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Design & UX

The most popular blog posts about design & ux on Hacker News. 202 posts.

2025
121

Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…

122

Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds

Just kidding. Of course, I have something to say about this. In the company, we look at the art of Homeworld from time to time and bow to the creators of this masterpiece. Once, we talked about how great the background look and how interesting this sketched style is. There is something…some details seem…special to us:

128

Monotype font licencing shake-down

tl;dr Don’t try to shake-down a typography nerd with your dubious, automated claims about his employer using unlicensed fonts. How it started It started with a LinkedIn InMail message (sanitised to protect privacy): Subject: [Urgent] Font Software Licensing Review Hi Ameel I hope you

131

My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. As a result, a plethora of font…

139

Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns

TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the...

141

Font-size-adjust Is Useful

In this article, I will describe a recent addition to CSS, the font-size-adjust property. I am also making a bold claim that everyone in the world misunderstands the usefulness of this property, including Google, MDN, and CSS Specification itself. (Just to clarify, no, I am not a web designer and I have no idea what I…

146

Cross Views

Your camera has the ability to take three dimensional photos. Your screen has the ability to display three dimensional photos. You’ve probably never used either.

149

Configuration files are user interfaces

We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it! You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be…