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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 233 posts.
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Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
In the mind’s eye of many people, Japan is a land of tranquil Zen gardens, serene temples, and exquisite tea ceremonies. Both traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, books and mag…
33
Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Bars
When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”
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The Tyranny of the Marginal User
why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
36
The age of average
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a colla
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GTA V – Graphics Study
The Grand Theft Auto series has come a long way since the first opus came out back in 1997. About 2 years ago, Rockstar released GTA V. The …
38
Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
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Typography in ten minutes
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe
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What every coder should know about gamma
Personal blog of John Novak
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About those vector icons
Why can’t we just use vector-based icons in our application? This question, in a variety of reinterpretations, keeps on resurfacing in various forums, blogs and articles. It is asked in the context of desktop applications where the same icon is used in different ways, starting from very small 16*16 icons in file…
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MindBEMding – getting your head ’round BEM syntax
A primer on the oft-confusing BEM notation for CSS
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Line length | Butterick’s Practical Typography
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
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Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures (2015)
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
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Top Web Design Styles of 1993
It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.
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Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
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Cameras and Lenses
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
50
How Doom 2016 Renders a Frame
DOOM pioneered fundamental changes in game design and mechanics back in 1993, it was a world-wide phenomenon which propelled to fame iconic figures …
51
Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)
A humorous exploration of the uncanny resemblance between AI company logos and human anatomy. Discover why circular, gradient-based designs dominate the AI industry, and what this design convergence tells us about branding in tech.
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Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays
✪ Update 2021-06-11 For WWDC 2021, Apple has posted an excellent video on EDR.
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LinkedIn dark patterns, or why your friends keep spamming you to sign up for it
or: Why Your Friends Keep Spamming You to Sign Up for LinkedIn
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Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
56
The Science of Serif vs Sans Serif Type
Update March 2012 See my expanded critique of Colin Wheildon’s legibility research .
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Mac-Assed Mac Apps
Link to: https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman
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Mirrorboard: A one-handed keyboard layout for the lazy
Do you have a wearable computer? Are you interested in alternate keyboard layouts but too lazy to learn Dvorak? Do you masturbate at your desk? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you ma…
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Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of "intuitive"…