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Design & UX

The most popular blog posts about design & ux on Hacker News. 72 posts.

2014
10

Why xkcd-style graphs are important

For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …

12

CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

CSS, a language for specifying visual appearance on the web, is … so complex that it has never been implemented correctly; yet, successive versions specify even more complexity. At the same time, it is so underpowered that many elementary graphic designs are impossible or prohibitively difficult, and…

16

How To Scroll

Scroll-based interaction is incredibly popular for interactive storytelling . There are many compelling reasons for this, yet scrolling is surprisingly nuanced and easy to break. So here are five rules for employing scrolling effectively.

26

The Scroll Up Bar

A design pattern that is currently growing more popular is the fixed position bar at the top of the page. Sometimes the bar stays the same throughout, sometimes the header morphs into a slimmer bar as you scroll down, sometimes a completely new bar appears.

28

Designing Stereographic Lampshades

I saw an article on the Guardian website here on the 3D-printing of shapes which project interesting patterns of light. Ignoring the strangely forced Halloween reference, I thought this would be an interesting project to attempt for an arbitrary pattern, perhaps as a personalised lampshade. Buoyed by the continuing…

30

Ikea C&D's 8-year old Ikea furniture hacking website

Updated 19 June: Read latest development (New talks). I am afraid I have a bit of bad news. Some months ago I received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that my site IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights. In that letter they asked that