There you have it.
Design
Understanding UX design
“UX” (user experience) has always been a broad, fluffy, and rather nebulous term to me. But I’ve finally found an analogy that makes UX make sense.
Pretty good analogy.
2014 National Design Awards Winners
The National Design Awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.
Congratulations to the winners.
Unpickable bike lock
[VIDEO] This bike lock is pretty clever. Most of these U-shaped locks are notoriously easy to pick, often just using a simple Bic pen.
This lock offers no apparent keyway. And when you do find a place to put the key, all you get is a hollow cylinder. Watch the video (embedded in the post) to see how this works. The coolness starts at about the two minute mark.
If someone buys Jim lunch with Tim Cook, pick me up one of these locks, too!
Choosing Web site colors
I really suck at choosing colors, but I know what I like when I see it—I also know what I don’t like. Designers that can pull this off are especially talented.
Design Flex
Design never exists in a vacuum. A designer is always creating something with a defined purpose. The essence of the designer’s job is a complex series of decisions that the end user has hired them to make.
Facebook’s unfriending problem
Interesting read. And, I think, an opportunity for a social network that recognizes the unfriending problem and that offers a more sophisticated friend curation solution.
Beautifully crafted off-center axe splits firewood like it was balsa
The embedded video is just mesmerizing. I love great design.
Please, don’t be a dick
This is “a handbook for clients and designers” on how to deal with each other.
Thoughts on asking users for iOS permissions
Asking a user for permission to send them push notifications or to access their private data can be a little bit of a minefield.
For many apps, not getting access to a phone’s sensors or data can change the entire user experience. For example, if an app depends on where the user is standing, declining access to location could render the app useless. More subtly, if push notifications play a critical role in getting your user to form a habit of using your app, declined access could lead to you losing them forever.
Making it all worse is that when a user taps “Don’t Allow”, there is no easy way for them to reverse that decision.
If you are interested in user interface/experience, this is some good food for thought.
Chair, step stool, table, kids desk, all in one design
Love a well thought out piece of furniture. This is clever.
Stripes in CSS
Why would you use images when you can do this.
Comparing Amazon’s Fire TV with Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku boxes
Good side-by-side comparisons in this LA Times piece. You might also want to take a look at this comparison from Forbes.
Walt Disney’s nine old men
[VIDEO] Disney is selling a boxed set of beautifully hardbound flip books, each showcasing one of its pioneering animators. The video in the post is a bit soft on focus but does a good job of giving you a sense of what’s inside. Really lovely.
Wikipedia about to undergo a massive font retooling
From FastCoDesign:
Next Thursday, Wikipedia will launch a redesign that’s almost impossibly large in scope, scaling across 32,533,899 pages in 287 languages. But admittedly, it’ll take a sharp eye to notice that font size is larger, or that the section headers will render in authoritative, old media serif (think Georgia) while body copy will render in streamlined sans-serif (think Helvetica).
Writing Aid, a real assist for writers
If you are a writer, check out the Writing Aid, an iPhone app by Benjamin Mayo. The interface couldn’t be simpler. Launch the app, type in a word or phrase, and a banner appears at the top of the app, scrolling side to side with a list of synonyms. At the same time, the definition of the word appears in the main body of the app.
Tap a synonym to jump to a new page with more synonyms and a definition of that word. And so on. You can tap on the upper left of the screen to climb back out to previous synonyms.
Simple, elegant, effective.
Something original and fun to play with
Just start hitting keys. This is a lot of fun.
How a typeface change can save the government $400 million
This is an incredibly clever idea that makes sense. Just took a teenage science whiz to think of it. Thinner typeface equals less ink. Read the post for details, but this is genius.
The making of 2048 (in a weekend)
To complement the earlier post about the Threes team, here’s some background on the creation of 2048.
The Threes team talks ripoffs vs originality, walks through their development process
It’s the nature of the App Store that as soon as original hits the store, the cloners start their copiers. There’s been a lot of talk about Flappy Bird and the huge number of clones it spawned. But it’s true of just about every successful app. The Threes team weighs in with their take on this.
Neurosurgeons successfully implant 3D printed skull
This is absolutely fantastic.
A 22-year-old woman from the Netherlands who suffers from a chronic bone disorder — which has increased the thickness of her skull from 1.5cm to 5cm, causing reduced eyesight and severe headaches — has had the top section of her skull removed and replaced with a 3D printed implant.
How fortunate is this woman that 3D printing technology was available to her surgical team. I can’t get over how cool this is.
Twitter rolls out two major new features
You’ll now be able to tag up to 10 people in a tweeted photo and attach up to 4 photos in a single tweet.
Apple patents iPad smart cover with built-in gesture aware keyboard
On March 27, 2014, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals an all-new iPad smart cover configuration that includes a keyboard panel. One of the aspects of this design which differentiates itself from Microsoft’s Surface tablet cover is that Apple’s keyboard has been uniquely designed to double as a multi-touch gesture keyboard eliminating the need for a touchpad.
I like the premise, the idea that you can gesture on the surface of the keyboard itself.
Dieter Rams: Ten principles for good design
Many of you may already know Rams’ principles, but if not, it’s worth a read. Note the similarities to what Jony Ive designs for Apple.
The secret room where the iPhone software was born
To go along with the Greg Christie interview, the Wall Street Journal also ran this small piece that focused on the room in which the iPhone was developed and tested.
2048 – I’m really sorry
2048 is a lovely and addictive game, quite similar to the beautifully designed Threes by Asher Vollmer.
Google Glass joins forces with Luxottica Group, makers of Oakley, Ray-Ban, other high end eyewear
I think this is a logical move on Google’s part. Certainly this will improve the look of Google Glass, but there’s only so much you can do without reducing the footprint of the Glass module itself.
Construction of Apple’s new campus begins with destruction
[VIDEO] As always, I am really excited to watch this new campus take shape. Gotta take down the old HP buildings first.
CSS Diner
It’s a little game to help you learn CSS selectors. Type in the correct selector to complete each level.
Very nice.
Colors of the iOS 7 App Store
Have an app or icon to design?
Have you ever wondered what the most popular colors are in each category of the iOS store? We did. So we crawled the iOS app store and grabbed the top 5 app icons in each category and ran a histogram analysis on each one to find which colors were used most often. What we found was very interesting.
Before you design you next app icon, take a look at the color palettes below.
Great idea. Pass this along to your dev friends.