Alex has been doing cruel and unusual things to CSS since 2001. He is the lead front-end design and dev for SitePoint and one-time SitePoint's Design and UX editor with over 150+ newsletter written. Now Alex is involved in the planning, development, production, and marketing of a huge range of printed and online products and references. He has designed over 40+ of SitePoint's book covers.
Alex's articles
9 of the Best Animation Libraries for UI Designers
By Alex Walker, Tanay Pant, Maria Antonietta Perna,
Animation is a part of a UI designer's job. Here are 9 free animation libraries we think deliver the most power for the smallest file size, while being relatively easy to use for reasonably code-savvy designers that aren't full-blown developers.
Code Challenge #2: 4 Tips for Higher Scores in CSSBattle.dev
By Alex Walker,
Our CSSBattle Code Challenge requires some 'outside the square' CSS thinking. Here are four tips to get you started on the right track.
Code Challenge #2: The Test of Characters
By Alex Walker,
SitePoint's Code Challenge #2 is a battle of CSS wits. We're partnering with CSSBattles.dev and asking you to recreate the SitePoint Logo in HTML and CSS - oh and in the fewest possible characters too.
So, Do We Have a Winner for Code Challenge #1?
By Alex Walker,
We've got CSS, SVG, canvas and JavaScript solutions to Code Challenge #1. Now it's time to pick a winner for the $200 Amazon Voucher.
UI Code Challenge #1 – Heartbeats
By Alex Walker,
The user interfaces we see in popular culture are often more fun than ones we build at work. Here's a code challenge to show us how you'd build your own.
5 Fast Tools For Generating Polished Product Mockups
By Alex Walker,
Product mockups are used to showcase web/app designs in a device frame, but can we accomplish this without Photoshop? Yes, and today, Alex shows us how!
Incredible Design Tools & Resources, August 2017
By Daniel Schwarz, Alex Walker,
Daniel and Alex list the best design tools and resources featured on Product Hunt in August 2017. You really don't want to miss out on these!
SVG Tip: Create a Bold Vector Halftone Graphic in Under 2 Minutes
By Alex Walker,
Read SVG Tip: Create a Bold Vector Halftone Graphic in Under 2 Minutes and learn Design & UX with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.
6 Clever SVG Pattern Generators for Your Next Design
By Alex Walker,
Though SVG Patterns aren't super widely understood, they offer a lot of really interesting design options – once you get your head around them.
Podcast: Google Ventures on When Design Sprints Go Bad
By Alex Walker, Ben Newton,
Lots of companies talk about 'design sprints', but are we all talking about the same thing? Jake Knapp – the man who documented it – has some ideas on that.
Podcast: Behind the Facebook Logo – A $100 Million Story
By Alex Walker, Ben Newton,
Getting paid for your design talents in equity is romantic – but rarely actually pays off. But what if you happened to design the Facebook logo?
New Podcast: #Ep1 – Designing for Scale: Inside Atlassian’s Design Teams
By Alex Walker, Ben Newton,
True North Design Podcast: Ben Newton talks to the Atlassian Design Team about how design – and the teams behind it – can successfully scale.
Finch.io: A Visual Tool for Finding and Fixing Design Bugs
By Alex Walker,
Finch.io is a new visual approach to finding and fixing bugs in your web projects. We take a test-drive of the beta to see what the fuss is about.
Design Tricks with SVG Filters: A Masked Blur Effect
By Alex Walker,
SVG might be a vector format, but it has some amazingly powerful pixel-based tricks up its sleeve. Follow Alex's journey – if you dare.
Killer GIFs: How Can an Animated GIF Become a Weapon?
By Alex Walker,
GIFs are the jokers of the web image formats – usually funny and playful. But can they be turned into a dangerous weapon in the right situation?
Introducing Portfolio WordPress Theme – and the Design Decisions Behind it
By Alex Walker,
Good design comes down to 3 or 4 fairly simple decisions at the beginning of a project – and then just carrying them through.
Web Layout 101: Vertical Rhythm is a Drummer
By Alex Walker,
Vertical rhythm is often worshipped or ignored. But perhaps its at its most useful when we treat it as a trusted advisor to our layouts.
Catching Frontend UI Design Tricks with SnappySnippet
By Alex Walker,
Often the key to understanding complex things is to understand their simpler parts first. SnappySnippet is a tool that can help you with that.
The First Rule Of Good Software Design? First, Do No Harm!
By Alex Walker,
We design features with the idea that they are helping our users – but sometimes these same features can be damaging to users with different needs.
Web Design 2016: Attack of the Chromes!
By Alex Walker,
Every year your workflow changes. For me, 2016 was the year when the Chrome App arrived as a serious web/UI design option.
UI Motion : Can You Tell a Story with Movement?
By Alex Walker,
We all think carefully about choosing a color, but – as Heider and Simmel show – the way an object moves can have a profound impact on how we feel about it.
How to Hack Brains with Cinemagraphs
By Alex Walker,
Cinemagraphs are like the snow globes of the web – simple yet strangely mesmerizing. Here's how to use them in your web design.
Type Nugget: Good Typography is About Finding the Right Playground
By Alex Walker,
While web designers have more typography choice than ever before, arguably our tools haven't caught up.Type Nugget hopes to fill the gap.
The Great Prototyping Debate: Software vs Hand-coding
By Alex Walker,
Visual prototyping tools are fast but lack the flexibility of hand-coded HTML prototypes. Why not both? Pingendo is a visual tool based on Bootstrap 4.
Designing for Moral Mornings and Naughty Nights
By Alex Walker,
We like to imagine that our morals and ethics are set in granite, but the reality is they are much more fluid over a 24 period. Can you design for that?
Botox and the Art of Designing Empathy
By Alex Walker,
Research shows that looking at faces changes the way we think. Can you use this knowledge to trigger empathy in your users?
UX Design 2016: Too Many Hunters – Not Enough Gatherers?
By Alex Walker,
As 'web people', we talk a lot about 'capturing customers', but not so much about what to do with them when we succeed. We can learn a lot from airlines.
The Trolley Problem: Will Our Cars Grow up to Be Heroes?
By Alex Walker,
The Trolley Problem is one of the great 'thought experiments' in ethics. But it's a thought experiment that's about to play out in the real world.
Prisma: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the One-Trick-Pony Filter
By Alex Walker,
'Push button' image filters have developed a bad reputation with design professionals. But perhaps a new image filter called Prisma can change their minds.
SitePoint/Flippa Hack Day: Hacking our First IoT Project
By Alex Walker, Jude Aakjaer,
We'd all played with computers for years but SitePoint's Hack Day gave us a chance to make electronics with our first IoT project.