Michelle Mac

Mind maps are a powerful tool for getting started with project planning, learning something new, or even making decisions.

Avoid The Urgency Trap With The Eisenhower Matrix, NNGroup, Design Principles, 2 UI/UX Design Tips

Here’s how I added a related posts section to articles on my Jekyll website.

The difference between note-taking and note-making, 98.css, extractCSS, 2 UI/UX Design Tips, Understanding The 30 Seconds Of Code Website

Feeling “bored” can result in a complete lack of motivation. You don’t have the drive to pick something from your list of chores. You can’t bring yourself to do anything except watch YouTube mindlessly.

The humanual, impossible checkbox, iPod.js, 2 UI/UX tips, understanding the Software Ideas landing page

Here’s how I implemented an affiliate disclaimer to specific posts or pages on my Jekyll website.

I created a free printable to manage how you schedule your Tweets.

Centered and full-justified text, Usability.gov, GetTerms, 2 UI/UX Tips, Understanding The Notion PM Landing Page

A shutdown routine is something you do at the end of your workday that tells your brain, I’m finished with work today.

Confirmation Bias, Carrd, A List Apart, 2 UI/UX Design Tips, Understanding The Game Thinking Landing Page

As a UI Designer, you are essentially paid for your ideas. They are your greatest source of value.

Mental Models For Search, Pomofocus, Frontend Mentor, 2 UI/UX Design Tips, Understanding the 100 Days of No Code landing page

I’ve been actively using Twitter since March 2021 so it’s really rewarding to see people value the content I share. I’ve been able to connect with some great people through Twitter which has been an excellent experience.

I was inspired by #ship30for30 where people post atomic or visual essays every day for 30 days.

I created this website to act as a central place for all of my work (aside from my personal website). I’m hoping it encourages me to create more things.

It’s easy to be bombarded by things you should work on or should do. Things from work, things in your life, things you read on social media.

This repo contains a boilerplate project for Jekyll with Tailwind CSS. After much work and frustration I eventually got this up and running 💪.

Design guidelines for complex apps, Twitter card validator, Wappalyzer, using testimonials, clean landing pages, understanding the NotionMetrics landing page.

We all need constraints to operate effectively. In the world of creators, creative constraints allow us to focus our energy and concentration in the right place.

6 Principles to make your ideas stick, Canva, Gradientify SVG Icons, better hero design, how Screenshot.Rocks works

Design User-Friendly Error Messages, CoolHue, Screenshot Rocks, Use Google Fonts, Review designs at different screen sizes, How CoolHue 2.0 Anticipates Its Audience’s Needs

As one of the many people now working from home, I found the process difficult at first.

A framework to make design decisions, Laws of UX, DrawKit, 404 pages, button hovers, how DrawKit’s landing page builds trust

Learn how to overcome the dreaded blank page with this free eBook.

As someone that is interested in systems and workflows, I’m always curious about the tools other people use to make them more productive.

Methods to Get Smarter at Visual/UI Design, Color Contrast Checker, Product Mockup Templates, Buy Me A Coffee

In the world of content creation, we’re always creating new things. New blog posts, new videos, podcasts, and social media posts.

Paradox Of The Active User, Color Contrast, Poor Font Choice

The whole idea of creativity and being creative is underestimated in today’s world.

Picking Fonts, Creating Color Palettes, Areas Designers Should Focus On

Any well-designed application should have good error messages. When I say good error messages I’m not talking about a message like “Critical Error x-299498sdkfjh”. Let’s face it, that helps no one.

Adding the estimated reading time of your article provides valuable context for readers. They can decide if they want to read your article now or bookmark it and save it for later.

How we live our lives and the systems we use to keep on top of things is always changing.

A great tip for speeding up the build time of your Jekyll blog is to make use of the incremental regeneration feature.

It can be easy to fall into the pattern of working from day to day, week to week. Finding the time and motivation to learn how to improve or become better than you were before can seem like a huge task.

This Dashboard, built in Notion, will help you to organize the visuals you create each day if you follow a daily visual challenge or something similar.

The 12 Week Year will fundamentally change how you think about goal planning and working towards those goals.

If you’re looking to optimize the build time of your Jekyll blog, it’s useful to know just how long each part of the build process takes.

As I sit down to write this article, I’m not starting from scratch.

This social media kit is a useful quickstart for anyone looking to build a presence on social media.

I sold my first copy of the Social Media Kit I created in Figma and made $5.

As your Jekyll blog grows in size over time, you might find that the build process takes longer to run.

I enjoy writing my articles using Markdown as it offers a lot of benefits. I’m able to write without distraction. Plus my hands never need to leave the keyboard to format what I’m writing.

The 12 Week Year will fundamentally change how you think about goal planning and working towards those goals.

A common convention for external links is that they open in a new tab. The idea behind this is that you can easily go back to the previous tab if you need to. This makes it easy for users to return to your website.

If you have read my recent post: You Learn More Effectively By Practicing, you’ll know that I’ve consciously made an effort to continue building my web development knowledge.

Cognitive Surplus was a thought-provoking but enjoyable book to read. It raised a lot of great points about the world we currently live in. A world where people are actively consuming media and have lots of “free time” when compared with previous generations.

If you have many different post categories on your WordPress website, you might want to funnel them to different pages. This is especially important to consider if you have included each of your post categories in your navigation menu.

I recently started back into building up my web development skills. A lot has changed in the time since I last actively made an effort to advance my knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so I needed to catch up!

Hooked by Nir Eyal outlines The Hook Model, a methodology for building habit forming products that improve a user’s life in some way.

I have been using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management (PKM) system for the last number of months.

I recently revised the way I use Todoist to manage my work-related tasks as a UI Designer at the company where I work.

I recently revised my content creation workflow to tie in better with my goal to develop a consistent writing habit. With that in mind, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share with you my simplified writing workflow for content creation.

This repo contains my links page; the page that I link to from Twitter and Instagram. It contains all of my most helpful links for anyone looking to learn more about me.

Don’t Make Me Think was a transformative reading experience for me. It boils down a lot of complex and indepth usability research and best practices into easy to understand advice with examples.

I recently had to do some research to figure out how to properly handle disabled fields and buttons (I’m collectively calling them components). This design pattern is quite often used across my designs so I wanted to be sure I was implementing it correctly.

Our brains are always thinking and processing. If each thought was a word, we would be able to generate enough content to produce a whole book every single day.

The War Of Art focuses on the topics of resistance and procrastination. It offers lots of insight into how these can negatively affect our creative output and general ability to get work done.

I recently wrote about the act of continuous learning and made a case for learning from and being inspired by others.

Just because you’ve left school doesn’t mean that you should stop learning. In fact, I would argue that you should never stop learning new things.

Getting Things Done is widely considered a staple of the productivity world and is the go-to book recommended if you’re looking to become a more productive person. It’s the go-to book that many consider being the start of the “productivity revolution”.

In today’s day and age, many people can become their own boss by being a “content creator” or “knowledge worker”. The internet is full of ambitious and creative people that make their living solely online.

Reading Peak was an extremely motivational experience for me. The idea that everyone can improve with deliberate practice no matter how old you are is a really great message.

Jumpstart your Knowledge Management System with my hand-crafted vault of literature notes. This is built in Notion.

As someone who writes blog posts pretty consistently and as a content creator in general, I find that I end up working on a lot of the same types of tasks quite regularly.

Reading The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry really opened my eyes to the fun and creativity that can be found in the world of designers and creators. As a UI designer, I now have a renewed motivation to continue to improve my craft and to create new things.

I recently did some research into the best practices for designing modals on mobile devices. This is something we are looking to implement across our mobile apps at my job so I needed some help in understanding how these types of components work and how they’re supposed to be used.

I’ve been writing quite a bit about goals, reviews, and routines lately as a result of the new year and that’s going to continue in today’s article.

You might think you know how to read a book but you’re probably not remembering much of what you’re reading. That’s where this book comes in. It describes the different levels of reading and how you can get much more out of the books you read.

At the start of a fresh new year, or when you’re planning out the week ahead during your weekly review, it can be tempting to pile on more and more things to your to-do list.

Reading The Productivity Project showed me that being busy isn’t the same thing as being productive. When we are productive we are accomplishing the right things that we intentionally set out to work on.

The start of a new year brings with it the chance to review and refine our routines.

Running a sprint is an excellent way to test out a solution to a problem without sinking lots of time and money into it.

As it’s the start of a brand new year, we’re all in the throws of reflecting over the last year and setting our new goals for the year ahead.

Make the most of your Notion setup to get work done with this set of Notion templates.

As an avid Obsidian user, I am always curious to learn how I can get the most out of this application.

Each time I re-read The Bullet Journal Method, I come away with something new that resonates with me. This book has inspired a pen and paper revolution among those of us that were previously slaves to our digital devices.

As a UI designer at the company where I work, I am often tasked with creating new designs for complex systems that manage a lot of data.

From reading Steal Like An Artist, I learned how to become more confident in sharing the work that I create. By learning that nothing is truly original, simply a mashup of other ideas, I learned how to harness my creativity to generate ideas that are unique to me.

In this article, I would like to walk you through my Notion Library setup.

Reading Show Your Work unlocked the motivation I needed to be more confident in sharing my thoughts with the world. This is a helpful book for content creators, knowledge workers, and creatives alike.

How To Take Smart Notes completely changed the way I look at reading books and taking notes based on what I watch, read, and listen to. This is a must-read for anyone that really enjoys reading but wants to get even more value and insight from the books they read.

In today’s day and age, people are constantly changing jobs as well as changing careers. Gone are the days when we simply had one career and one job until retirement.