Tag Archives: Design

Fifteen fantastic data visualisations

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Brian Suda, software developer, informatician and author of “A Practical Guide to Designing with Data”, presents some of the best and most beautiful visualisations on the web that are based on time, geography, sound data and more. The ability to create beautiful infographics and visualisations is easier now than ever. Much like the explosion of easy to use fonts created a design monster, misunderstood use of data does the same for visualisations. Having a source of quality design is key for inspiring the next generation of infographics. Visualisations, infographics and interactive data have brought us many hours of delight, but are they actually useful? With companies like visual.ly churning out infographics with the click of a button it’s easier now than ever for anyone to make and share their creative … Continue reading →

Designing for touch

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Fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head. Interaction designer Josh Clark explains what you need to keep in mind when designing for mobile touchscreens and compares finger-friendly touch interfaces for iPhone, iPad and Android. Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It’s not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand.

Dieter Rams’ 10 principles of good web design

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Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality” – Dieter Rams Since I got to know the work of Dieter Rams back in college, I became fascinated by the exceptional products that he made for Braun from the 1950s onwards. He was able to start a revolution in the way we use household appliances that we still use as inspiration for designing today’s world, and you couldn’t have a better example than Apple. … Continue reading →

What successful products teach us about web design

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Web design is a craft that is constantly evolving and yet also sometimes sabotaged. The moment a design is released, a new version is born. In the beginning, like a baby, it seems vulnerable and weak, but in time it grows up and becomes self-sufficient. Redesigning a website for its own sake doesn’t prove anything; quite the contrary, it reveals a lack of effectiveness on the part of the designer. Product design is a craft in which new versions come to life with increasing difficulty. We can learn a thing or two from it when designing for the Web. First, let’s look at some examples. How many designs for the iPhone has Apple released since 2007? The answer is one, with only two tweaks. How many Motorola phones for Android … Continue reading →

Create amazing newsletters

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Email newsletters are often the neglected child in the world of digital design but a cleverly crafted campaign can reap huge rewards. Digital creative agency We Love explains the secrets to newsletter success, with reference to its recent third birthday campaign This article first appeared in issue 217 of .net magazine – the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Email newsletters may not be the sexiest or newest topic in web design. But they’re still a massively useful way to spread your message, promote your product and get people visiting your site. Getting them right can be the key to a successful project; getting them wrong can be hugely counterproductive. So how do you strike that perfect balance between enticing and informative? How you push your message without … Continue reading →

Need help with responsive testing?

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Resolution Test changes the size of the browser window for developers to preview their websites in different screen resolutions. It includes a list of commonly used resolutions and the ability to customise that list. It also gives users the option to turn on Google Browser Size, more info on that here.

Design the invisible to tell better stories on the web

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For design to be meaningful we need to tell stories. We need to design the invisible, the cues, the messages and the extra detail hidden beneath the aesthetics. It’s all about the story. From verbal exchanges around the campfire to books, the web and everything in between, storytelling allows us to share, organize and process information more efficiently. It helps us understand our surroundings and make emotional connections to people, places and experiences. Web design lends itself perfectly to the conventions of storytelling, a universal process. However, the stories vary because they’re defined by culture, society, politics and religion. All of which need considering if you are to design stories that are relevant to your target audience.

Dropbox’s attention to detail on their download page

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Sometimes good UX is about being clever. Sometimes it’s to make the user happy or smile. However, when the success of your product depends on new, possibly inexperienced users successfully downloading and installing it, good UX is the difference between success and failure. I love what Dropbox has done here. I’ve noticed it for years and mentioned it in talks and to friends but I wanted to call it out here because it’s so thoughtful.

Easier is better than better

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In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice. “People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.” Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message … Continue reading →

The perfect paragraph

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In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee circulated a document titled “HTML Tags,” which outlined just 20 tags, many of which are now obsolete or have taken other forms. The first surviving tag to be defined in the document, after the crucial anchor tag, is the paragraph tag. It wasn’t until 1993 that a discussion emerged on the proposed image tag. Bursting with imagery, motion, interaction and distraction though it is, today’s World Wide Web is still primarily a conduit for textual information. In HTML5, the focus on writing and authorship is more pronounced than ever. It’s evident in the very way that new elements such as article and aside are named. HTML5 asks us to treat the HTML document more as… well, a document.