Design articles

Digital products will always need to be redesigned. Styles progress, hardware technologies advance, and development possibilities are ever-increasing. Just in the past year the potential for implementing microinteractions, and processor-intensive animations and graphics, has come along at a fair pace. Product...

It seems like the current buzz word in the design industry and everyone wants one. But how exactly can a product benefit from having a living, breathing design language? I’m going to try break down the very basics so you can understand why it’s needed. Creating an underlying language will unite our design philosophies...

One of the more lucrative projects for designers these days doesn’t even involve desktop. That’s because, in the last few years, more and more people have switched to mobile use, which also includes time spent shopping. A good rule of thumb as a designer is to go where your users are flocking, and you’ll find plenty of...

As a designer you’re expected to make the impossible happen. Time and time again, you’re expected to take an incredibly complex process and make it easy, simple and beautiful. When it’s handled well, you feel like a rock star. When we fail to live up to those heavy expectations, it leaves many of us feeling... deflated....

You encounter emojis on a regular basis in your 21st-century, tech-savvy lifestyle, but what is the history of emojis? They’re all over the place, and you really can’t interact with any device or platform these days without someone sending you an emoji or you sending one out yourself. This speaks to the ubiquity of this...

More and more companies are constantly chopping and changing their design direction and user interface in a battle to stand out. Many are employing large teams of user interface designers to work on pretty simple products. When it comes to mobile apps, user interface design is little more than a marketing gimmick. As it stands,...

Every single designer reading this runs a blog, or at the very least a Medium account; around 5% (wildly anecdotal statistic) actually post on it. Most designers reading this speak at conferences, or at the very least have an opening slide mocked up in a sketchbook. Most designers reading this have a startup, a side-project,...

Getting punched hurts, but in our line of work you need to get used to taking some once in a while. The work we do isn’t for us or even for our clients. It’s for our client’s clients. And to reach those people, you need to put your work literally out there. Be it the internet, the streets in the form of a outdoor or a bus advertising,...

Design is about problem solving, whether that be visual, structural, conceptual, or any other ‘…al’. If there’s a problem, it follows that there is a solution. When Steve Jobs hired design legend Paul Rand to design the brand identity for what would be named (by Rand) NeXT computers, he was expecting a few options....

In November 2015 I did a little talk at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City about designing Adobe Portfolio, and product design. You can watch the talk here. I originally wrote this article in preparation for the talk, but have since expanded upon it to publish here. It aims to introduce the product, share insight...

It’s that time of year again. You know, the time when we all write articles about “that time of year”? I thought it would be fun to research how design (and the advertising industry) have affected not only Christmas, but a few of the major international holidays. It’s hard to know exactly how much advertising has affected...

When Thomas Heatherwick’s 2012 Olympic cauldron unfolded its 204 petals on a warm summer's evening in London during the opening ceremony, many gasped in awe. It captured brilliantly, in a moment, the optimism and human achievement that’s the core of the Olympic spirit. It was something that no-one had...

A few days ago, on November 11th, we celebrated our 6th birthday here on WDD by revealing our latest redesign. If you visit often, you should easily notice most of the changes, however, if you just drop by once in a while the site will feel similar yet different. In fact, if we did our job right, it should feel more minimal, more elegant...

I had an advertising teacher who claimed that big tobacco companies had registered the 1970s names for different marijuana strains, such as Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, Sensimilla, and other cute names for pot, in the inevitable legalization and marketing of packages similar to Marlboro cigarettes. He also claimed the packaging...