Berlin is big beers and the Fernsehturm TV tower. Paris is the Eiffel Tower, croissants, and baguettes. New York is the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, bagels, and pizza. Paris [Image: courtesy Traveloka] As it turns out, when people are asked the first thing that comes to mind when they think of a city, they tend to think …

CSS is one of the most important tools of any web designer. It adds the design styling to pages, but it has become far more important than that. Having the ability to add animations to pages and provide feedback on interactions is central to creating a compelling user experience.  CSS now performs many tasks that previously needed JavaScript, such as off-screen …

Sidewalk Labs is one of the most mysterious initiatives inside Alphabet (and formerly, Google). The company says it “imagines, designs, tests, and builds urban innovations to help cities meet their biggest challenges.” In other words, Sidewalk Labs wants to create the smart city of the future. In 2017, the company reached an agreement to build its first “city” in Toronto: A …

On: 20 Feb 2019 Category: UX Design Length: 6 min read There are so many micro elements that are a big deal with it comes to user experience design. A lot of focus has been put on micro-interactions and engagements, but what about micro-copy? UX writing is a big deal. The words, language, and composition of sentences and phrases throughout …

The city of Paris has revealed a new visual identity that celebrates the capital’s welcoming spirit. Created by branding agency Carré Noir, the design overhaul includes a modern, single stroke logo that draws on the nautical nave historically associated with the city. Described by Carré Noir as an identity that sees Paris having a rendezvous with itself, the logo and …

Remember about five years ago, when the new hotness in interaction design was to have flashy layers in your website scroll at different speeds, creating a faux-3D effect? The effect was called parallax scrolling, and it’s still easy to find across the web. According to the usability nerds at the Norman/Nielsen Group, parallax scrolling never really went away–it just got …

Rendering an image, animation of a model or even a whole scene is an important step in art creation. Without this important stage, the end result will look unfinished. Whether it is for a portfolio or commercial purposes, being able to render your work is a valuable skill. Every artist has a favourite render engine to work with. KeyShot offers …

Learn how to create an interactive “fake” 3D effect for images with depth maps and plain WebGL. WebGL is becoming quite popular these days as it allows us to create unique interactive graphics for the web. You might have seen the recent text distortion effects using Blotter.js or the animated WebGL lines created with the THREE.MeshLine library. Today you’ll see …

Creating 3D art is not only timely, it can be very expensive. Thankfully, one of the best 3D softwares around won’t cost you a penny – with open source software Blender, everyone can get involved.  Not only is it free, there are also hundreds of brilliant Blender tutorials online to help you get to grips with the powerful software. Improve …

Photo credit: Orin Zebest Few things in life are constant: death, taxes, and strangers asking “So what do you do?” within a minute of a handshake. As a UX designer, I’ve had a lot of practice over the years trying to nail down my answer. Here’s what I’ve come up with: It’s my job to be inside a user’s brain. …