UXcellence
Writing a love letter to design, development, and building great products
Branding
The UXcellence logo looks like a U-shaped badge, with two strands connecting the ends and corners and crossing diagonally in the middle to form an X. The badge is meant to evoke an award. The X of crossed lines suggests the different aspects and skills that are interdependent and foundational to creating great user experience. The name (and titles) are set in Sentinel, a lovely slab serif that exudes professionalism with a hint of whimsy.


Building an audience
To help build an audience, I publish a monthly newsletter. I designed and developed the template by hand. I’ve worked hard on refining the subscription process and wrote about what I learned. Each issue includes a brief thought on design, any recent articles I’ve posted, a curated set of helpful links spanning design and development, and any new (and sometimes old) design-related books that I think deserve attention. Some issues include beta samples of a new product I’m building.
Style guide
Like several other recent projects, I created a living style guide for the site that documents typography, iconography, colors, and common patterns. Even though it’s a personal site (for now), having a style guide has helped maintain a consistent look as I build the site.
Content principles
When I first began the site, I created a set of content principles to define the type of content I wanted to create for the site. They have helped to guide me toward writing articles that are practical, positive in nature, and span the spectrum of disciplines that can influence user experience.
Performance
Over the years, I have worked hard to tweak and improve the site’s performance. I have learned about server-side and client-side caching, image optimization, asynchronous loading, and more trying to make the site faster for readers.
Side project spin-offs
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UX Compendium
The UX Compendium is a cohesive collection of Sketch templates and libraries to round out your design process beyond the user interface.
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ColorBot
ColorBot is a personal color assistant, a Swiss army knife for creating great color palettes, and a fun experiment built for A 10k Apart.
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UX Tool Belt
The UX Tool Belt is a handy tool for learning about UX techniques and mapping out your design process, originally built for A 10k Apart.