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Fresh from earning an industrial design degree decorated with magna cum laude honors, Zack joins us with a year of UX/ UI design already under his belt. He’s wireframed and designed apps for iOS and Android, and designed video games and web interfaces from start to finish. That’s something that almost comes naturally, though, as a lifelong gamer. He’s an avid fan of all kinds of games, and firmly believes that life lessons can be learned from Pokemon or Zelda.
Zack is a big fan of cycling and loves to ride his bike both recreationally and for a good ecological commute. He also loves that eternally glorious cuisine, ramen noodles, whether it’s for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
The unveiling of the iPhone X has confirmed the existence of the top “notch” or sensor housing. While this seems purely aesthetic, there are a few things to consider when designing around this sensor housing in both portrait and left/right landscape orientations.
Year after year, Apple rolls out platform features that greatly improve usability when they’re used correctly. Unfortunately, many apps that have been around for awhile still don’t take advantage of these features. With the release of iOS 11 on the horizon, now is the perfect time to start incorporating them. To help you along, I’ve listed out some under-used features and reasons why your users will thank you for using them in your app.
Recent versions of iOS have reimagined the design for several of Apple’s platform apps, with big titles, rounded card-like UI and filled buttons. Apple pushes these changes even further in iOS 11 by making them the norm for the platform, which means that it is time to reevaluate your apps to ensure that they conform with the new design language.
With the introduction of the Android O preview, we’ve gotten a look at how Google intends to tidy up the home screen through Adaptive Icons. In this post, we’ll be highlighting how this changes creating production assets, what to consider when designing your adaptive icon, and introducing our adaptive icon sketch template.
In all areas of the app development world, designers and developers run into the issue of not being able to communicate efficiently. At Big Nerd Ranch, we’ve encountered this problem before, but have improved our communication over the years. Recently, my colleague Kristin Marsicano and I sought to identify what designers and developers at Big Nerd Ranch have done to improve our ability to communicate effectively with one another.
Designing meaningful products for Apple TV requires taking into account many more additional factors than when designing for a mobile device. To prepare for this, here are some considerations when designing your app for tvOS.
For a designer, the word “port” can be cringe-inducing. By definition, a port is an application adapted from one environment to another. However, what sounds like a short re-skinning project is actually a challenging process involving design, development and stakeholder communication.
Designers need to be aware of many new features when it comes to designing for iOS 8 apps. Extensions, device sizes and frameworks like HealthKit and HomeKit all have an impact. In this demo, I talk about the ways that iOS 8 changes app design.
While the visual design of iOS 8 remains similar to its predecessor, it is packed with features that require special design attention.