[Podcast] The Brand Storytelling Formula That Actually Works with Park Howell

In this episode, Park explains why story remains one of the most powerful tools in brand building, what separates a memorable narrative from an interesting one and how brands can shift from simply telling stories to beco…

Rethinking design leadership with swarms and flocks

What Star Wars got wrong about AI (so far)

Framer is killing the marketplace… or are they?

New EU Guidelines For AI Labelling

New EU guidelines, why AI sparkles aren’t enough, when AI labels are required, and what the rules mean for AI-powered features and products.

I’m building a tool around a simple problem: teams are shipping faster than ever, but it’s getting harder to catch experience problems before they reach users. The idea isn’t to generate another generic “your button cou…

What a dollhouse full of death taught me about thinking

We’re gorging on borrowed trust and it’s going to cost us.

Design’s dreaded phrase is coming back. This time we’re in control.

How “Everyone can Design” means designers don’t have to wait for permission Continue reading on UX Collective »

Building Tactile UX: Honoring Intentional Design With Lottie

When tasked with building a highly interactive, tactile web experience, the architecture must serve the art direction. In this article, Alexey Kopytin explains their architectural rationale for building a digital stress-…

been thinking a lot about cognitive load in everyday interactions lately. the products i genuinely love are the ones where the interface just dissolves into the background. compare that to 90% of modern apps/web services…

Knee-deep in user research calls lately and the recording side is handled, but the synthesis layer is where it falls apart. Grain and tldv are good for clips, Dovetail wants everything manually tagged before it's usefu…

Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.

Pressure to adopt AI isn't evidence that a tool helps. The PROVE framework tests one tool against one task and produces a provisional decision you can defend.

How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript

The gap between “you need a library for this” and “the browser does this” keeps closing. A practical guide to auditing your dependencies and finding what the web platform can now handle for you.

AI can now generate a convincing interface faster than most teams can properly review it. The obvious problems are easy to catch: broken layout, inconsistent spacing, missing responsive states. The harder problems sit …

Take up to 2 in-depth training courses, teaching user experience best practices for successful design. Training focused on long-lasting skills for UX professionals. October 26 - October 29, 2026.

Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Virtual Branding Summit

Discover how to plan a successful virtual summit, from strategy and speaker outreach to branding, promotion, registration and event delivery.

[Podcast] Creative Leadership & The Future of Branding with Ekaterina Solomeina

Ekaterina shares her perspective on what separates talented creatives from true creative leaders, why many businesses still underestimate design, and how creatives can better communicate their value in language executive…

NN/G is hiring a People & Culture Generalist. This is a fully remote, permanent role running the day-to-day of our People function. Three to five years of People Operations or HR generalist experience. Applications…

Post your portfolio or something else you've designed to receive a critique. Generally, users who include additional context and explanations receive more (and better) feedback. Critiquers: Feedback should be supported…

Are you beginning your UX career and have questions? Post your questions below and we hope that our experienced members will help you get them answered! Posting Tips Keep in mind that readers only have so much time (Pr…

Mentorship is an essential growth tool that offers substantial personal and career benefits, but only if you engage in it properly.

A survey of 604 tech and design professionals found that “UX” remains the default name for our field, while alternative names remain fragmented.

Small Joys And Big Adventures (August 2026 Wallpapers Edition)

Whether you’re enjoying some well-earned time off this August or are jumping headfirst into a new project, how about some new desktop wallpapers to accompany you on all those big and small adventures the month might brin…

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI

As AI reshapes product design, it could give designers greater autonomy or expose the gaps that autonomy makes harder to hide. Exploring both the bull and bear cases, Andy Budd examines what happens when designers need l…

Thinking Outside The Box: Digital Design In The AI Era

Many of the AI tools we interact with take the form of text boxes. But what if there was a different way to interact with AI? Oleksii Hrzhehorzhevskyi explores a different approach to creating a new AI assistant and how …

[Podcast] How to Price Creative Work (& Why Hourly Billing is Nuts!) with Jonathan Stark

Jacob and Jonathan explore the difference between fixed fees and true value pricing, how to run better sales conversations, why pricing is deeply connected to positioning, and how authority changes the way clients buy.

I’m excited to share that I’ve been invited to join the judging panel for the new Designity Awards, a program created to recognize designers and creative professionals doing bold, original, ... Read more

[Podcast] Brand Associations & Why Most Brands Are Forgotten with Ulli Appelbaum

In this conversation with Ulli, we unpack one of the most important and often misunderstood areas of branding: how associations are formed, strengthened, measured, and used to drive real business growth.

When a sidebar contains many items, grouping is necessary to help users find them faster. However, most designers don’t group their sidebar items and force users to scan an entire list. This results in slow navigation ti…

How easy to scan is your sidebar menu? If you haven’t optimized the spacing, users will likely spend more time navigating and finding items. Balancing the spacing in the sidebar can help users navigate faster and easier.…

A sidebar navigation on an interface offers users multiple items to select. After making a selection, they need a visual cue to identify the chosen item. This cue is called an indicator. Every sidebar needs a clear and n…

Screen space on a desktop interface is more important than you think. Most designers take it for granted because a desktop screen contains so much space. However, when it comes to data display, every pixel counts. A side…

A sidebar navigation with a few items is simple to design. All you have to do is display them in a list with relevant icons. But what do you do when you have multiple large-scale item groups to display? The typical appro…

Updated January 30, 2023 – Amy Jiménez Márquez After much internal debate, I’m placing the publication on indefinite hiatus. It’s a difficult decision, and if you have questions or want to talk about the future of Boxes …

Book in brief — Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap

Designers can empower people to make confident decisions. Empowerment goes beyond just basic functionality: we help people meet their needs and gain a sense of fulfillment and knowledge through their interactions with sc…

Designing Respectful Tech: What is your relationship with technology?

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or, maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt …

Introduction to Ontology Concepts and Modeling

What is ontology? An ontology is a formal system for modeling concepts and their relationships. Unlike relational database systems, which are essentially interconnected tables, ontologies put a premium on the relationshi…

Activating Change: A Designer’s Guide to Systems Thinking

This past year we became acutely aware of how interconnected we all are. The toilet paper shortage gave the world a glimpse at supply chains, and the pandemic as a whole was a crash course in how our healthcare system ca…

The Dream of a More Human Navigation Realized

Using the customer intentions method to humanize our virtual worlds In the 2010 Sci-Fi film Inception a professional thief is offered a chance at erasing his criminal history if he implants one person’s ideas into the su…