There’s a technique for improving one’s user interface design skills that is the most efficient way I know of expanding one’s visual vocabulary but that I’ve rarely heard mentioned by digital designers.
I’m talking about copywork. Copywork is a technique that writers and painters have been using for centuries. It is the process of recreating an existing work as closely as possible in order to improve one’s skill. In our case, this means recreating a user interface (UI) design pixel for pixel.
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With a couple of days left until New Year’s Eve, it’s just about time to set aside 60 minutes to clean up, sort out and back up your digital footprint, to ensure a good smooth start to the new year.
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I’m big on modular design. I’ve long been sold on dividing websites into components, not pages, and amalgamating those components dynamically into interfaces. Flexibility, efficiency and maintainability abound.
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In this article, David Berner shares advice on how to avoid fatigue. Once you’re fully burnt out, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place.
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Shaders are a key concept if you want to unleash the raw power of your GPU. I will help you understand how they work and even experiment with their inner power in an easy way, thanks to Babylon.js.
Before experimenting, we must see how things work internally. When dealing with hardware-accelerated 3D, you will have to deal with two CPUs: the main CPU and the GPU. The GPU is a kind of extremely specialized CPU.
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Creating an online quiz that is simple to use, looks great and is really fun to play is one thing. Basing it on Donald Trump’s polarizing presidential campaign is another. The brainchild of Parallax director and developer Andy Fitch, Topple Trump! has gone on to win numerous awards. But it was a real team effort that brought the game to life. Here’s a glimpse into precisely how that happened, touching on the development process, design considerations and some valuable lessons learned along the way.
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The common wisdom for most companies that set out to build an app is to build a native Android or iOS app, as well as a supporting website. Although there are some good reasons for that, not enough people know about the major advantages of web apps.
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There is UI animation, and then there is good UI animation. Good animation makes you go “Wow!” — it’s smooth, beautiful and, most of all, natural, not blocky, rigid or robotic. If you frequent Dribbble or UpLabs, you’ll know what I am talking about.
With so many amazing designers creating such beautiful animations, any developer would naturally want to recreate them in their own projects. Now, CSS does provide some presets for transition-timing-function, such as ease-in, ease-out and ease-in-out, which add some level of smoothness and realism, but they are very generic, aren’t they? How boring would it be if every animation on the web followed the same three timing functions?
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Redux is one of the hottest libraries in front-end development these days. However, many people are confused about what it is and what its benefits are. As the documentation states, Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. To rephrase that, it’s an application data-flow architecture, rather than a traditional library or a framework like Underscore.js and AngularJS.
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Everyone wants a clean, consistent code base, no matter the language. Developers are accustomed to setting up linters in programming languages such as JavaScript and Python, but they rarely use a linter for style sheets. In this article, we’ll look at stylelint, a linter for style sheets.
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