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This post was written by Ivana Miličić, Designer for Toptal.   Wireframing is a major step in designing any user interface, whether a website, application, or software product. Without distraction in the form of visuals, colors, typography, styles, and effects, you can be more focused on defining content hierarchy and user experience. Doing low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes will help you test and iterate earlier and more often in the process. Low-fidelity wireframes allow designers to work faster and develop products that users will love. There are a lot of different wireframing tools to choose from in the wild. Which one you choose will depend on your personal preferences and workflow style. Just like a lot of designers who have moved to digital design from the print ...

This post was written by Tanya Junell, Designer for Toptal.   Being a seasoned designer means having the frameworks and skills to tackle most design problems with ease. Be it your expert-level UI talent or UX guru status, you’ve likely had great success creating beautiful digital products for your company or clients. But in this age of lean startups and entrepreneurship, designers often find themselves in stretch roles where they are not only in charge of a product’s design but also in charge of coming up with the type of product to build. Whether working in a small product team or taking the leap of building out their own mobile or web app, designers may find it necessary to add the skill of product strategy to ...

This post was written by Tanya Junell, Designer for Toptal.   Being a seasoned designer means having the frameworks and skills to tackle most design problems with ease. Be it your expert-level UI talent or UX guru status, you’ve likely had great success creating beautiful digital products for your company or clients. But in this age of lean startups and entrepreneurship, designers often find themselves in stretch roles where they are not only in charge of a product’s design but also in charge of coming up with the type of product to build. Whether working in a small product team or taking the leap of building out their own mobile or web app, designers may find it necessary to add the skill of product strategy to ...

This post was written by Joel Lopez, Designer for Toptal.   When it comes to designing a product, designers are looking for the best solution to ensure a product meets the needs of the user as well as the needs of the business. Making a conversion is an important business goal when convincing a potential customer to buy a product or use your service. But what role does good user experience design play—including usability testing—in ensuring the highest conversion optimization rate possible (i.e., of leads to sales)? There are a lot of articles out there that claim to hold the ultimate key to conversion. There are always new trends or fads promising that, by changing a button to one particular color, using ...

This post was written by Miklos Philips, Designer for Toptal.   Our daily lives are are saturated with amazing images. Visual design experiments become hot graphic design trends, and suddenly we see them everywhere. Striking visual designs are plastered all over the sides of buses, posters, billboards, TV ads, magazines and of course, digital products. They have many names, including duotone, double exposure, scan lines, glitch, smudge, color channel, photo masking, vibrant-garish colors, and misprint. The graphic design trend “glitch” on a New York City subway advertisement. As with fashion, design trends are often recycled from decades past—we see them coming back again and again: Russian constructivism, Bauhaus, screen printing, 1970’s… etc. Simple, saturated geometric design patterns have been around for ...