Use Sharpies to keep your wireframes messy

You may know that I'm a fan of using Sharpies for wireframing layouts instead of specialty wireframing apps like Balsamiq or Mockingbird. I stated several reasons for my Sharpie affections a couple weeks ago in a post called Cheap, powerful desktop and mobile wireframing tools.

This time I want to hone in on one major benefit to using Sharpies for your initial wireframes. Messiness.

How to bring content design back into your UX design process

Content design isn't necessarily part of an aspiring web developer's immediate learning plan, but getting a sense for other disciplines in your industry will make you a more well-rounded developer. And since you should be learning UX design anyway, it's good to know this stuff. For the purposes of this post, content refers primarily to copy, not other content elements like images or icons.

UX design has been overly deconstructed to its basic parts; wireframes, mind maps, and user stories. The role of content in UX design has been lost, left to the last item on the todo list before a website ships. Content managers have been relegated to mere copywriters, pumping out words like widgets in a factory. It's no wonder business writing sucks.

Choosing a winning color palette

I suck at building color palettes from scratch. I've read a dozen tutorials and watched a handful of videos and if you asked me to put together 5 colors that look great together I couldn't. I think building great color palettes is a genetic predisposition, like drawing or writing good poetry or liking mushrooms. If you're not born with it, you won't have it.

That said, the Internet does a great job at augmenting our deficiencies. You don't have to be a color aficionado to choose a great color palette. All you need is a basic understanding of the effect of color on emotion, a little good taste, and a tool like COLOURlovers or Kuler by Adobe.

Take a cool photo of your latest design

You've just finished a sweet design and you want to post a screenshot of what it will look like on an actual computer. First option: find a photo of a Macbook, drop in Photoshop, and put your design on the screen. Meh, that'll work. Second option: put your Macbook on the ground and take a picture of it. Genius.

The image above was part of Dann Petty's recent Yahoo! redesign post on Medium. There's a free PSD of the design, too. Check it out.