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Understanding Emotional Design

by Khaiersta English
Emotions play a crucial role in how we understand and experience the world. For generations scientists, psychologists and designers have worked to capture the essence of human emotion and various ways to appeal to it. Don Norman, author of Emotional Design made some valuable observations, which every designer should be familiar with. Where cognitive science...
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Five UX Design Books to Add to Your Reading List

by Khaiersta English
In the world of user experience design, there are many approaches to solving design problems. Depending on how you gained your education and experience in the field, you may prefer one approach or another. I find it is helpful to read about other people’s experiences and approaches to solving design problems. Often, opportunities present themselves...
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Designing Better Forms, A Top 10 Guide

by Khaiersta English
In digital product design, forms are a necessary evil. Whether you’re designing a registration flow, checkout experience or settings page, forms allow you to collect data from the end-user. There are fundamental best-practices you can use when putting forms together, which will help users process requests more quickly, increase data entry accuracy and increase your...
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The Benefits of Reflection

by Khaiersta English
As a designer with 20+ years of experience handling client projects, I can say with certainty that the creation of brand assets, campaigns, taglines and visual designs all benefit from time for reflection. Time to step away from the work you’re considering has a way of changing its shape. Things can look different after only...
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SVGs: Vectors for the Web

by Khaiersta English
When working on visual design for the web, choosing the correct image format is essential.  The rise of responsive design, mobile devices, and high-pixel-density displays have made this process trickier than ever. When working with photography, and 3D imagery, JPGs and PNGs are still the best formats to use. Saving images up for 2x to...
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How to Quickly Evaluate Browser Compatibility for New Web Technologies

by Khaiersta English
When designing for the web, designers and developers are often tempted by new technologies. Recent advancements such as embedded fonts, parallax scrolling, JS animation, SVGs etc. have had varying levels of cross-platform support. Depending on the requirements of your website or application, browser support limitations may become a deal-breaker to including modern UI/UX advancements. Can...
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Issue Tracking and Team Workflow with BitBucket

by Khaiersta English
With multiple projects and competing demands, issue trackers can be a lifesaver. Our team at Flower Press Creative Studio relies pretty heavily on BitBucket, which is compatible with our GitHub repositories. Designers and developers work together to tackle new functional requirements, design deliverables and bug tracking. There are plenty of competitors on the market with...
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How to Export SVGs for the Web from Illustrator

by Khaiersta English
Adobe Illustrator is by far the most established, and popular Illustration tool in the design community. But until recently, it had a major shortcoming when exporting SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) cleanly for the web. Now, Adobe has upped its game by adding a clean, export function targeted at the web. Please note: there are actually...
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SVGs, CSS and Javascript: Where Images and Code Cross

by Khaiersta English
SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) is well-accepted as an ideal format for two-dimensional graphics on the web. Logos, icons, backgrounds, buttons and animated graphics can scale for high-definition displays while maintaining low file-size. There are several ways to implement SVGs within web code. The chosen method depends heavily on what you’re trying to achieve. SVG Embed...
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HTTPS, A Necessary Investment

by Khaiersta English
This video from DigiCert does a good job of spelling out recent updates to HTTPS on the Internet. As of July 2018, Google Chrome released changes to its handling of HTTP sites. In the address bar, these sites are now labeled Not Secure. On all HTTP pages, Chrome 68 displays a warning reading “Not Secure”...