Tools and Tutorials posts

User testing, often confused with usability testing, is an overarching term which helps validate the need for a product. When used with prototypes and the right testing tools, it can help save a product from failure.

Since its introduction in 2017, Adobe XD has matured when compared to its rival, Sketch. Looking at Adobe XD vs Sketch, is it time for a change?

Improving workflow and maintaining consistent design standards throughout a product can be achieved using Sketch and Atomic Design.

Color: It’s stunningly beautiful and maddeningly deceptive. Use this color theory field guide (with an infographic) to make lightning-quick color choices with unwavering confidence.

The right color palette encourages people to behave in ways designers want them to, while the wrong palette can turn visitors away before they take any action at all.

Great features and seamless integration with the Adobe ecosystem makes Adobe XD a powerful design tool that competes with industry favorites like Sketch and Figma.

Design thinking goes beyond the usual problem-solving focus of most UI and UX designers and adds the aspect of deep empathy for the user to the entire product design lifecycle, increasing the prospect of success.

The letters used to construct our written languages have their own anatomical features. Here is a collection of lesser-known letter parts that every designer should be aware of (with an awesome infographic).

How can designers move beyond personal insights to understand the problems users face? We introduce time-tested UX research methods that inspire user empathy and lead to better user experiences.

The use of color in design can affect the emotions and moods of the people. Using colors wisely can improve UX and induce desired behaviors in significant ways.

There are many UX design tools on the market, but their capabilities vary. This review examines the effectiveness of Sketch, Axure, and Figma with a task-based comparison.

Creating a dynamic, organized, and collaborative workflow between design and development teams is essential to building great digital products. This tutorial outlines how Sketch, working in tandem with Zeplin, can facilitate this collaboration seamlessly.

Follow this tutorial to create an interactive prototype with slick animated transitions in minutes using InVision Studio, the exciting new free interface design tool.

When having the right UX tools is the crucial difference between having an effective design workflow and one that’s slow and unproductive, it’s important to stay up to date with the latest tools (with infographic).

Designers can brush up on solid fundamentals and be inspired by innovative new ideas by reading the great books and free ebooks about design and creativity on this list.

How does Figma improve the design process and outperform Sketch and other design tools when it comes to designer collaboration? Learn the big differences that every designer should know.

Every month, we bring you compelling design news and inspirational content focused on design innovation. Here are six hand-picked pieces of intriguing design news.

Sketch is a valuable, time-saving resource for any designer’s toolbox. Though not every designer chooses to do so, creating style guides in Sketch can make it even more of a time-saver.

AI has become an over-hyped buzzword and the design world is no exception. Instead of resisting it, designers will soon be co-creating with AI. It will make them smarter. (Includes infographic)

Every month, we bring you riveting design news and inspiring content focused on design innovation. Here are five hand-picked pieces of design news.

Wireframing is a major step in designing any user interface, whether a website, application, or software product. Apps in the Adobe CC suite can be used to create wireframes for an efficient workflow.

In this age of lean startups, 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.

Visual design experiments often become popular design trends and suddenly they are seen everywhere. Here are a number of hot graphic design trends and some of the top tutorials on how to create them.

Every month, we bring you riveting design news and inspiring content focused on design. Here are five hand-picked pieces of design news.

Hand lettering is an art form in revival and a powerful branding tool. See inspiring examples from the world’s best letterers and learn a step-by-step approach to start your own lettering practice.

Sketch plugins can help designers speed up their design process and automate repetitive tasks in Sketch. Learning Sketch plugin development allows designers to constantly improve their workflow.

Net Promoter Score is a consumer insight method to track customer loyalty, but it falls short in many ways. Applying various user research methods gives a more complete picture of the user experience.

The inaugural issue of Toptal Design World News. Every month, we bring you riveting design news and inspiring content focused on design.

Flinto is a simple and easy to use tool for creating interactive prototypes. This tutorial teaches you how to quickly create mobile dashboard microinteractions in order to improve your prototype.

New design tools are emerging at an incredible rate, but the future promises a vast array of astonishing tools that will forever change the way designers think and work.

Design frameworks help designers work more efficiently by utilizing reusable UI components. We shed light on how to create and use one using Sketch symbols (includes a free Sketch UI framework).

Prototyping with real data can be compared to building something out of LEGO: Instead of working with imaginary, loose shapes, we can use existing components out of the box and build something real.

After years without a dedicated UX tool and the space owned by Sketch, InVision, and Figma, Adobe started developing XD. Let’s look at XD and how it compares with Sketch, the market’s dominant choice.

When working with typography, Sketch comes up short, especially when you compare it with the most popular design tools out there. In this article, we’ll give you quick tips to compensate for its shortcomings with typography.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a book contains that and more. These free eBooks may help designers grow as professionals, improve their skills, and expand their field of knowledge.

In recent years, as designers, we have a growing selection of tools to work with. One of them is Figma – the answer for collaborative work which, nowadays, we do more and more often.

Designers love Sketch for its simplicity. They love it thanks to its plugins, which add numerous features. Here are 50 of the very best plugins for Sketch.

A well-produced, high-quality pitch video can go a long way toward helping a business or individual gain credibility and secure funding. Here are 7 tips.

When it comes to large projects, browsing through layers in Sketch to understand what they do is not exactly a comfortable process even with good naming conventions. Unless you use something visual…like an emoji.

An image is worth a thousand words. Learn how to create outstanding illustrations with the Sketch plugin Looper.

Framer Studio is a powerful tool for creating interactive prototypes. Learn how to create seven useful microinteractions in no time to improve your prototype.

Craft by InVision LABS is a powerful suite of plugins for Sketch. Learn how to super-charge your process and streamline collaboration for your remote team.

Framer, the most powerful interactive prototyping tool, just became even more powerful with their latest release. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create prototypes in Framer the same way Uber, Dropbox, and Google do.

In this tutorial, we will give a simple breakdown of the steps that you need to create an animated explainer video like the slick masterpieces built by Slack.

Not so long ago, implementing a design according to a designer’s final deliverable was a nightmare. Today, new prototyping tools are helping the gap disappear between designers and developers.

Blog publishers hope to turn their blog into an effective sales and marketing tool. Here are some useful examples that show how to design a high-conversion funnel for a blog and make it a success.

Designers love to hate some fonts. We’re introducing a simple process and seven easy steps that can quickly transform a typeface into something better and can turn a font into a beautiful logotype.

Nobody likes staring at an empty screen while content loads. A well-crafted animation helps people stay engaged while they wait. This tutorial will show how loading animations can be done with ease.

When done well, emotional design increases engagement and can elicit an emotion that will deliver a positive response in users.

From the great industrial designer Dieter Rams explaining his principle of design to Adam Grant discussing the habits of original thinkers, we’ve curated a list of our favorite design videos.

We can harness the power of constraints by consciously choosing to place strict limits on design options, and we needn’t look beyond our own smartphones to find compelling examples of how this works.

Many designers shy away from making their own custom illustrations for the fear that they don’t have conventional drawing skills. What if we could show you how to make your own great custom illustrations, no sketching skills required? In this article, Toptal Design Blog Editor Tidjane Tall guides us through three step-by-step illustrations each with different styles.

Despite Photoshop’s unparalleled feature set, everyone has a few extra things that they wish the product could do. Fortunately, there is a rich community of third-party developers who are regularly pumping out fantastic plugins and extensions to make you a better designer.

Today, in a world where only three percent of adults spend time learning each day, reading is a competitive advantage.

To jumpstart your learning in 2017, we’ve curated the absolute best design links published around the web in 2016. You’re welcome.

UX sketching is a crucial, yet often overlooked, aspect of UX design. It’s a very efficient way of communicating design while allowing designers to iterate multiple ideas before settling on one.

The difference between getting the job or not often comes down to how design work is presented. Even great designers can miss opportunities because their portfolio isn’t up to snuff.

Sketch promises a faster workflow and greater ease-of-use than Photoshop. Let’s examine the dilemma between choosing which one to use by looking at the advantages from different perspectives.

Despite having four times as many pixels per inch on a 4K display, there are still legacy applications that do not look good. Learn why this happens and what to do in order to make improvements.

We often use allegory to make an idea easier to understand. But using animation may be a better way to get the message across. Learn the value of animation and why it should be leveraged.

For some people, front-end design and development can sometimes start to seem like a chore, and can be monotonous and time consuming. Through a modular design approach, it is possible to both save time and streamline the design and development process.