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.
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.
The gaming news site Polygon just launched late last night. I’m pretty excited given the team’s editorial strength – Arthur Gies, Christopher Grant, Brian Crecente, Russ Pitts, among others.
Also if you’re at all involved with the web (even if you could care less about video games) the website design and development is very unique (I still have to make up my mind if that’s a good or bad thing.) Fully responsive design, web typography in Gotham and Mercury, minimal navigation and much more.
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.
This is awesome idea: take the already sound idea of throwing a bunch of icons and symbols into a single web-friendly font set and then make them easy to use by invoking the symbols with common terms (e.g. an HTML list item with the word ‘home’ gets replaced by a home icon.) Perhaps most importantly, every set on the site looks great. At $30 to $60 each, it’s a pretty affordable option as well.
We’re going to see a big change in a certain type of iOS app—the one designed for the device….In a sense, this could be a good thing—freeing up iOS from the constraints of specific screen shapes opens up developers to whatever Apple throws at them next and should also make apps simpler to port to competing platforms. But it also impacts heavily on those tightly crafted experiences that were designed just for your iPad or just for your iPhone.
With web having been down this road for a while, it will be interesting to see native apps designed in a more responsive direction.
Nathan Ryan, writing for The Industry:
If you’re working from the start date on an open-ended project, it’s much easier for the client to dictate terms which almost always means you end up doing more work than you signed up for when the project started.
Focusing you and your client on an agreed-upon ship date for their project means you can more clearly dictate what can and cannot happen in that timeframe because you’re working against the clock and you can only get so much quality work done in any given amount of time.
I can’t say I fully embrace Nathan’s stance; something about basing things off a hard deadline (which often changes) does feel very “waterfall methodology” to me. Yet he makes some reasonable points, especially the one quoted above.
Jason is one of the designers I respect most from both his writings and tweets, and this extended interview helps illustrate why. I especially liked his advice to designers starting out:
Creativity is like a muscle and you need to exercise it constantly. You need to draw; you need to sketch; you need to constantly be recording and taking in the world around you. A lot of writers say they need to write in order to understand how they think; I believe designers need to draw to understand how they think. Keeping a sketchbook is something that every designer I know takes for granted. Because it’s something they can do, it’s something they don’t do.
Lots of great advice here on running fast design iterations. Many fairly well proven pieces of advice here as well, like the weaknesses of group brainstorming and how tighter constraints and deadlines can lead to innovative ideas.
Really enjoyable read here on how Microsoft’s web design jumped into such a modern, approachable design. Pay special attention to author Nishant’s “four tenets” web design presentation at the beginning; I like his emphasis on responsive design.