I had a fantastic conversation with Jem Sophia today (our first actual conversation after years of talking online!) who pointed me in the direction of this fantastic article. I love the sentiment and the metaphor. Creating software to scratch an itch without any ambitions of ScAlInG and turning it into a capitalistic enterprise.

UX competitor analysis is a valuable user research method that focuses on understanding your products’ competitors, helping you better understand your market and goals. Idea Theorem™ has worked with many clients that required a UX competitor analysis to get actionable insights about their competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and mistakes to avoid and know what they are doing right.

This week’s designer news includes CSS Printing Guide, Retrofitting Fluid Typography, CSS :has() Interactive Guide, Bootstrap 5 Modern Backgrounds, and much more.

Focus outlines highlight the active interactive element on a web page. They’re crucial for accessibility, especially for keyboard users and those with motor impairments. If you ever tried navigating a website without a mouse, you can imagine how frustrating it is when you can’t see where you are. If not, imagine not seeing your cursor

Ask the search engine Ecosia about “Paris to Prague” and flight booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia’s CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to present more train options, which he considers better for the environment. But because its results are licensed from Google and Microsoft’s Bing, Ecosia has little control over what’s shown. Kroll is ready for that to change.

Creating effective designs for tech-savvy audiences, such as data scientists and software engineers, requires a careful balance between visual clarity, functionality, and creativity. While the complexity of the product must be communicated clearly, the interface also needs to feel intuitive and engaging. Success in such projects doesn’t just come from creativity; it’s rooted in strategic collaboration.

Let’s create a Breakout game using Vanilla JavaScript. In a Breakout game, the player uses a paddle to bounce a ball and hit bricks, removing the bricks one by one.

This article is the culmination of months of work, trial and error, and research to craft the perfect painterly shader for your next WebGL project.

Tooltips are used to provide simple text hints for UI controls. Think of them as tips for tools. They’re basically little bubbles of text content that pop up when you hover over an unnamed control (like the bell icon in Stripe).

Thomas Bohm rethinks technical illustrations and data visualizations, sharing interesting and uncommon examples of how to present data and information. Bar graphs and pie charts are great, but there’s so much more to explore!