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3 Tools to Create Social Media Visuals

Do you create custom images for social media? Looking for tools to streamline the design process? There are some new desktop design tools that make it easy to quickly create multiple graphics for social media. In this article, you’ll discover three user-friendly desktop tools to create visuals for social media. Why Create Images via Desktop? If [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Donna Moritz via

How to Use Facebook Business Manager to Share Account Access

Do you have multiple business pages and ad accounts on Facebook? Looking for a secure way to share access to them? Facebook’s Business Manager makes it easy to give people access to your Facebook presence without sharing your password. In this article, you’ll discover how to add your Facebook accounts to Business Manager. #1: Set [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Greg Daily via

Reddit Is A Customer Research Gold Mine [INFOGRAPHIC]

“Do you ever have the feeling that your ideal customers are all meeting in some secret location, and that you haven’t been invited?

Well, you’re not exactly wrong. In 2015, Reddit received 82.54 billion pageviews. People visit Reddit to read, comment, and socialize, and they cover just about every topic under the sun. The site and its users are somewhat intimidating at first, but Reddit is a vibrant community full of open, (sometimes painfully) honest, oddball dialogue. Your target customers are here pouring their hearts out, so it’s time that you to take advantage of this gold mine of customer research.”

by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

5 tips on moving from graphic design to interaction design (from someone doing just that)

In the past three years of my professional career, I’ve been searching and working towards finding the right kind of role for someone like me. I use the phrase ‘someone like me’ because I imagine there are a lot of UX Mastery readers who feel like they don’t quite fit into just one category.

Chances are, if you’re interested in user experience design, you’re probably some type of hybrid. A hybrid in the way you think – equal parts creatively and intellectually. A hybrid in the way that you don’t want to be given a brief, but you want to help design the brief. And a hybrid in the way that you’re interested in far too many things to tie yourself down to being purely a designer, developer, researcher, and so on. This feeling of being pulled in so many directions has led me to interaction design.

Before I continue, I should probably explain what I mean by “interaction designer” (or IxD for short). The term is somewhat arbitrary, as are most role titles under the UX design umbrella. In short, it refers to a designer who focuses on interactive mediums such as digital devices, websites and apps. An interaction designer does this by using UX skills to create a design that puts functionality and usability at its core. From there, they might either pass the creative design onto a digital designer to craft, or in a more entry level job they will more likely do the design themselves as well.

An interaction design role is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a UX/UI Designer. This is often used in job ads a little too liberally, in the same way that companies sometimes unknowingly ask for a designer/developer. UX and UI are different skills, and to be experts in both areas takes many years of diligent experience.

Are you still interested? Want to know more about becoming an IxD designer? Excellent! Read on for my top 5 tips on how to transition into this type of role.

Seek out the skills you’re missing and fill those gaps on your own

I often hear people complain that they can’t get a job in interaction design because all jobs require a minimum level of experience. There’s a simple way around this: start to incorporate UX processes into your current graphic or digital design work. Then, when you see a job ad that requires the experience, you’ll already have that talking point and folio.

A search for UX/UI designer will always reveal more job opportunities than Interaction Design. It’s important to try and decipher the skills the company is really looking for.

In a later article I will talk about how to unpack job ads to find your missing skills. But in the meantime, I highly recommend reading UX Mastery’s Get started in UX ebook. In particular, the sections on peers and mentorship echo a lot of my own experiences.

In addition, I recommend doing online courses with the Interaction Design Foundation, for a small yearly fee you can do as many online courses as you like.

Use instinct and a fine-toothed comb

New designers often find that they get to a point with their design where they can’t progress any further. It’s a special skill to learn how to keep moving and iterate your designs for the better. This might include conducting rapid prototyping to find the flaws, followed by user testing in the later stages of design. Ask your boss to build in research, prototyping and testing into the project.

Interaction designers spend a lot of time in the initial defining stage of a project.

You may need to work some overtime initially until the experience pays off and you can get to a better solution faster.

Meet as many people in the industry as possible

Get over your insecurities and reach out to people via email or Linkedin for a coffee and a chat. Be mindful that if you decide to do this, it’s important to do your research first. Have a good understanding of their role and where they work before you meet with them. That way, you’re able to demonstrate your understanding of the industry and their particular place within that industry.

Make sure you prepare some questions so they don’t feel like they have to lead the whole conversation.

Another way to meet people is to sign up to email newsletters for UX or other related groups in your city. Make a pact with yourself to go to any talk or meetup that they hold.

Some good ones I go to are the UX Book Club, Ladies That UX, Carlton Connect (Melbourne) and General Assembly.

Learn to verbalise your thoughts on the subject

Learn how to talk confidently about UX. User experience designers are known for their communication skills. Practise verbalising your thoughts on the journey you took to create your work and why you have designed something in a specific way.

It’s very natural to start off by standing back and allowing your boss or client to interpret your work for themselves. For instance, you may think that it doesn’t need any explanation to be able to understand it. But as an interaction designer, your role is to combine research, thought, design and intuition into a functional solution that answers the core problem. It’s important that you can explain your process so that others can understand why your solution is the best possible solution.

This is a skill that can take years, so start working on this as early as possible.

Take criticism openly and humbly

This one is incredibly important, but doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. If you are lucky enough to find a mentor, allow them to speak frankly with you about your work and take on board everything they say, at least until you have given their recommendations a try. You may find their suggestions don’t work for you, but more times than not you’ll learn something from the process. Remember, IxD design is a specialty that comes with experience.

If this resonated with you, let me know in the comments! I’ll aim to answer any questions about how to utilise these skills in your own career.

The post 5 tips on moving from graphic design to interaction design (from someone doing just that) appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Leigh Gamon via UX Mastery

Image Replacement Techniques in the Modern Age

If you are not familiar with the concept of image replacement in CSS, consider the following scenario. Let's say you want to display a fancy logo in your website header. Now, you might be tempted to use the typical <img> tag. That would work — however using images in such a manner will deprive your website of SEO benefits and will also compromise the accessibility of the website.

[caption id="attachment_133603" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Artwork by SitePoint/Natalia Balska[/caption]

Image replacement techniques allow you to replace a text element with an image while avoiding some of the above downsides. There are multiple ways to replace text with images, we will cover a range of these in this article.

Using Negative Text-indent — The Phark Method

This is the most common technique that most web developers have used at one point or another. The idea here is to move the text far outside the browser window by setting a large negative text-indent:

.replace-indent {
  width: 264px;
  height: 106px;
  background: url("assets/logo.png");
  text-indent: -9999px;
}

Here is a CodePen demo showing how two headings look with and without text-indent. The first contains text which is not hidden and the second has the text hidden using text-indent:

See the Pen Image replacement indenting by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

The text is still accessible by screen readers using this method and there is no SEO penalty. However, this solution won't work when the text is right aligned. Also, the browser needs to render a very large box for our header due to the text-indent value which can be problematic on very old devices.

The Scott Kellum Method

Instead of setting a large negative text-indent, you can set it to 100%. This way the browser won't need to create a large box and the performance will improve. You don't need any extra markup to use this method. Here is the CSS that you need:

.replace-scott {
  width: 264px;
  height: 106px;
  background: url("assets/logo.png");
  text-indent: 100%;
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
}

Setting overflow to hidden hides the text and whitespace: nowrap keeps it from moving onto the next line. The text will still be read by screen readers in this method. Here is a demo of this technique:

See the Pen Image Replacement - Scott Kellum Technique by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

Using Margin — Radu Darvas Technique

This technique also forces the text outside of the browser window but uses margins to do so. The idea here is to apply very large negative left margin and give your header a correspondingly large width.

.replace-margin {
  width: 2264px;
  height: 106px;
  background: url("assets/logo.png") top right no-repeat;
  margin: 0 0 0 -2000px;
}

Just like the previous case, our logo is used as a background image for the heading. Here is a demo to show how this technique works, first without the margin and then with the margin applied:

See the Pen Image Replacement - Margin Technique by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

If you keep scrolling to the right you will eventually see the background for first heading. In reality, you won't have to worry about the scrollbar because the large negative margin compensates for the width (as you can see with the second heading). Keep in mind that this method is not as efficient for the browser to perform because the browser has to draw a really large box.

Using Padding — The Langridge Method

This time we push the text outside of our header using the padding-top property. The property is to be set to a value that is equal to the height of our logo. However, this alone is not enough and we also have to use overflow: hidden to hide the text.

.replace-padding {
  width: 264px;
  height: 0;
  background: url("assets/logo.png");
  padding: 106px 0 0 0;
  overflow: hidden;
} 

Compared to the previous two methods, this property does a much better job performance wise. It also offers the same level of accessibility as the previous two methods. Below is a demo of this technique, the first heading does not have the padding background, while the second one does:

See the Pen Image Replacement - Padding Technique by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

Using Small font-size — The Lindsay Method

Another way to hide text is make it very small and set its color to the background of your logo. This works without affecting accessibility but you might face SEO penalties because of the tiny font size and camouflaged color.

.replace-font {
  width: 264px;
  height: 106px;
  background: url("assets/logo.png");
  font-size: 1px;
  color: white;
}

Here is a demo for this method, the first image without the font-size fix and the second one with it in action:

See the Pen Image Replacement - font-size Technique by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

You will still face problems if your logo does not have a flat background color to allow perfect blending. In that case, you can set the color to transparent.

Continue reading %Image Replacement Techniques in the Modern Age%

by Baljeet Rathi via SitePoint