Co-founder of Segment, and ex-RISD Graphic Design. I write about design, programming, and pretty much anything systems related.
Visit ianstormtaylor.com → On Hacker News Aug 2012 – Jun 2013
One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same again multiple times at RISD. It sounds weird at first, but it’s good advice.
Reducing an interface until only the absolutely necessary elements remain is one of the most satisfying tasks in design.
The big buzzwords in CSS these days are “modular” and “responsive”—and for good reasons. But we’re still trying to achieve those goals with the wrong tool: Media Queries. What we really need is a tool that doesn’t exist yet: Element Queries.
That was the first reaction I heard to iOS 7. I’m not going to lie, when I saw it for the first time myself, I freaked out a little too. Like any good simplicity-loving designer, I was eagerly waiting for Jonathan Ive to reveal a fresh, clean take on iOS.
Object-oriented CSS is awesome. But littering your markup with non-semantic classes is not awesome. Those classes sprinkled all over your HTML are going to change, and that’s not gonna be fun. But if you combine OOCSS and Sass you get the best of both worlds: modular CSS without bloated, hard-to-maintain HTML.