Free learning resources
Here’s what you may have missed
My YouTube channel just reached 7000 subscribers, so it’s time for a short summary.
Because I believe curiosity and fun are essential not to go insane as a designer, I’m not just doing the tutorials (even though they’re the most popular) but I also try to show you other ways of being creative and exploring.
Let’s go.
Here’s what happened between 6 and 7K:
Audits and UI design tutorials
These take a bit longer to make, but they’re always fun. It’s all about quickly identifying the patterns and finding quick solutions that can be tested later.
Glassmorphism and Soft Backgrounds
My free tutorial section is growing fast!
When I started my YouTube channel in April of 2020, I didn’t know what kind of videos I’ll be making exactly. One type, that caught on the most among my subscribers was design tutorials.
I got so many requests in the recent weeks, that I decided to mix things up and do tutorials on more than one type of work.
In this post I’ll cover three recent ones that I think you’ll find interesting.
They all bring something to the table to help you boost your skills to another level. Each one enables you to progress fast and grow as…
UI Trends 2077
From touch through VR, AR, all the way to direct neural connections. See the future of User Interfaces.
As a designer, when playing a video game that has user interfaces inside of it, I can’t help but to think about how they’re made and how they fit the lore and time of the game. So whenever a game has a computer in it, that you can interact with, I sit down and play around with it.
Hello, 2077!
Cyberpunk 2077 has inspired me to take a look at the interfaces in the year 2077, and what I think would be the directions UI’s will take. But before we start going theoretical, here’s a super brief analysis of the in-game UI’s…
UI Trends 2020–2021
Another year, another UI trend is becoming increasingly popular among designers. Do you know it yet?
Last year I unintentionally started the craze around Neumorphism, but as I predicted then, it didn’t really take over the design scene. In that very first article, I also mentioned all the potential accessibility problems this style faces, which hopefully helped all the other articles raising accessibility issues that year :-)
Sure — there were some apps and products done in this style, but most notable, widespread uses were in some Samsung ads and in the MKBHD intro video. …
Design tools are ultra powerful now, yet they seem to highlight the nightmarish features of collaboration the most.
Yes, this is going to be one of those controversial articles, and if you’re a Figma superfan, you likely want to start throwing rocks at me right now. Am I right? But please hold off for a while, and hear me out.
Collaboration is…
Starting my design career in the late ’90s, collaboration simply meant someone sitting behind your shoulder at a clunky grey PC, and pointing at the screen.
“Move that here!” and then “No, that’s too far…”
Just ask, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.
As I’m nearing 16K followers here on Medium, I wanted to let you all know, that it’s not a one-way-communication. If you like what I write, you can always catch me on twitter:
www.twitter.com/michalmalewicz
And just DM me in case of any questions, ideas or general chit-chat. I try to respond to everyone, but it may take a while.
Important, if you want to ask me for feedback, please use Twitter DM for this — it makes it a lot easier to have it all in one place :)
And if you’re a junior designer…
I made an outline on how I can help you in…
tl;dr
A short, two episode series on the limitations, alternatives and potential workarounds
As you probably already know, Figma is going to limit their free (Starter) plan on April 21st. If you’re unaware of all this, and you’re a Figma user, here’s what’s changing:
Neumorphism? Glassmorphism? Material Design? All design trends can be accessible.
Remember how in late 2019 I wrote that first-ever Neumorphism article? The entire debate that started with over half a million readers divided the design community in half.
One half liked this idea of the New Skeuomorphism, as people are slowly getting bored with the current design trends. They wanted to explore it and see how it can be used (if at all).
But the louder, more aggressive group was the Accessibility advocates. Their concern? Neumorphism is NOT accessible. They wrote countless blog posts on just that one part, even when I clearly stated the biggest accessibility problem of that…
Blurred, organic gradient backgrounds are going to be a thing this year.
UI design and especially its more artistic, visual side is constantly evolving. While most current products repeat the same, trusted and well-known IA patterns, UI and the Value Proposition are the biggest differentiators the product can have.
Nobody is going to try and redesign a registration process that works well in thousands of other apps — we’ll tweak it, for sure, and hopefully with some research, but in the end, it will just be a copy of what the users already know.
All the morphisms
Both Neumorphism and Glassmorphism were the response to the design trend pendulum swinging back from forced minimalism. The…
Square10
Let’s hope it can be fixed with software.
A while ago I benchmarked my new M1 MacBook Pro and was blown away by the performance. It allowed me to easily duplicate my entire book in Sketch and even with 1800 artboards on a single page it was still pretty responsive.
I went with the 16GB/512GB model, but assumed that it would probably work well enough with 8GB of RAM as well — after all my test was very unusual and purposefully “heavy” on the computer.
Real life design work (unless you also do 3D, audio or video) is not that heavy on the computational power. …
