Today's Ranger Snapshot comes from Prague-based designer Jakub Antalík . We've been following his work at Scrapeapps, particularly the upcoming task-manger app, Taasky. We reached out to him recently and chatted more about his process.

1. We were really impressed by the animation for the sidebar for Taasky. How did you come up with that idea and what were some of the challenges faced in getting that to work? 

It was simply inspired by the current trends of menus being in sidebars. However, I had to remake it to harmonize with the Taasky style. The greatest challenge was to keep it simple to use and give users the ability to personalize it. Users should be able to choose icon, re-order and add new items. I used a simple 3D transition, which I believe is also  effective and attractive. The animation was created in After Effects and exported with Photoshop.

2. There's also a lot of wonderful detail, such as the glyphs, even though you've gone with a minimalistic design. What were some of the design decisions that you feel work best? If you had more time, what would you change about the design? 

I believe what's very important in every user interface are colors, because they have a serious impact on whole application. This is actually most important in a minimalistic design. That's why I hadn't underestimated the colors, and, before any actual designing I chose color palette, there were several variations during the design process until I was satisfied with the final palette. Besides color scheme, I was also paying great attention to typography, cleanness and airiness. I definitely would like to improve logo, it should be more sophisticated.

3. Your  work on the app was featured recently in an article on design trends. How excited were you about that? Also, what are your thoughts on some of the current design trends like flat design and skeuminimalism? 

I like the current trend of flat design and I support it, because I think that in most cases it pushes application functionality forward and puts content to the foreground. Emphasis is also increased on colors and typography, that is a move in right direction. Whatever style a designer chooses, the most important thing is always functionality so I am always trying to look at it as a whole.

Know of a great designer or design that we should feature? Email us: hello@forrst.com.

Today's Ranger Snapshot comes from Seattle-based designer Rick Murphy. We've been following his work for awhile and really admire the work he's done on his Seattle print. We chatted with him recently to get more insight into how he created the poster.

1) We really love the work you did on the Seattle Poster, especially the use of orange on the Space Needle. How did the city inform your design choices? What design decisions do you think work best in the poster?  

The geometry choices come from our skyline being made up of vertical buildings and angular mountains. I find that limiting yourself to a small a set of design rules helps decision making and gives your work a cohesive finish. Everything here was drawn from the vertical, horizontal or forty-five degree angle. The objects that didn’t immediately lend themselves to this style were “pushed through it” and ended up with the best solutions.

For most of 2012 (the year I worked on this project), the Space needle was painted orange to celebrate its 50th birthday. Orange was its original color when it was built for the 1962 World’s Fair. I was limiting myself to four colors and you’ll generally need two shades of any hue to render lighting. This led me to choose a light and dark color from the orange side of the wheel and obviously the same technique went into selecting the blues for the sea, sky and dark shadows.

2) We also really love how you incorporated many landmarks from  the Washington State Ferry System in your United Pixelworkers t-shirt. Why did you choose the ones you did? If you had more time, what would you change?

The shirt and print share similar landmarks in the same way that the Puget Sound region shares its features with Seattle. The brilliant thing about riding the ferries from downtown is that you can remove all of the loud elements of the city by simply walking on one of these boats. That is all I did when creating the United Pixelworkers shirt. The concept worked well for them because a lot of people actually commute to work on these things.

3) We saw on your Twitter that you enjoy Game of Thrones. Have you ever thought of doing a poster or t-shirt for the show, or any show that you're currently addicted to?

It's funny you ask a TV content related question. Most of my time is  spent  working on an iOS TV app (BuddyTV). I've ran into a few walls trying to use imagery from TV shows without proper permissions. I'm not sure how far I'd get trying to illegally distribute a poster with Geoffrey's face on it.  I would do one if asked. For sure.

Know of a great designer or design that we should feature? Email us: hello@forrst.com.

Note that for mobile, since plugins aren't supported on mobile browsers, the design responsively changes to an email capture (which will later send an email reminder). This was fairly easy to accomplish using Foundation.

Another point we made was to give the add-on credibility and validation. Realistically, and rightly so, no one wants to install software unless they feel safe. We included some logos from press publications that have picked us up, as well as actual embedded tweets to add the "real" human validation element. We ended up going with only 3 tweets (not six as shown above).

The main challenge we faced in our previous iteration, based on stats from KissMetrics / Mixpanel, was battling the drop off rates during installation. Users would click the download button, but some would not advance onward. Chrome, a simple two-click, install performed the best. Both Safari and Firefox require an extrea step, and it seems enough that some users bail. To combat this we have a popup modal appear with instructions. There is probably still be room for improvement here though.

Once the plugin is installed we want to give the user a positive experience and help them understand how to use it as quickly as possible. To do this we create a simple tutorial that appears on the success page (seen only after the install is completed).

If they navigate through the tutorial successfully, we ask them if they'd like to share with their friends / social networks. Any thoughts on a way to make it more engaging?

We’d love your feedback on any of -- the overall design, onboarding, user experience flow! Is it clear what the plugin does? Would you install it? Would you share it? If you do install it, any feedback on the tutorial followed directly after the installation? And any other feedback is, of course, welcome!

I would love feedback from you guys. You all are really very helpful. :)

@erraziB @ryantriddle @renwalker @mkantariya @LauraMoraiti @Cre8aRt4LifE @harshil @ibie @anevins2 @asifaleem @sarah_edwards @emi_cloud @samsu @madanpatil @dimple @RobinSchreiner @JohnR88

Below is Actual pixel design. Please check.

Which variation would you pick? And why? Would you make any changes to the existing concepts?

Best regards, Tiago

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback and response guys, it's very much appreciated! I'll be posting the final result here once it's done.

Today's Ranger Snapshot comes from Anthony Lagoon. He's the founder of Underbelly, whose work on the photo sharing app JustFamily caught our eye. We asked him more about where the idea for the app came from and some of the challenges in building it.

1. The one thing that really impressed us was how a person could organize their precious family memories. What inspired you to create the app? What design decisions do you think work in the app?

I'd say our inspiration comes from the fact that lots of new technology seems to be designed for individuals — it's all about your user ID. That's true for photo apps too. But family photos aren't about the individual, and there's really no good family photo management solution out there. In the past, my family had a big chest full of photos. No matter who took them, or what camera they were shot with, this dusty old chest was where they all ended up. Every so often someone would open it up, and we would all gather around to look at them, hearing the stories behind each photo.

I guess you could say we're trying to bring your family photos to life by allowing your family to see them, create journal entries and albums with them, and just enjoy them again as a family. Keeping all of your photos backed up, and organized is a challenge for anyone. We just wanted to make that easier for families.

There was some debate amongst the team around keeping the "journal" tab in the app, but after we watched people use the app, we found it to really resonate well with people. They love the concept of creating stories around certain photos from their library. It just goes to show you really have to put your ideas out there, and see if it works. But be prepared to iterate quickly after you learn from it.

2.  People take tons of pictures with their smartphones and post them in a variety of places so organizing that chaos seems like a daunting challenge. What were some of the difficulties in deciding how people could organize their photos? If you had more time, is there anything you'd change and why? 

It's good to hear I'm not alone. So many photos, on so many computers and phones that even a nerd like me can't keep them all straight. We've got some really exciting things coming soon that will help with organizing photos. I can't say too much, but I can say it will be fun to organize your photos. Not only that, but your entire family can help organize them too. So you upload your DSLR pics, and someone else tags them along with the app doing as much as it can with the metadata to keep them all organized. 

As far as combining photos from different places, one of the things that work best for my wife and I is that all of the photos we upload go into the same library. For other people, you can create shared collections. There's a lot we're doing in these areas to make it easier and more straight-forward, but we're currently iterating on smaller interaction changes, testing to see what works, and what doesn't.

3. Tells us a bit more about the bell jar icon. We really admire the colors and the detailing on both the jar and the lid. Where did the inspiration come from to have a bell jar represent the app? 

The inspiration for the Jar icon for the app came from the founder's love of the beach. People collect small trinkets and memories in jars. Whether it be notes, small toys, or sea shells, a jar represents the "collecting" of memories in a fun and easy way. Find something you want to keep and remember? Just drop it in your keepsake jar. The original jar icon was done by the talented SoftFacade. The app icon was made to be a simpler version that would work at smaller scales.

4. We see from your personal site and your Twitter that you're a family man. How has your family inspired and informed your work? 

My family lives in different places across the United States. Designing the JustFamily app has really been a fun challenge because it allows us to be closer despite the distance. For me, getting my family to accept and use the app has been the constant test to see if it works. Because when things don't make sense, you can bet that they are the first to let me know.

How Would You Post From a Mobile Device?

We highlighted our thoughts on how posting from a smaller device would work. We wanted to know whether you would create full-on posts with screenshots from your phone. We got some great feedback from @anevins2, @cgoodwyn, @rowanu, @JGallardo and a few others. Seems most of you would prefer leaving comments or use your mobile device to browse other posts.

To Collapse or Not to Collapse

We've gone completely Mobile First with the redesign. One of the things we've considered is whether the Post Stream should be a list view or an expanded view. We even ran a Verify preference test to see which one everyone preferred. 64% of those who took the test preferred the expanded view.

Bringing Back Post Types

One of the things we've considered was brining back post types. We want to make it easier for everyone to frame their posts — asking for feedback, sharing insight or asking a question. We got some valuable feedback from @jakiestfu about the developers in the community, sharing some insightful ideas.

We've got a few more sneak peeks in the works in the coming weeks and we want to get your feedback on what we're working on!

Today's Ranger Snapshot comes from Eddie Lobanovskiy, a designer out of Sarasota, FL. We recently come across his latest project, a social-locator app called Close. We were impressed by the navigation and the animations he employed. So we reached out and asked him a few questions about it.

1.  The one thing about Close that really caught our eye was the side menu animation. How did you come up with that idea and what are some of the challenges in getting something like that to work?

What really inspired me for the side menu came from our main flipping animation on our timeline.  I like to keep my designs consistent and true to make them feel complete.  Getting any animation to work is always a touchy subject.  Thankfully I’m working with a top notch team that can get the job done.

2. There's a lot of intricate and wonderful interactions in the app, especially in the navigation, which you showcased in a video. What are some of the design decisions that you're most proud of and why? Is there anything you'd do differently?

During the design process of this app, I had to always remind myself to “think simple”.  It’s actually much harder than you think to “think simple."  We started out with a completely different set of designs and interactions and quickly realized that we need to stop what we were doing and strip everything down to basics.  After we took the "think simple" approach to design, that’s really when the design and interactions came to light.  

The only thing I would have done different is to take the "think simple" approach right from the beginning.  You’d be surprised how hard it is for a designer to force him/herself to do this.  Try it, you’ll see what I mean.

3. We've noticed that sketching is very important part of your process and many of them are very detailed. You're also a very talented freehand artist. Who are some of your artistic heroes and how have they influenced your work?

Sketching is indeed very important to me.  There are no boundaries with sketching.  When using software, it makes things very limited and being a designer, you need to feel free :).

There is so much talent online you can learn from on sites like Dribbble, Forrst and Behance, but if I was to mention any names I’d have to say, Karem Suer, Ben Cline and Eric Hoffman. They are all experts in the UI/UX field, their work speaks for itself.

Know of a great designer or design that we should feature? Email us: hello@forrst.com.

The version without the label :

The version with explicit label

Version 3 with a relooking of the icon

Another attempt at creating the icon

Specially I would love feedback of... @erraziB @ryantriddle @renwalker @mkantariya @LauraMoraiti @Cre8aRt4LifE @harshil @ibie @anevins2 @asifaleem @sarah_edwards @emi_cloud @samsu @madanpatil @dimple @RobinSchreiner @JohnR88