Tag: design
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How to fix the web
Robin Rendle published Why are websites embarrasing? wherein he laments the state of design and accessibility on the web. But, he’s hopeful. “I do truly believe that a website can be as well designed as any book, just as thoughtful, just as brilliant.” I sympathize with Robin. The web, especially the news web, is a…
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Cypress is now available for free on Micro.blog
If you’re a member of Micro.blog you can now choose to use Cypress as your theme for free. Log in and click on your Design settings page, and choose the theme. That’s it. I’m happy that this came together. I thought it might be fun to make a Micro.blog theme and when I tossed the…
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No more boring apps
Andy Allen: The world of apps—once an exciting canvas for creative exploration—has become repetitive, predictable, and… boring. If this isn’t a rallying cry, I don’t know what is. I downloaded his apps, they are fantastic. I’m on it Andy.
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Shift Nudge
Matt D. Smith (@mds), explains what Shift Nudge is: Shift Nudge is the systematic process to learn the visual skills of interface design, even if you don’t have a design background. Perfect for those wanting to enter or advance in the field. Let’s say you’re sitting there reading this and you’re a coder that wishes…
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Goodreads isn’t very good
Sarah Manavis: After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to add what they’ve read to their “shelf” or to discover new titles, users know they’ll be forced to give up, confronted with the fact that any basic, expected functionality will evade them.…
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Darice de Cuba, Real talk about inclusiveness
Darice de Cuba, who recently wrote about inclusiveness in design, has now been interviewed by my former workmate at 9rules Matthew Oliphant about inclusiveness in the real world. She writes on her blog: The interview is very casual, we talk about real life examples and how to get people and companies to be more inclusive.…
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The Mac is turning less Pro
skywhopper, on Hacker News, commenting on a thread relating to Mark Gurman’s scoop on Apple’s (supposed) plan to have apps running on iOS and macOS using the same (or, similar) code bases by 2020: And then the Mac is losing what should be its primary audience through unwanted innovations and otherwise stagnant hardware, and a…
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Don’t get clever with login forms
Brad Frost: As time goes on I find myself increasingly annoyed with login forms. Excellent suggestions for designing simple, usable login forms. I’ve made a note to double-check anything I make with this list.
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Darice de Cuba on Inclusive Design
Darice de Cuba, who is a front-end web developer that slowly lost her hearing starting at a young age: But inclusive design is much more than structure, code and color only. Inclusive design is about the whole website as one — it’s about the complete experience of the user when they visit a website. She…
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Corporate typefaces are all the rage
This isn’t a recent phenomena. Corporations have been creating their own typefaces since the beginning of type. But, lately, I’ve noticed more and more that they are using it in their marketing efforts or because the scale of these corporations make it cost prohibitive not to make their own typeface. Let me pull these two…
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A new brand identity for Jujama
This project was not part of my Design Challenge. However, I thought I’d catalog this project here as I was the primary designer working on it, with help from Jujama’s designer Lindsey Jamieson. Jujama is a nearly 10-year-old business (and my current employer) with global clients and a sophisticated product that services top-tier customers. The…
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A new badge for Lackawanna Astronomical Society
This post is in a series I call The Grand Brand Design Challenge where I’m trying to flex my muscles in brand design. The Lackawanna Astronomical Society is a club membership for astronomical enthusiasts in the county that I live in. I frequent one of the observatories that they use for their events. When I…
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A new brand identity for The Watercolor Gallery
I’m excited to start a brand-new series here on my site — The Grand Brand Design Challenge. I’m equally excited to be starting this series with a personal project I’ve been working on since 2010, The Watercolor Gallery. Read more about The Grand Brand Design Challenge on its own page. I’ve only taken the time…
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You should attend events, meetups, and conferences
I published the following article on LinkedIn in March. However, their publishing tool removed all of the photos from the post when I published it and I was so frustrated that I did not bother to go in and fix it. I’m republishing the post here with photos. For over a decade now I’ve put…
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Wallace.dog
Local friend Jeremy Brown has a cute animated comic that he publishes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is called Wallace.dog. If you follow him on Instagram you can see behind-the-scenes how much work it is — often starting long before sunrise. I urge you to check it out.
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Good Design Award
Cabel Sasser on Twitter: After seeing the logo on cool products before, I finally looked it up: what a great index of cool products with Good Design. Not just fancy design! Fascinating list of products on the Good Design Award list. Be sure to look through Cabel’s replies on Twitter.
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Twitter’s new character UI
Josh Wilburne, Designer at Twitter: With this in mind, we designed a system that defines two types of written languages, dense and non-dense, and expands the character limit for non-dense languages. By grouping languages this way, we can give people writing in non-dense languages like English and Spanish the same space to express themselves as…
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Creating Summit: The current summit view
This post is the first in a series of posts about my experience building and designing Summit. This post focuses on just one view within the application; the current summit view. The idea for Summit came nearly 4 years ago as far as I can tell. I’ve hunted around for scraps of paper, digital notes,…
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Rebuilding Slack.com
Mina Markham: In August, we released a major redesign of slack.com, and we want to give you a peek behind-the-scenes. She goes on to show tons of details on their latest redesign. There are several bits I found interesting such as their attention to accessibility, how they handle fall backs for IE11, and how they…
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Required reading
The first time I linked to Colin Walker, which was only about 4 months ago, it was because he was fiddling with his blog, trying to come up with the right way to display his content for him and his audience. It is a topic that has fascinated me for 20 years and to see…
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Ryan Lau on iOS 11’s inconsistencies
Ryan Lau: The unfinished feeling in iOS 11 mostly comes from UI and animation. UI elements in iOS are quite inconsistent, mixing a variety of UI elements, which might look quite similar but introduce a disconnected feeling for UX. The inconsistency of those elements majorly stems from those UI element updated in iOS 11, such…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…
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Goodbye Google.com
BBC: Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage – Google.com -to show users content they may be interested in before they search. End of an era.
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Spine Magazine
Spine Magazine: Spine was founded in 2014 by Emma J. Hardy, and covers creative and production aspects of the book publishing industry with a primary focus on book cover design. Its mission is to offer creator insight, long-form stories, product information, and community content for an audience that is highly enthusiastic about books. The first…
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Colin Walker on macOS software
Colin Walker: Using OSX can be more intuitive at times but it is visually inconsistent. It may have been through various aesthetic revisions but it can feel old. I think Microsoft has done a better job of enforcing a standard look for applications on the desktop and the Windows design language is now generally more…
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Social Thoughts
Me, in 2011: I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. I still feel that…
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Looking beyond launch
Jeremy Keith regarding Clearleft’s upcoming rebrand: I think it’s good to remember that this is the web. I keep telling myself that we’re not unveiling something carved in stone. Even after the launch we can keep making the site better. In fact, if we wait until everything is perfect before we launch, we’ll probably never…
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On rebranding
Over on our company blog we published our recipe for rebranding a company. Here’s a snippet on how our outsider view is an advantage: Our suggestions and feedback come with no internal bias, no politics, no fear of losing our jobs, and certainly no fear of sounding stupid. We’re experts at dumb ideas. Out of…
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A custom skin for MyFantasyLeague
Kyle Ruane on why he created a custom skin for MyFantasyLeague: There are things on that page that defy explanation—nested tables driving layout, 8px text, inline styles on everything, five different ‘main’ navigation elements. One big dumpster fire. And this is actually one of the better views in terms of usability. The power of the open web. If…
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Instagram’s new look
Ian Spalter, Head of Design at Instagram, on Medium: The evolution of the community has been inspiring, and we hope that we’ve captured some of the life, creativity, and optimism people bring to Instagram every day. Our hope is that people will see this app icon as a new creative spark — something to have fun with…
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
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Andrew Kim’s Microsoft rebrand; \”The Next Microsoft\”
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.