Erik Kennedy

Props to James Cook for using common ingredients uncommonly well 🤩
hellojames.co.uk/writing/bet...

📏 XL SIZE: at size 84, this headline is massive. We see details in Georgia that aren't as familiar. It's a whole new font!

👌 NEGATIVE LETTER SPACING: fonts are designed for body text sizing. For headlines, subtract letter-spacing for a tighter, crisper feel.

Georgia is a default web font, it's on a billion pages... but here it looks FRESH 🔥

Why? 2 reasons...

Showing a bunch of intermediate deliverables in your portfolio writeups?

Plz don't 🙈

Instead, focus on RESULTS.

If you can achieve the results, it's *understood* you know how to do the process. If you CAN'T achieve the results, it DOESN'T MATTER if you can do "the process".

How to generate Apple’s liquid glass effect in Figma, step-by-step – including WHY we modify each property that we do.CONTENTS0:00 Intro0:49 Adding the Textu... How to Make Apple's Liquid Glass Effect In Figma

And here's the short video version where I break down Liquid Glass in Figma step-by-step 😎
youtu.be/uJthLkf8X1A

Here's a property-by-property visual breakdown of Liquid Glass in Figma, along with WHAT each property changes.

How to do Apple's Liquid Glass in Figma (a property-by-property visual breakdown)

Time to get nerdy about liquid glass 🤓

👇👇

Design Hacks A free newsletter of UX and UI design tips and tactics. Improve your design skills in 5-minute lessons.

Join Design Hacks, my free newsletter on making software look great 🫡
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🥃 Refraction through glass effects
⛅ Soft shadow techniques
🌈 Mesh gradients

All in Apple's new visual style, announced yesterday.
All topics covered on Design Hacks (or events I've done, announced on Design Hacks).

Interested in staying on the future of visual design?
👇

learnui.design – master the visual design of beautiful apps & websites

learnui.design/courses/lea... – master usability, research, and interaction design patterns

learnui.design/courses/lan... – master the craft of high-converting, beautiful landing pages

All 3 of my courses close enrollment tonight at midnight pacific.

All courses contain:

📽 Dozens of video-based lessons
📝 Figma/downloadable resources
🌎 A student community for learning & feedback
💯 Lifetime access to all course materials, including additions and improvements
♥️ 30-day refund policy

And if you HAVEN'T signed up, they're open for the next week for new enrollments. Ask me anything 😎

learnui.design
learnui.design/courses/lea...
learnui.design/courses/lan...

These courses are my life's work. I am extraordinarily lucky to have been born in a moment where I could create and sell them. And if you've signed up, I hope they've been transformative for your design skills and confidence.

These 3 courses are SO MUCH of what I know about design. In total, they're 69 HOURS of videos about every aspect of digital design: aesthetics, usability, conversion-rate optimization, communication, etc.

And every moment of them is architected to be as practical, as clearly explained as possible.

Fast forward to now. The course is Learn UI Design. Over 5,000 students have taken it, including from the most respected companies in tech – Stripe, Apple, Meta, etc.

I've added an additional 10 hours of video to it, re-recorded everything from scratch – and created two more courses on top of that.

I just had to make it.

So that was the addendum to our San Diego babymoon.

In 2 and a half wild days, I outlined a 25-hour video course AND wrote a 4,000 word landing page for it.

(Then came 11 months of monk mode, planning and recording and editing)

Anyhow, like an idiot, it took me 2 full YEARS to realize that if a MILLION people would read a design article, maybe some FRACTION of them would pay for a design course.

See, a few years prior, I'd posted some design articles on Medium. I tried to make them highly practical – and it worked! They went MEGA-viral. Like, millions of views, emails every few minutes, more inbound client requests than I could handle, etc. It was digital cocaine for three days straight.

My wife and I had just found out we were pregnant with our first kid. We had a nice babymoon to San Diego, and I stayed a few days extra to outline a design course I'd been noodling over for a while.

If there's one time in my life the muse was with me, it was in the house with the Mexican talavera toilet...

These tips are all in Learn UI Design, which opens for enrollment at midnight tonight 🥳
learnui.design

Enroll your team (5 seats across my 3 courses) for...
💸 30% off
🧐 2 bonus design review/coaching sessions with me

Details here 👉 learnui.design/for-employe...

☝️ Little-known design tip: if you're trying to balance a thicker element with a thinner element, make the thicker element a lower opacity 😉

The goal: get the icons and text feeling really nice *together*

Icon consistency is a common UI mistake in meaty SAAS apps. At the very least, be consistent on:

🐄 Stroke weight thickness
🔘 Border radius
🪣 Fill vs stroke icons

Alignment is critical. You want to buy as much neat/clean feel as you can with the few elements in a sidebar.

We don't talk enough about the UI of SAAS apps.

Flashy landing pages are one thing, but how do you make data-heavy apps look GREAT?

I'll be posting some tips this month 👇

this is what i'd put in a time capsule from 2025.

Proud font dad moment: seeing Figtree in Figma's new feature announcements at Config today 😎

Also! AI makes this 100x easier.

So what will you make that's Hard To Do in Figma? 🤔

Which one do you choose? Whichever fits you and the project best! There's no right answer here.

I played around with some Blender course for 5 minutes and made a wild magic carpet that's, like, impossible in Figma.

Boom. Instantly better portfolio above-the-fold.

The antidote: design something that's Hard To Do in Figma.

Like:

- Animation or motion
- 3D
- Stunning photography or imagery
- Front-end effects
- Amazing typography (technically easy in Figma; just rare 😅)