Posts Tagged: design

The top 5 website UX trends of 2012

As UX Magazine emphasizes here, single page websites are everywhere. I predict we could see a big backlash to the look overall by mid next year.

How to do presentations that don’t induce suicide

More technical or design-heavy presentations can be hard to deliver well; either you get too technical or too visual. That’s why the advice here from designer Andy Whitlock here is so helpful. Andy writes simple presentation pointers that are applicable almost anywhere.

iTunes 11

Lukas Mathis:

It seems as if Apple tried to hide iTunes’ complexity under a shallow veneer of simplicity. Unfortunately, a new coat of paint won’t fix the leaning tower of Pisa.

Sub-pixel text rendering

From Mac/iOS app developer Bjango’s blog, a solid primer on why sub-pixel antialiasing – still fairly common on Chrome and the PC world – is on its way out. This part really surprised me:

WebKit on OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when animating, often resulting in a visual glitch when it starts and stops, unless standard antialiasing is set using CSS. OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when using CoreAnimation’s layer backed views.

Now I know why some of my CSS3 font animations can run a bit off; turns out it was for good reason.

PSDDD

I’m currently a bit more developer than designer in my day job so the many virtues of Dribbble don’t apply to me as much. But the many free resources published there – especially for in house UI design, sketching, and brainstorming, really come in handy. That’s what makes PSDDD so useful. A bunch of free resources available for download, separated out by functionality.

The infinite grid

Designer Chris Armstrong writing for A List Apart:

When we construct a grid, we’re creating layout boundaries: known relationships and constraints that define an environment wherein an appropriate solution can occur. But when we construct an infinite grid, we’re not just setting the boundaries for a layout, but a layout system, with too many variables for us to nail everything down. If we define the important relationships, the blanks will fill in themselves.

Really interesting read, and something that I heard several times in the UI17 conference I attended last week. In short, don’t design break points and your site’s responsiveness based on current mobile constraints, instead design based on site content.

CreativeMornings: Jason Santa Maria

Jason gives a nice talk here regarding how and when to say ‘no’ to clients. The content is simplistic but given through the lens of the speaker’s diverse experiences it says a lot.

Sidebar

In the midst of a ‘super summary’ site resurgence (e.g. Evening Edition), I stumbled upon Sidebar – 5 cool, relevant design related links post every day. Normally such a site wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, but look at the curators here: Chris Coyier, Sacha Grief, and many other talented web designers.

UI17: building adaptive designs now

For the last three days I’ve been at User Interface 17, a web design conference in Boston (it’s also why posts here have been sparse recently.) Overall I had a really good experience, one of the highlights being Luke Wroblewski’s extended workshop on multi-device design. In addition to Luke being an excellent speaker, he’s also a prolific writer and he wrote up some notes from some o the other talks at the conference.

I’ve linked here to Aaron Gustafson’s talk about progressive enhancement, but there’s more if you check out Luke’s writing section.

Rogie’s resource buckets on Dribbble

Komodo Media designer Rogie is big into the Dribbble scene, and today he posted today his personal bucket list compiling some truly great free design resources. Psd/vector files for the iPhone 5 and 27″ Cinema Display, icons, backgrounds and much more.