups that deliver the most actionable user insights, while being as efficient as possible with design time. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it.

The post Optimizing Your Design For Rapid Prototype Testing appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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There are reasons you’re still saying the same thing after all these years — still talking about how it always seems like design gets tacked on to the end of the process. You should be at the concept meeting, you say, where you can make a real difference.

I’ve been hearing it for 15 years. I once had a job where I got to say it myself a few times. I got tired of that pretty quickly. I don’t say it anymore. You shouldn’t either. Primarily because it’s not true.

The post Hey Designers: Stop Being An Afterthought appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Hey Designers: Stop Being An Afterthought
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For Professional Web Designers and Developers

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Web applications are everywhere. There is no official definition, but we’ve made the distinction: web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting point, from which to apply development and design patterns.

These patterns are often established through a different look at the mainstream techniques, a paradigm shift, convergence with an external concept, or just a better implementation. Universal web applications are one such pattern.

The post Server-Side Rendering With React, Node And Express appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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