Toptal Design Blog

The Toptal Design Blog is a hub for advanced design studies by professional designers in the Toptal network on all facets of digital design, ranging from detailed design tutorials to in-depth coverage of new design trends, techniques, and technologies.

authors are vetted experts in their fields and write on topics in which they have demonstrated experience. All of our content is peer reviewed and validated by Toptal experts in the same field.

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authors are vetted experts in their fields and write on topics in which they have demonstrated experience. All of our content is peer reviewed and validated by Toptal experts in the same field.

How to Use Adobe Firefly’s Generative AI Features: Insights From Designers

AI doesn’t diminish creativity—it amplifies it. Toptal designers reveal how Adobe Firefly’s tools, like Generative Fill and Text to Vector Graphic, elevate your work and client results.

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Jessica Souza

Jessica is a digital designer who specializes in Adobe Creative Suite and composing compelling visuals for brand identities, websites, and marketing campaigns. Her clients include global brands like Google, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and EA.

Figma vs. Adobe XD vs. Sketch: Choosing the Right UI Design Tool

Which tool should you choose? From reusable components and real-time collaboration to voice prototyping and developer handoff, a UI/UX expert weighs the features of the leading UI design platforms to help you select the best tool for your project.

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Sérgio Estrella

Sérgio is a UI/UX designer who crafts intuitive interfaces across diverse industries, including AI, enterprise, finance, education, e-commerce, and automotive. He has a background in graphic design, front-end development, and team leadership that informs his approach to user-centered solutions.

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Navigating the Product Design Process: A 6-step Guide to Superior Digital Products

Product design is complex, and new apps and tools fail all too often. Incorporate these six key activities into your workflow to create digital products that thrive in the marketplace.

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Christian Adolphus

Christian is a product designer, product owner, user researcher, and Webflow developer. He led the design team at Chaka, a leading online investment platform in Nigeria, and worked as the founding product designer at SquadPal. His product experience spans B2B, B2C, and SaaS enterprise solutions.

How AI Reshapes UX: A Design Expert Sheds Light on Benefits and Success Strategies

AI impacts user experiences by making digital products more responsive to individual user needs. A seasoned product designer specializing in AI explains how to avoid pitfalls and maximize the potential of the latest technology.

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Akis Apostoliadis

Akis is a lead product designer with more than 20 years of experience in AI, fintech, healthtech, SaaS, and e-commerce. He has an extensive background in creating design systems for enterprise companies, and has worked with Sony Pictures, WeWork, Pfizer, Cigna, and Unilever.

Are users scrolling past your brand’s social media images? Try these graphic design techniques to create expert visuals that grab attention on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and beyond.

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Micah Bowers

Micah is a digital designer who has worked with clients such as Google, Deloitte, and Autodesk. He is also the Managing Editor of Toptal’s Design and Technical Content. His design expertise has been featured in Fast Company, TNW, and other notable publications.

Boosting Satisfaction and Sales: An E-commerce Checkout Design Case Study

Improving your checkout flow can dramatically increase conversions and user satisfaction. A veteran UI/UX designer explains how she reimagined the checkout process of the seventh most visited e-commerce site in the US.

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Beatriz Garcia de Prado

Beatriz is an art director and a UI/UX design leader with extensive experience in e-commerce and digital product design for clients like the large American retailer Belk. She specializes in leveraging user personas, customer journeys, and user story mapping to create products that resonate emotionally.

How to Increase Website Conversions With Effective UX Design Techniques

Reciprocity, commitment, social proof, and scarcity are powerful tools for increasing user engagement and sales. Explore the ways that Amazon, Airbnb, and YouTube leverage these factors for conversion optimization.

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Shoaib Mahmud

Shoaib is a product designer who specializes in creating designs that drive conversions across various industries, such as freight, transportation, HR solutions, edtech, and logistics. He has worked with numerous startups in the US, Bangladesh, and Singapore, overseeing project life cycles, including user research, wireframes, prototypes, and UI.

Create Engaging UI Components: A Figma Animation Tutorial

Figma’s intuitive animation features enhance usability by adding subtle motion effects to UI components like icons, buttons, and product cards.

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Anna Muratova

Anna is a UI/UX designer experienced in creating UI animations and improving the usability of digital products. She has collaborated with a range of clients, from small startups to larger companies, to create intuitive mobile apps, redesign websites with improved visual aesthetics, and establish branding that represents company values.

Building a Mental Health App for Families: A UI Design Case Study

The global mental health app market is booming, and research suggests that using thoughtful UI design can give newcomers to the space a competitive edge. Here’s how.

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Fellype Silva

Fellype is a digital product designer who specializes in crafting exceptional user interfaces. He has worked with a wide range of businesses, including a pediatric mental health app developer, a venture capital studio, an AI image recognition company, and LabHacker, a research initiative led by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.

Immersive Experience Design: Expert Insights and Techniques

How can designers draw people into your product’s virtual, digital, or physical world? Take UX to a new level with these expert perspectives on immersive experience design.

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Clarke Noone

Clarke is a designer who focuses on UX, UI, VR/AR animation, and 3D design. He has extensive experience crafting immersive user experiences for companies such as Barclays and Skype.

Better UX Writing: 3 Effective Strategies for a Seamless User Experience

UX writing should strike the right tone and be empathetic and persuasive. Create a frictionless user experience with these three best practices.

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Kate Margolis

Kate is a digital product designer and UI/UX consultant who specializes in user-centered design, UX writing, and user research. She has partnered with companies such as Hertz, Jaguar Land Rover, and the dating app Thursday.

3 Best Practices for Successful SaaS Design

Poor SaaS design can cause customers to get frustrated and flee. Follow these best practices to create a seamless software experience that users will love.

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Ahsan Jalil

Ahsan is a lead product and UX designer who creates user-centered solutions for SaaS, enterprise software, web, and mobile applications. He has worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprise multinationals like Cisco, GSK, and Western Union.

Design High-converting Websites With These Webflow Best Practices

Webflow can cut website design time in half—enabling designers to devote more attention to driving traffic and boosting conversions.

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Pavle Lucic

Pavle is a designer specializing in UI/UX design for websites and mobile apps. His clients include large international companies such as Societe Generale and TomTom, as well as successful startups in fintech, healthcare, travel, and other industries.

Design Dilemma: Balancing Aesthetics and Functionality

Ideally, aesthetics and functionality would merge seamlessly in digital design, but that isn’t always the case. Here, we discuss when to prioritize one or the other for the optimal user experience.

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Merehan Elamrosy

Merehan is a product designer who crafts functional and visually appealing user interfaces for education, management, health, transportation, SaaS, and e-commerce companies. She has led design workshops for multiple EU-funded projects and has given design thinking lectures at leading European universities.

How to Avoid 5 Types of Cognitive Bias in User Research

Cognitive biases can skew user research, leading to design changes that don’t address your customers’ real needs. Build digital products that users will love by mitigating these common biases.

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Rima Khachatryan

Rima is a product designer with expertise in UI/UX design, graphic design, digital marketing, and user research. She has worked across various industries to create user-focused and aesthetically pleasing digital products, and spent six years at the global software development company Volo.

How Chatbot Features Can Elevate the E-commerce Search Experience

Applying chatbot features to e-commerce search can increase user satisfaction while tackling the pervasive and costly problem of search abandonment. These chatbot UX best practices will help your customers find what they’re looking for.

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Khatia Gagnidze

Khatia is a product designer and researcher who has designed innovative solutions for banking, fintech, and e-commerce products. Her clients include Bank of Georgia, the payment processing software company HitPay, and Mymarket, the largest e-commerce platform in Georgia.

Toptal Design Expert

Paula Barcante

Paula is an award-winning UX/UI designer, advisor, and illustrator with more than six years of hands-on experience in making complex interfaces delightful and user friendly. She has made a significant impact in large corporations, such as Amazon, Zillow, Google, as well as startups. Her mission is to create efficient, beautiful, innovative, and high-quality experiences for the greater good of society.