Last week, one of my readers sent in a question: How do I become a better visual designer? As I was thinking about how to answer this question, my mind wandered to my experience with learning Mandarin Chinese. Recently, I decided to teach myself Mandarin.

How I came to appreciate Microsoft's design roots It is easy to question everything designed before you when you join a new company. I mean, why the heck would a scroll bar be red in Windows 2.0 ... what could they have possibly been thinking?!

UI methodologies like Atomic Design bring logic and structure to individual screens. Now it's time to extend that thinking to every aspect of your product. Here's a little mystery. Why is it that - a bit like hangovers and pop music - most products somehow seem to get worse with age?

With over 1,500 people working at Dropbox, getting a complete web redesign to happen isn't easy. Redesigning each and every component is hard enough. But do you know what's even harder? Convincing everyone in your organization to get on board with the idea.

An open source Pan-CJK typeface