As a product designer, I know the importance of having a visually appealing and memorable app icon. However, not all of us are naturally gifted in graphic design, and that’s where tools like Midjourney come in handy. Midjourney is an image generation tool similar to DALL-E 2, and I’ve been using it to explore different styles for my app icon.

With the recent layoff in the tech industry, many designers are now finding themselves in a difficult position, trying to stand out in a competitive job market. If you’re a designer who’s currently working on building or updating your online portfolio, here are five things you can do to be more productive while staying sane and motivated to increase your chances of landing a job or freelance project.

In the previous chapter, we went through some of the basics of logo design. In this chapter, we get a bit more serious. Starting with a tutorial. If you have ever opened the Sketch app, then you should be ok following along with the tutorial:

This tutorial is meant to give you the skills necessary to start turning your logos from sketches into Sketch files. Let me know in the comments if there are any logos that you’d want me to create. You can send me photos of what you’ve drawn so far if you want help with turning them into sketch files as well.

You go on Instagram and you see a bunch of really clever logos, then you think to yourself: “My business needs a clever logo like those!” Alright. Let’s see what it takes to create one of those clever logos for your business.

One problem that many professionals especially in the tech industry have, is that when faced with any idea, we immediately frame it within our knowledge. For example, someone might be explaining to me an app they are working on and I start imagining the interface of the app, the pages it might have, the buttons and the animations between the screens that might be there. A developer might be listening to the same conversation, but they would think about the back-end requirements, the libraries and frameworks that might be needed, and how much of it can be made with native elements.

With the introduction of OLED screens to the iPhone X, more and more people are requesting night themes in their favourite apps to take advatage of the true blacks on OLED screens, to save battery, and to make it easier on the eyes in some cases. But should you add this…

Yesterday, after a long quiet period Sketch announced their new version. Sketch 49. It come with some basic prototyping features and one of the main new updates was an official Apple integration for iOS 11 UI kit. It all sounds great, but if you take a closer look it starts to fall apart.

About 2 years ago I volunteered as a design mentor for the Van{Hacks} hackathon in Vancouver. I ended up sleeping in the Hootsuite lounge to make sure nothing went wrong and to provide support to the teams in the form of design feedback and healthy snacks, making me the only mentor who stayed overnight.

In a few years the interface of most applications will be redundant. Let me tell you why. There are apps that you use to create stuff, then there are apps like games that are immersive experiences. Pretty much everything else is about consuming information...

Another CES passed by and we saw a bunch of new smart cars, with self-driving capabilities. What all of them had in common, was how they were trying to be the center of your digital experience.

After a visit to Cupertino and getting the silent treatment from all of the Apple engineers I tried to talk to about the next iPhone, I started thinking what the next iPhone would actually look like. This was before all of the rumours about the iPhone X

"Think of your branding as an outfit. It tells a lot about you. Even if you're the most qualified person for a job, if you dress poorly for an interview, you might not get the job."

In this article I’m going to talk about the future of the iPhone and how Apple is going to kill their most profitable product...

You’re a UI designer. You’ve heard about the Taptic Engine on the iPhones and watched the developer videos where Apple encourages you to integrate them into your design. At first you thought, it’s only on the iPhone 6S. It’s a small market. Then the next iPhone came and you procrastinated more. And now it’s maybe too late to get started with it?

Some apps have dedicated on-boarding screens. Some let you skip them and some don’t. Some apps are only accessible with an account and when you open them you are presented with a log-in screen. Some leave this as an option and let you log-in later by experiencing the app first, to see if it’s really for you, and some don’t. So which is the right approach for your app?

They have replaced the burger button with a tab bar. Every good user experience needs to provide these pieces of information to the users: Where they are, where they can go, and how they can get there...

Instagram has been testing a somewhat radical new user interface of their app. A black and white approach to the infamous social media app with hints of red here and there. Here are a few reasons, why I think this is perfect for the users: The newly designed tab bar uses black, thick icons for the selected tabs and thin, grey outlines for the unselected ones...

I will not be getting into the history of the shift key and how Apple has tried to get it right over and over again and failing each time in one place or the other. To get a detailed history and for an amazing read check out this article...