Consistent animation is crucial to both branding and UX. But because animation sits squarely at the intersection of design, development, and UX, achieving consistency presents unique communication challenges. Including animation in our style guides is a good place to start, but no “ultimate” animation style guide currently exists. Indeed, there may never be an animation-style-guide pattern that satisfies everyone. But Rachel Nabors maps out how we can create the ultimate animation documentation for our own teams.
Topic: Process
The Itinerant Geek
Conference season travel stress is the fun-killer, the health-killer, and the stealer of concentration. Veteran traveler Rachel Andrew has some tips to help you maintain equilibrium—and productivity—on the road.
Create an Evolutionary Web Strategy with a Digital MRO Plan
To keep complex machinery working for you, you don’t neglect it for five years and then buy in a new round. You put your assets on a schedule of maintenance, repair, and overhaul. A website—a machine for engagement—shouldn’t languish between redesigns, says David Hillis. Draft a digital MRO plan to keep a site running smoothly from year to year.
The Foundation of Technical Leadership
Technical leadership starts with technical expertise, but also requires a passion for training, an ability to plan out team success, a clear head and constant readiness to help. Brandon Gregory spells out some of the soft skills a tech lead needs in order to show true leadership.
Promoting a Design System Across Your Products
Our industry has gotten really good at making living style guides out of parts: reusable components like color, typography, buttons and forms, voice and tone. We’ve also learned how to map skills to these parts by mobilizing the best people to make decisions across platforms. But, argues Nathan Curtis, a third element is crucial to any design system mission: products. What products will use our system? How will we involve them?
Commit to Contribute
Even a very basic contribution to an open-source codebase will turn into more than a one-line change when all is said and done. New developers can be put off by seemingly arbitrary roadblocks when they’ve just worked up the courage to contribute. Remy Sharp has a rundown of some tools that can smooth the way and make novices feel more welcome.
The User’s Journey
We’re hardwired to respond to stories—to parse them, to invent them, to translate our world into landscapes and characters. Applying a twist to “narrative architecture,” Donna Lichaw deconstructs how we weave stories into our products. The real trick, she says, is to do more than tell stories; it’s to design our products to be the story.
Design for Real Life
We say we’re crafting personas to fit the needs of “real” people—yet we easily revert to abstractions when raw emotions enter the picture. Common human experiences aren’t “edge” cases; we don’t get to dismiss what seems uncomfortable or different to us. In this excerpt from Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher take on the elephant in the room—the tendency to look the other way.
Aligning Content Work with Agile Processes
Times (and job titles, and platforms) have changed. Agile has the potential to liberate content strategists from obsolete ways of working, and developers and designers can help. Brendan Murray identifies four key areas—iteration, product, people, and communication—where designers and devs can find common ground with their content counterparts and usher them into to an agile world. The open and collaborative approach of modern agile development is a framework within which content work can refine itself, test, and learn.
Impulses and Outcomes
When a designer becomes known for a certain look or style, it could be a sign that they’re held in thrall by something in their own personality or individual life experience. Matt Griffin reminds us that design is a service intended to be tailored to the client. To best meet the project’s and the client’s needs, recognize when you’re hanging on to a limited selection of personal design tropes.
