People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Design & UI
Satisfying UI Design is Often Illogical
Scott Stevenson provides a very interesting essay, Satisfying UI Design is Often Illogical, discussing the impact and need for UI changes and the expectations of and reactions by the market to those changes. The entire piece is well worth a read by anyone interested in design and user experience, with many valuable insights. One of my favorites though is encapsulated in a single line: “The real goal is user satisfaction, and some of that is really illogical and messy.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Design
You tell him I said to take a long unstructured walk around his city. Talk to strangers. Take pictures. Visit at least one museum. Pretend like he’s from somewhere else for an hour. Stop in a park to read Raymond Carver’s “What we talk about when we talk about love.” outloud would be rad, but I leave that up to him. Go into a music store, find two people who seem completely different from him and buy whatever they are buying. And then end his travels at your house where he’ll tell you the story of his day over a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin. The story should last as long as the bottle.
Maggie, the fifth commenter on the article One List to Rule Them All
I link to the article for the commentary more than the post, which is a brief rundown of resources for people interested in Interaction Design. The heart of the matter is the fact that Maggie’s instructions apply to anyone interested in becoming a designer, whether print or interactive, an architect or for that matter a strategist of any field.
We all follow the precedents of those who came before, but we lose sight of the road others walked before us, and the paths others take alongside us, as we look toward the road we must walk ourselves.
John Wayne, Fish Scales and Type
I recently discovered a great link in my design feeds, pointing me to the site I Love Typography, which is well on its way to becoming a great resource for designers and all those with an interest in type The most recent post, Who Shot the Serif?, is a tremendous introduction to the terminology used to describe serif fonts and makes any typographic discussion a bit more accessible to those without formal education in the field. Add a pinch of humor, and you’ve got a rocking article! Check it out, even if you aren’t a designer, you’ll learn something interesting for the day.
Safari's Font Rendering on Windows
I just ran across an interesting feature of the Safari 3 Beta for Windows. Apple has included a copy of Lucida Grande and Lucida Grande bold. But instead of dropping them into the main Windows font directory, where all apps could make use of it, the fonts are under the \Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\
. So, sites that set Lucida Grande as the first font in their styles will look different in Safari than the other browsers in a Windows environment. Add the font smoothing capabilities built into Safari, and you can see some visible differences in text rendering on many sites across the Web when comparing IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows.
Kuler Dashboard Widget
Adobe has released a Dashboard widget for Kuler, it’s beautiful, and very useful Web-based color picking app. The widget consumes RSS feeds from the site to display the most downloaded, highest rated and newest color schemes. In addition to the abiliy to search the tags that are used to organize the color palettes, each scheme in the widget provides a direct link to that scheme in Kuler, making it very easy to modify the scheme to fit your needs, and of course save it to Kuler for future reference and sharing amongst the community.
Another great feature is the ability to click a button and have the HEX values of the currently selected scheme copied to your clipboard. If you only want one of the colors, it’s easy to see its HEX in the widget screen without copying it to the clipboard.
If you have yet to play with Kuler, give it a try. It’s well worth the time for every designer…well, as long as you don’t get lost in it for a couple of hours playing with color. Not that I did that or anything… Really.
Hrrm, okay back on track. It is functionality like this that makes Dashboard worthwhile in my book. For those on a Mac, this is yet another reason to include Kuler in your design process. For those on PCs, you may want to drop Adobe a line to encourage them to release the widget for you to consume.