Styling Modern Web Applications – CSS Frameworks vs. Component Libraries

When building a new web application, there are quite a few decisions you have to make. Will it be rendered by a server and sent to the client, or will it be a feature-rich SPA? Which JavaScript framework should be used (if any)? React? Angular? Vue? Ember? But one decision that’s often overlooked is how […]

Is Sketch Still King? My First Impressions of Figma

I love Sketch — it’s my go-to for wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and even prototyping. I’ve become as proficient as I can, including mastering nested symbols and utilizing JSON data connections to populate real data into static designs. But I recently started helping a client’s design team build out their design system. The problem? They exclusively […]

Creating a 3D Logo with Vectary

Before a recent request to create the Atomic Logo in 3D, I had never ventured much into the 3D design realm. A few years back, I’d attempted 3D design using Sketch, and before that, I’d tried Blender/Rhino. This software brought with it a host of challenges, so I was pretty nervous to try to output […]

Making the Most of Mural – 5 Ways to Prep for a Great Remote Workshop

Since working from home has become the new normal, we’ve adjusted to remote workshopping by employing a variety of digital tools to help us collaborate from afar. One of our most beloved has been Mural. Out of the box, Mural offers a variety of handy templates and tools to get your team collaborating quickly. It […]

Design Thinking Toolkit, Activity 19 – The Perfect Morning

Do you want the customer’s perspective on a workflow or process? Are you trying to discover which touchpoints are the most meaningful to your customers? The Perfect Morning is the activity for you. This is part of our series on Design Thinking Methods and Activities. You’ll find a full list of posts at the end […]

Recruiting & Coordinating User Interviews with “User Interviews”

User research is critical when validating ideas for a product. But finding participants and scheduling interviews is not as easy as you’d think. People are excited for the results, but they don’t understand all the tasks involved in the upfront recruiting. We needed to conduct a set of user interviews for a recent project. After […]

Six Great Icebreakers for Remote Meetings & Workshops

We’ve all participated in some cringe-worthy icebreakers before. A good meeting/workshop icebreaker should do three things: Bring people together Teach them something new about each other Get their minds in the right headspace for the task ahead Here are a few great non-traditional icebreakers for your next remote meeting or workshop. Superhero Imagine yourself as a […]

A Designer’s Guide to Scraping Data from HTML Pages with Artoo

Gathering real data for your digital designs can be a real challenge. Without access to the client’s data, we’re often on our own—reliant on bad mock data or Lorem ipsum. But don’t worry, Artoo can help solve this problem by web scraping HTML pages for you. Artoo is a neat little web scraper that will […]

Sketching Apps for iPad: Paper vs Procreate vs Affinity Designer

As a designer, I often have opportunities to sketch out ideas for clients – I might be in the wireframing stage of the design and want to get ideas on paper quickly, or I might need to create a logo or illustration. However, it can be a pain to get a paper sketch to a […]

Sketch vs. Adobe XD for Prototyping – A Designers’ Conundrum

As part of the design process, we use tools like Sketch or Adobe XD to think through our workflows, visualize wireframes, and share designs with clients and developers. We also use these tools to create clickable prototypes that can clarify component functionality and validate designs in user testing.

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