02.24.14 |
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Designer Brandon Kowitz:
It feels great to launch fast. But launching also makes future changes much harder. So if you can invest a little energy to learn early, and then fix problems before launch, it ends up saving you a tremendous amount of time later. It also reduces the risk that you’ll launch something truly bad and get stuck backpedaling for weeks.
So replace the startup dogma of “launch early and often” with “learn early and often.” For me, it opened my mind to all the different kinds of ways startups can learn, and how valuable user research can be to the core mission of any startup.
01.31.14 |
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I have a habit of installing quirky screensavers on my Macs as a throwback to an earlier era. But with my latest Macbook Air I fell in line with the default settings sans screensaver, dissatisfied with what was out there. That all changed when I saw this screensaver by designer Robert Padbury, developed by Steve Streza. It’s a twist on the iOS7 lock screen with options for white on black or black on white typography. It’s minimal and extremely elegant.
01.23.14 |
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To quote from the site, “loved by hipsters & lazy designers.”
01.13.14 |
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Mikael Cho writing at Medium:
I came across a study by psychologist Kevin Larson. Larson has spent his career researching typefaces and recently conducted a landmark study at MIT about how font and layout affect our emotions.
In the study, 20 volunteers- half men and half women- were separated into two groups. Each group was shown a separate version of The New Yorker- one where the image placement, font, and layout were designed well and one where the layout was designed poorly.
The researchers found that readers felt bad while reading the poorly designed layout.
Good design and good typography are more than just fluff. They make us happier.
12.24.13 |
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It’s too last minute to be useful for holiday gifting, but for 2014 shopping, Canopy is a great site. It’s effectively a wrapper around Amazon with hand picked recommendations; most items selected are very design and/or tech friendly, and often hard to find elsewhere. I like the clean web design as well.
11.12.13 |
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Designer Trent Walton is a responsive web design veteran; he’s part of the three man web agency Paravel who’s done many cutting edge responsive projects. That’s exactly why reading this post, highlighting some smart steps to get a team on board with RWD, is so awesome.
(Bonus points for the FF Meta Serif usage, one of my favorite web fonts.)
11.07.13 |
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iOS App designer/developer Jared Sinclair:
What makes something touchable?
For things that scroll or zoom, touchability means that the content under your finger moves with your touch, without any lag or jitters…
…For buttons, touchability requires something different. Touchable buttons need borders. By “borders” I don’t mean outlines, (although outlines are included in my usage of the word). I mean borders in a broader sense. A button is a tappable area, clearly delineated from the un-tappable content around it by an obvious border.
Native app design isn’t my background, but the switch in iOS 7 from clearly defined buttons with borders and gradients to raw text labels always rubbed me the wrong way. Jared makes a strong argument why. (via Jeffrey Zeldman).
10.30.13 |
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Gradients and colors inspired by iOS7, generated by designer Tom Oude Egberink. The clean design fits very well with Apple’s aesthetic.
10.29.13 |
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There’s a lot of designers and developers who love the design of Apple’s new product pages. But I’m not one of them and it’s almost entirely due to its very forced input methods. Designer Trent Walton explains it perfectly.
10.16.13 |
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I’m a fan of Dan Mall’s design work, but he rarely comments on more tech heavy issues like web performance. Yet that’s exactly his focus on his latest blog post where he talks through the impact of a responsive design refresh. It’s not exactly scientific; Dan mostly is refreshing Firebug a few times to get his numbers, but I appreciated the approach and the thought process. It’s an encouraging read for performance novices.