06.05.13 |
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The New Yorker’s Matt Buchanan:
When I spoke to Google designers across a number of products over the past couple of months, they rejected the idea that this was a top-down revolution. They described it instead as a conversation across the company. While an ascendant Larry Page “put the emphasis on beauty and gave us the freedom to go beyond,” said Gilbert, there’s “no organizational authority making it happen.”
Whatever the real story, from grass roots to a top-down skunkworks factory, it’s working. A year or two ago I wrote off Google’s design chops, especially on an aesthetic level, as dull and uninspired. No longer.
05.29.13 |
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Developer Lucas Rocha:
Why is it so important to have designers and engineers working very closely? First, there are a number of issues that you only spot once you actually try the design ideas. If designers don’t engage with engineers, the product will likely stick with broken and/or unintended design.
Furthermore, design issues are tricky in that they have this qualitative side that tends to be invisible to untrained eyes. Design problems will not necessarily be caught by even the most competent QA team or the most solid UI tests—because both are usually focused on the functional correctness of the product.
As I’ve said many times here, close collaboration between a tech team’s designers and engineers isn’t just a “nice to have”. It’s essential for success, especially in smaller organizations like startups.
05.28.13 |
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Designer Khoi Vinh:
It’s much more common for designers to be expected to master the engineering vernacular than vice versa, but that shouldn’t stop designers from asking engineers what they know about design. Designers might hesitate to ask if the engineer understands anything about typography, color, images, branding systems and logos, but I say why not? It’s perfectly fair game to ask if an engineer understands why a given design solution works…An engineer who understands these things is a tremendous asset in shipping great products, and designers are best equipped to assess that.
04.03.13 |
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Mobile designer Rakesh, writing on his own blog Radesign, gives the GMail mobile app a visual makeover. I’m not crazy about everything he does (most notably, making unread titles blue), but if anything, Rakesh illustrates some great guidelines for general readability and contrast. It’s applicable equally to both native mobile app design and the web.
04.02.13 |
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Designer Khoi Vinh:
This inverse relationship between active user input and automated output is wonderfully consistent with how real people use mobile software. Unlike desktops, mobile devices are more often than not complements to other, real world activities, where ‘computing’ is not the main activity. Phones and tablets are used in situ, and so their software cannot afford to demand high levels of input effort.
02.20.13 |
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Sacha Grief is already a designer I’ve kept my eye on for a while – prolific on Twitter, creator of the amazing Sidebar – but he’s outdone himself with this very long post on the future of web and app design. Loved this line:
When you have a high-definition display and screen-optimized fonts, you quickly realize you don’t need much else to create beautiful work.
02.05.13 |
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The new gaming site Polygon made a big splash when it launched late last year, and deservedly so. Not only is the editorial content solid, but its web design is bold and well thought out. This post is a very detailed breakdown of the initial design planning workflow, with initial mood boards, wireframes, and sketches.
02.01.13 |
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A very well put together pdf/iBook download for web designers. Great tips here on basic color settings to ensure your Photoshop and Illustrator work stays color consistent, proper alignment among vector objects, good use of layer effects and much more.
01.14.13 |
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Nick Bilton, writing for The New York Times:
The worship of design has also taken designers out of the back offices and into top executive jobs. Engineers are still in the mix, to be sure. But they don’t rule the roost in product development, which may also be why tech products are easier to use, more human.
As Bilton’s piece illustrates, this is a time where great web designers make or break websites. The collaboration level between designers and developers is key as well; without a great workflow, all the great design ideas in the world won’t be implemented.
01.10.13 |
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I find myself in Photoshop pretty much every day in the office. As our web team moves increasingly to a responsive, grid based framework, design work has to match grid structures perfectly, hence the importance of grid guides or layers to keep things on track.
But Photoshop doesn’t make quick guide generation easy out of the box. Enter GuideGuide, a free tool by designer Cameron McEfee. Install it as a Photoshop extension, and with just a few clicks you’ve got simple horizontal or vertical grid guides based on percentages or pixels.