Creating that singular piece of graphic design that users will first interact with each time they encounter your product can be intimidating. A beautiful, identifiable and memorable app icon can have a huge impact on the popularity and success of the app. But how exactly does one make a “good” app icon? What does that even mean?
Fear not, I’ve put together some tips and advice to help answer these questions and to guide you on your way to designing great app icons. I’ve been designing, making resources and giving talks about icon design for the past couple of years. In this article, and in the video at the end, I’ll sum up what I’ve learned about this amazing craft.
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Digital products are getting more and more complex. In this article, Yury Vetrov explains why we need to support more platforms, tweak usage scenarios for more user segments, and hypothesize more.
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Around a year ago, while working at a digital agency, I was given the objective of streamlining our UX design process. Twelve months later, this article shares my thoughts and experiences on how lean thinking helped to instill efficiencies within our UX design process.
When I arrived at the agency, wireframes were already being created and utilized across a variety of projects. Winning advocates for the production of wireframes was not the issue. All stakeholders (both internally and externally) understood the purpose of wireframes and appreciated their value in shaping and modeling digital experiences.
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I realized something the other day: I’ve been designing apps for nine years now! So much has changed since the early days and, it feels like developers and designers have been through a rollercoaster of evolutions and trends.
However, while the actual look and functionality of our apps have changed, along with the tools we use to make them, there are some things that have very much stayed the same, such as the process of designing an app and how we go through the many phases that constitute the creation of an app.
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How can you be sure you’re moving your design problem in a straight line? That you’re moving directly to a solution? From client to payment, from product to audience?
How certain are you of what the second step in your process is? Or the third? Or how long each will take, or if any should be removed? Are they all useful? Do any need improvement? Is each done with aim and purpose? How often do you fall-forward with momentum, rather than move with reason?
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In the tech industry, many of us came of age during hip-hop’s rise as a dominant art form. Its spirit of individualism, bravado, and constant reinvention makes it impossible for us not to admire. Our thought leaders craft mixtapes and pour millions of dollars into apps that decode rap lyrics.
The founders of my former company rapped to celebrate every corporate milestone. We’re compelled to quantify what we love about it, and to somehow technologize it the same way Instagram did photography. Many have tried, myself included, but capturing hip-hop’s alluring qualities in an app is no simple task.
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There are reasons you’re still saying the same thing after all these years — still talking about how it always seems like design gets tacked on to the end of the process. You should be at the concept meeting, you say, where you can make a real difference.
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In the first part of the case study about Mail.Ru Group product design unification, I described our first approach — a mobile web framework. Aside from creating a unified visual style and interaction principles for a dozen services, we’ve also transformed our design process from the classic “prototype → design mock-up → HTML → implementation” approach for every screen, to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.
In this second part I’ll show how we have improved the same technology to embody larger versions of these products and made our “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. In the spring of 2012, our business unit acquired 11 content-based projects: Auto, Events Guide, Health, Horoscopes, Kids, Lady, Moto, News, Sports, TV, and Weather. Many of them are very successful in their market niche in Russia; however, they each have their own history, often with outsourced designs that led to inconsistencies.
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How does one design and develop for the responsive web? A lot of methodologies out there try to tackle this problem, but all of them rely on the same classic website development process. It boils down to the following: design and then develop.
Let’s go nuts and flip this outdated methodology on its head. Before we start flipping things around, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane, just so we know where we’ve come from and where we are now.
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Designers are great at producing visual artifacts. We create mockups, images, code and all sorts of other material to document our solutions. But looking only at those artifacts doesn’t account for the actual creative process. In their article “Documenting Design-In-Process,” John Bassani and Carolyn Barnes highlight a potential reason: We view our design approaches as intuitive and emotional, so we have a hard time developing documented, human-focused design processes.
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