Back to News Working in tech and design requires constantly keeping up with the latest techniques, tools, technologies, and industry news. Here are a few of the things our team found useful over the last week.
Design
30 examples of illustration styles in web design
awwwards.com
Here is an inspiring collection of websites which beautifully incorporate illustration into their design.
— Anne
Brand illustration systems: drawing a strong visual identity
smashingmagazine.com
Creating a visual identity which incorporates illustration is no small task. This article breaks it down nicely with examples from the designer’s own work.
— Anne
Gears Tactics started out as a board game, here’s what it looked like
polygon.com
I started playing this game over golden week, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Of course game design is basically a form of UX design, sharing many of the concepts and processes that we use in digital product design. It’s especially cool to see how paper prototypes and user testing informed the mechanics of Gear Tactics.
— Mark
How to create a sense of urgency the right way
boagworld.com
This article shows an example of bad decisions companies made due to a lack of understanding about their customers, and cases where businesses use a trick to try to make profit that actually keeps their customers away by providing bad user experience.
— Junta
Tech
A visual guide to React mental models
obedparla.com
An interesting explanation of many of React’s concepts and structures from the author’s way of thinking.
— Mark
Complete guide to CSS functions
css-tricks.com
Anyone who’s done frontend work is familiar with calc() and nth-child(). Do you know about lang() and steps() though? As the title of the article states, this is a comprehensive guide to CSS functions. I’d be surprised if you didn’t learn something new!
— Ian
RailsConf
railsconf.com
While the in-person version of the 2020 event had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus, the good people at RailsConf were able to get many of the originally scheduled speakers to record online versions of their talks. You can watch them all for free at the link above.
— Ian
WWDC20
developer.apple.com
It’s not surprising that Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) will be all-online this year. As I’m a member of a number of developer accounts I received multiple emails from Apple about this, and I noticed that the character shown in the email was different each time. A nice touch!
— Mark