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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 108 posts.
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Flickr's redesign makes it a photo service actually worth sharing
I’ve been a paying Flickr member since late 2009, but this year was going to be my last. I believed this even after I forgot to change my billing settings and Flickr auto-renewed me into 2015, because it seemed chances were good that Flickr, a long-neglected and resource intensive property, would get the ax soon …
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Media Queries are a Hack
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.
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Mobile web design: The reign of morons, indeed
If you are Esquire's web designer, please find another career. Stop. Stop hurting the internet. I am still constantly amazed at the level user-hostility -- actually outright contempt -- in mobile web design. Remember in the 90s when those oh-so-clever web sites would pop up little Javascript dialogs trying to better…
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Revising MailChimp's logo
When Ron from Mail Chimp contacted me about helping them out on a logo revise I was totally tickled pink. Mail Chimp has been a wonderful supporter of the...
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A PRISM-inspired Google Doodle
Google is watching you...
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Bezier Curves and Picasso
Pablo Picasso Simplicity and the Artist Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall: Dachshund-Picasso-Sketch (Jump to interactive demo where we recreate “Dog” using the math in this…
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Are Designers Crazy?
...or do I just need new glasses? I'm not a graphic designer. I find it hard to get into the mindset of excellence through beauty. I understand user flow, interactions, happy paths, delighting the user, humane design, and so on - but when it comes to the art of making something look nice I'm all at sea. I understand…
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Labels in input fields aren’t such a good idea
There’s something that’s been bothering me lately. It seems to be some kind of form interface trend where the labels for text inputs are placed inside the fields themselves.
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Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best
With a new CEO last summer and a $1b acquisition this spring, Yahoo has been changing significantly. Next up is its iconic logo: Tomorrow Yahoo will unveil a new logo to signify the new era. To draw attention to the change, Yahoo has been displaying a different logo every day for the last month. We were … Yahoo showed…
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Developing a responsive, Retina-friendly site (Part 1)
This post is part of a series documenting the design and development of this blog, including responsive mobile first web design.
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New UI Pattern: Website Loading Bars
Here’s an emerging UI pattern: a web page loading bar. Unsatisfied with progress indicators provided by the browser, some sites are implementing their own ones to show the load status of the next page. The progress bar appears as a thin line overlaying the content, sitting right underneath the browser toolbar, growing…
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Jony Ive is Not a Graphic Designer
Jony Ive, at a talk I was fortunate to attend a few years ago (sorry, no linkable write-up exists): One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particu…
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The Cinematography of "The Incredibles"
Here is Part 1 of 3 on a case study of the shot compositions from Pixar's film "The Incredibles, I'll go over how the relationships of all ...
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What's Wrong with the iOS 7 Icons?
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.
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Leap Motion: Amazing, Revolutionary, Useless
I desperately want it to work, don't you? Just like Minority Report. You wave ...
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Rebuilding a simplified Firefox logo
Sean Martell Creative Lead at Mozilla, Transmogrifier of vectors, animator of GIFs, CSS eyebrow waggler, ketchup chip expert, lover of thick cut bacon.
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Data looks better naked
Rather than dressing data up, strip it down—remove to improve.
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Flat design is great for mediocre designers like me
Lost amidst the hubbub around flat design is the fact that the flat trend makes it really easy for mediocre designers to do merely passable work.