This talk on talks was incredibly helpful for me when I was preparing my first big talk. The same guy presenting that talk created a website that gives more detail to his talking tips and framework.

This is another helpful video for proposing talks and structuring them.

The biggest thing for me when prepping for a talk is to practice in front of people. Practicing in front of an audience is like having others read an article you've written–only outsiders to your process can let you know when they may not be able to follow your logic or don't understand a point. Videotaping yourself and sending to someone to review is also a good substitute, but I find that talking in front of people helps me practice eye contact and visualize what it will be like to have a bigger audience.

There are a few arguments you can make back:

• Left align is a better reading experience for users (having the same anchor point on the left side where the line starts helps the eye move between lines and list items)

• Depending on how long the line-length of the list items are, you can argue that there is an optimal line length regarding characters and words - basically, if a line is too long, then it's more difficult for the eye to follow the line.

• If you have any real analytics about the existing product, you may be able to find the average viewport size for your audience or go grab a general number. You may be looking at designs at a wide-screen view, but a small percentage of your users may actually be seeing that view. This may help them detach a little realizing this isn't the WHOLE experience.

Sometimes it's difficult for stakeholders to not worry about negative space, but reminding them that usability is more important for the user. Also argue that white space is good because it focuses users on the list, helping them complete the task they have. "Too much whitespace" is a recurring theme for stakeholders in my experience. Here is a resource where you can provide them evidence from UX best practices.

My company is currently implementing this for our blog on our site, and I'm super pumped. I'm CEO and design lead, and while I don't code for paid work (I don't think that is reasonable for all designers to do), I DO think designers need to get closer to code, and certainly more comfortable with things like markdown.

Netlify is generally awesome for static hosting, and makes a whole bunch of stuff cheaper, easier, and faster for our company. Their CMS is one more awesome thing we love about it because now there is a bit more control for our designers and marketers.

So happy the bad infinite scroll is fixed! Looks great and is so much more usable!

I usually pick out a set of fonts that I really like to work with that are fairly generic - a serif and sans serif. And if it's a web project, I stick to google fonts. This site has some great combos.

Usually with clients/stakeholders, I concentrate on the content and not discussing the font at all, and make it clear that it's really not useful to discuss "fonts & colors" at this time. And I always use real text, because I always write the initial interface and give clients guidance about how to critique and edit the content.

I think if you are sketching digitally, redacted font makes sense, just like sketching on paper. If a stakeholder wants to see/approve sketches, I try to schedule a meeting to quickly whiteboard ideas with them. I find it's more effective way to share ideas, in low fidelity. Plus, it involves them so they feel ownership.

Hey, so I started using webflow for my company's marketing site, and it was pretty cool. My opinion is that it works better for marketing sites or blogs but not web applications, but I am sure you could use it for web applications in some way. The main reason I tried it out was to basically try to save some time in our design to development workflow when we first started our company and there were just 2 of us. I found that it was easy to use for me (I can code but not fast or well so the WYSIWYG editor meant I could generate code faster).

Performace

The performance of webflow editor is pretty great, but there are some bugs that you may hit here and there like any product. Signing in and out or leaving the site editor area usually clears them up.

Gripes

You are beholden to designing within the breakpoints they establish - so this is a little tricky because you can add custom css to change the breakpoint, but that won't be reflected in the editor. This was a major gap in my mind, as their largest breakpoint is still as the old fashioned 960px. So if you wanted to create an HD desktop experience, you had to custom change the code and then tweak it after export (because the editor would not reflect your new custom-set breakpoint).

Because they have put a bit of structure around css and html elements, building some designs in webflow might use different elements than if you were building them in code. i know this could annoy some developers, but as a designer, it was easy to figure out and still generated good code. Everything is built on top of bootstrap, so that will be underlying in all of the pages, which is pretty nice, though I know some developers prefer to work with Foundation or their own grid.

Overall I think it is definitely worth it to try it out. You can definitely get something built and ready to be implemented quickly with their hosting and CMS features.

This general subject is my pet peeve as a designer. Inevitably someone pulls out an infographic like the one cited early in this article to tell me why orange is the wrong color because orange means "x." Then I have to explain basically this entire article (with less direct evidence).

This article is immensely useful in collecting all these great arguments and studies (so that I can send to said clients/coworkers), but also gives some great fuel for working with clients on choosing colors and branding. It really helps better outline a choice that seems so nebulous. It's great when we can demystify aspects of our industry, because I think some of the misinformation comes from folks being so curious in the first place.

If you already have creative suite, then you might want to give illustrator a try. It's much faster than photoshop, and the multiple artboards, symbols palette, and precise pixel measurements make it a really great tool. Plus you can export your artboards as pngs, throw them into InVision and have a clickable prototype in less than 30 minutes.

This is helpful to get started in Ai (but there are some more changes and improvements since this article): http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/17/productive-web-design-with-adobe-illustrator/

Dark patterns!