Design for Hackers: Why Monet Never Used Black, & Why You Shouldn't Either
Monet’s paintings evoke a sense of energy and life, they leap off the canvas with color and contrast, but Monet somehow managed to avoid using the color black for nearly his entire painting career. By avoiding black in your own designs, you can replicate some of this dynamism. Monet and Other Impressionists Explored…
Realism in UI Design
The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability…
Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness
Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It ...
Kindle vs. iPad Displays: Up close and personal
Programming, creative coding, tutorials by Keith Peters
"Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%
A while ago, I came across a unique registration form built by Jeremy Keith for his audio sharing site, Huffduffer. Though it asked people the same questions fo...
Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
Life Below 600px
Paddy Donnelly, an Irish UX/Web Designer in Belgium who really lives on the Internet. Aspires to be a webmaster. Co-host of @sameforyou. Remembers when Pluto was a planet.
Design For Hackers: Why You Don't Use Garamond on The Web
Garamond is widely considered one of the greatest fonts ever made. But the things that make Garamond so beautiful also make it a problem.
Solving the Alt-Tab Problem
I've got about 20 Chrome tabs open right now, and I feel the same way you do: they're all too vital to close. Everything from articles that I'm currently
Logarithmic calendar view
I’ve been sitting on this idea forever, but the chances that I’ll ever do anything with it are close enough to zero that I’m letting it go. (It’s not original, either, but it has yet to make it into a widespread calendar product.)
Why Does Apple Offer Free Engraving?
This Black Friday, I had the occasion to ponder why it is that Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads (hereafter, iP*ds).
Steve Jobs "never had any designs. He has not designed a single project"
Back when I reviewed Peter Siebel’s fascinating book of programmer interviews, Coders at Work, Erik Anderson suggested in a comment that I might also enjoy its precursor Programmers at Work […
Overdoing the interface metaphor
We’re often told that we should design our websites and software to mimic real-life objects. The iPhone strengthened this idiom, and Apple has been driving this home hard for the iPad.
Fluid Layout from Hicksdesign
Hicks.design is Jon Hicks, established 2002.
Why are restaurant web sites so bad?
On Twitter, my friends Shani and Erie are engaged in a bit of time-honored kvetching about the legendary and general awfulness of restaurant Web sites. Who thinks it’s good idea to blast annoying music at people going to your site? Why do they so often rely on Flash, which doesn’t really add anything to the…
Thank HN: Design for Hackers
Last week, I signed a contract to publish Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty with John Wiley & Sons. I still have plenty of work left to get this book onto shelves – and to exist at all – but I’m extremely excited about it, and wanted to share the news with everyone, especially visitors coming
37signals' Chalk Dissected
Update 2010-11-05: I dove into the JavaScript a little and explained most of it. Sam Stephenson tweeted that Chalk is written in CoffeeScri...
Jakob Nielsen on iPad Usability: First Findings
iPad apps are much improved, but new usability problems have emerged, such as swipe ambiguity and navigation overload.
Paypal's logo designed to look like a recommendation?
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing