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Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
Maybe you haven't noticed, but just about every scene in every blockbuster movie has the same color scheme.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 324 posts.
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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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Flat Design: Its Origins, Its Problems, and Why Flat 2.0 Is Better for Users
Flat design is a web-design style that became popular around 2012. It is still widely used today, and its misuse can cause serious usability problems.
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BSI-001: The Perfect Wall
The perfect wall is an environmental separator—it has to keep the outside out and the inside in. In order to do this the wall assembly has to control rain, air, vapor and heat. In the old days we had one material to do this: rocks. We would pile a bunch or rocks up and have the rocks do it all. But over time rocks…
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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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Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
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Cameras and Lenses
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
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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 …
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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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Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It
Browse how-to articles on starting, running, and marketing your business, plus thought-provoking podcasts and films to inspire your inner entrepreneur.
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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
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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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Participation Inequality: The 90-9-1 Rule for Social Features
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
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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"…
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Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
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AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts
Fitts' Law, A fundamental principle of interaction design, from AskTog, the Webzine for Computer Professionals, their Family, and Friends
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A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” Color Scheme
Yesterday’s post about code syntax color schemes got me thinking about what is perhaps the ultimate color scheme, Windows 3.1’s “Hot Dog Stand”: The truly funny thing about this color scheme is that all the other Windows 3.1 color schemes are surprisingly rational, totally reasonable color
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Hyphens and dashes
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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User Interface Design For Programmers
Chapter 1: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintess…
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Underlining | Butterick’s Practical Typography
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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New alternatives to HSL and HSV that better match color perception
Okhsv and Okhsl Two new color spaces for color picking This post has an accompanying interactive comparison of color pickers. I would...