Toptal Design Blog

Travel gives a fresh perspective, inspires creativity, and improves our empathy for people around the world. By making the globe your office, you can benefit from new insights and become a better designer.

Want to become a phenomenal designer? Take a multidisciplinary design approach and study the methods of other design disciplines.

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

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

Following some basic mobile app design best practices and avoiding the most common mistakes will help designers create apps that live past the crucial 90-day mark when 71% are abandoned.

Users form mental models around how products should work through use. In order to design for maximum usability, designers need to understand and leverage users’ mental models.

Creating meaningful designs, capturing customer attention, and influencing their behavior is something that designers and marketers will agree is one of the most difficult things to achieve.

Two Toptal designers engage in a lively debate about aesthetics, objectivity, and the definition of art and design.

No matter what design discipline you are working in—whether it’s visual design, UX, or traditional print—typefaces are essential elements of virtually every bit of design produced.

The most progressive and interesting designers steer clear of visually stale design solutions and ditch restrictive rules by learning UI design best practices and avoiding common design mistakes.

A design sprint is a methodology used to validate ideas through design, prototyping, user testing, and collaboration in only five days, offering a more structured, effective approach to creative thinking.

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.

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

The best landing pages increase conversions and help brands sell more. But what makes great landing page design? Read and uncover valuable insights for any business looking for a world-class landing page.

80% of businesses fail in their first year—a majority of these casualties are due to a lack of customer research. Effective customer development interviews can help validate product ideas before moving forward.

Great emotional design creates a bond between the consumer and the brand—creating an emotional connection to your target market translates into conversions and sales as well as online and offline interactions.

A lion’s share of websites and apps in the online media space are powered by content management systems (CMS). The optimal way to design for these applications is putting content first, style second.

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.

Conversion optimization doesn’t simply boil down to using trendy colors on CTA buttons. Leverage usability data to improve customer experience that will make a larger, more lasting impact on conversion than any fad.

Gestalt principles are an important set of ideas for any designer to learn and their implementation can greatly improve the aesthetics of a design as well as its functionality and user-friendliness.