#design (1,029 links)
Or, if you want to put it into more practical language: simply spend 3x more on design and branding than any of your competitors.
- LukeW | Different Gets Ignored lukew.com
Instead of making elements visually distinct to be noticed, designers should focus on integrating important elements seamlessly into the user interface. This ensures that crucial actions and information are perceived as part of the overall user experience, rather than distractions to be dismissed.
- Visual design rules you can safely follow every time anthonyhobday.com
- The Aesthetic-Usability Effect nngroup.com
Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say.
- Design Principles principles.design
An open source collection of Design Principles and methods.
- Healthy System Healthy Body underconsideration.com
New Identity for Ayushman Bharat Wellness Centers by Lopez Design
- Building like it's 1984: A comprehensive guide to creating intuitive context menus - Height height.app
So as you can see, building context menus is quite a bit more complicated than it looks from the outside!
Another good "UI is more complex than pictures" example.
- Okay, Color Spaces — ericportis.com ericportis.com
- The Design Philosophy of Great Tables posit-dev.github.io
Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising sophistication and nuance in designing effective tables. Over the past 5,000 years, they’ve evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data. Although we argue that the mid-1900s served as a high point, the popularization and wider accessibility of computing seemingly brought us back to the simple, ancient times.
- Generative UI and Outcome-Oriented Design nngroup.com
GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a move from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.
- Dynamic Pictograms For Design Systems carbonemike.com
How to prepare pictograms for design systems by handling variable brand and skin colors.
Design Engineers work closely with designers to implement designs, skipping the traditional handoff process. Instead of handing off a completed design, a Designer sketches the start and iterates with a Design Engineer in Figma or code to produce the final design. Lots of technical exploration is done to push the designs.
Via monospaced.
- DesignOps 101 nngroup.com
There are a lot of components within DesignOps, and what an organization chooses to select — or to pass on — should depend on the current needs and most poignant painpoints of that organization.
Go for not too specific, not too general.
- Be usable, not consistent, not uniform – Duncan Stephen duncanstephen.net
Consistency can be a great thing if it makes a design more usable. But if you don’t know what you want to a design to be consistent with — and why — then consistency risks confusing your users.
Interesting take that I think is building on a bit of a false premise.
- Being consistent, not uniform – Design in government designnotes.blog.gov.uk
- Alt Group altgroup.net
Via benterrett.
- Icon University blog.streamlinehq.com
- Retrofitting fluid typography clagnut.com
- A generation of design leaders grapples with their future fastcompany.com
Modern UI teams are designing components first; Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow. As we learn to craft systems rather than pages, we must invest effort into shaping these often missed states of design and create with a component lifecycle that can support everyone.
Old but gold
- Carolyn Davidson (graphic designer) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
In 1971, Knight and his (Blue Ribbon Sports, Inc., later Nike) co-founder needed a logo for a new line of running shoes they were getting ready to introduce. They asked Davidson to design a stripe (industry term for a shoe logo) that "had something to do with movement".
- I is for Intent — Acko.net acko.net
This is a slightly problematic article, but worth noting: so few people write about the complexity of UI in a useful way. Organisations too often treat visual design as being as good as done, missing all the nuance behind great UI.
- How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name (2015) fastcompany.com
- New design patterns for AI medium.com
- Daring Fireball: The Vision Pro daringfireball.net
A headset, a spatial productivity platform, and a personal entertainment device.
- Don Norman on how design fails older consumers fastcompany.com
Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone. Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases.
- Design Principles - Adactio principles.adactio.com
A collection of design principles from elsewhere, gathered into one place.
- The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design cs.umd.edu
I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three decades, require validation and tuning for specific design domains.
This is wonderful.
- Why Do Everyone’s Logo Fonts Look the Same? justcreative.com
Throughout this piece, we’ve talked about the sans-serifs and the utilitarian nature of their design. But perhaps their greatest sin is that they often lack personality. When more and more customers are looking for a more human relationship with brands, having the same logo font as everyone else just doesn’t cut it.
- Creating a Future-Proof Design System: Comparing Tools vs. Headless – Blog – Supernova.io supernova.io
This methodology involves decoupling the design tokens and elements from their implementation, allowing them to be applied across various platforms and technologies. This platform-agnostic nature of headless design systems makes them highly scalable and suitable for organizations that have a presence across multiple digital mediums beyond just the product.
So, essentially a reframing of what we called the Spotify Model in 2019, based on the "Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify" talk.
- Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems designsystems.surf
- Modern iOS Navigation Patterns · Frank Rausch frankrausch.com
This page collects all the familiar navigation patterns for structuring iOS apps, like drill-downs, modals, pyramids, sequences, and more! Think of it as an unofficial bonus chapter for Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, written by someone who cares deeply about well-crafted user interfaces.
Via tlavoie.
- Brands as Operating Systems | LinkedIn linkedin.com
If you’re designing a brand today, you’re designing a digital entity. You’re also designing a shared entity. Brands today aren’t the work of lone geniuses. They are collaborations between marketers, product people, partners and customers.
- How to (properly) break your design system breakyourdesignsystem.com
Systems thinking allows your work to reach more people.
If a component doesn’t align with the project’s vision, it’s not sacrilege to customize or create entirely new elements.
- Toggle-Switch Guidelines nngroup.com
Toggle switches should take immediate effect and should not require the user to click Save or Submit to apply the new state. As always, we should strive to match the system to the real world.
- Classnames classnames.paulrobertlloyd.com
Naming things needn’t be hard
Via monospaced.
- Welcome to the new Verge theverge.com
We’ve got a whole new Verge for you today. Radically new. Sometimes you just have to blow things up and start over. Yes, we have a sharp new logo that started…
... or more accurately: bad mobile-first web design.