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The Kawaiization of Product Design
Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed a certain style emerge in brand and product design. Look at the graphic below and you'll see it. The colors are soft and muted, the shapes rounded and the typography unobtrusive. It’s what you could describe as clean. It’s approachable. It’s inoffensive. It’s almost… cute. Zoom…
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The Elroy Lamp: A transparent LCD lamp (2019)
Elroy is a table lamp with a unique feature -- the shade can dynamically change to a new style or pattern from your phone or web browser.
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The web as a GUI toolkit
The web is kinda weird because it was originally created as a typesetting system, rather than a GUI toolkit. While this definitely has its drawbacks 1 and isn’t suitable for everything , I personally rather like the “web as a GUI toolkit” exactly because of its typesetting roots; it provides some features that few…
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Thoughts on Voice Interfaces
I’ve been working on the Consumer Voice Products team in Mozilla for about a year now. My primary project has been Firefox Voice , but our mandate is larger.
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Humans Are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter
Been a lot of "victim blaming" going on these last few days. The victim, through no fault of their own, has been the target of numerous angry tweets designed to ridicule their role in internet security and suggest they are incapable of performing their duty. Here's where it all
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The Shapes of Code
Expressive code in C++
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Single div Sierpinski triangle
Today I found another way to draw the Sierpinski triangle using pure CSS.
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Deep Chernoff Faces
One of my favorite ¹ concepts for multi-dimensional data visualization is the Chernoff Face . The idea here is that for a dataset with many...
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UX design: Tools, methods and frameworks for generalists
🗝 The Keyring // 001
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Maybe visual programming is the answer, maybe not
Whenever discussing problems with programming today and potential solutions, invariably someone will pop up and declare that the problem is ...
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Text layout is a loose hierarchy of segmentation
I love text layout, and have been working with it in one form or other for over 35 years. Yet, knowledge about it is quite arcane. I don’t believe there is a single place where it’s all properly written down. I have some explanation for that: while basic text layout is very important for UI, games, and other contexts…
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Bokehlicious Selfies
I signed up for the excellent fastai MOOC recently, and one of the project ideas I had was the idea of adding bokehs to selfies using Deep learning. Most phones have a not so great selfie (front-side) camera and therefore this idea has some merits.
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Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
Chronicling the design of the spacecraft and systems depicted in the book, Delta-v, by Daniel Suarez:
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A Light Box in Heavy Times
My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much…
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A Book about Aircraft Scale Drawings Creating with Inkscape and Gimp
This June I started working on a new (fourth) edition of my book about aircraft computer models. Actually, I am finishing its first volume (“Preparations”). It describes how to prepare accurate ref…
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Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design
How a misguided attempt to achieve cross platform UI leads to terrible experiences and kills the open web
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The Hyperbezier Pen Tool
Introduction
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Asterisk
Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk. In this post, Julia takes a back seat but it’s working hard behind the scenes. [1] The font used for the examples is JuliaMono.
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Apple’s New Map, Expansion #7: Final Parts of the Continental U.S.
On January 30th, 2020, Apple’s new map expanded to the remaining parts of the Continental U.S. , including Alaska and the Central and Southeastern U.S.:
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Short term usability is not the same as long term usability
When designing almost any piece of code or other functionality, the issue of usability often comes up. Most of the time these discussions go...
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Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Many (maybe most) of us Software Engineers are deeply involved in projects where UI and UX are very important concerns (or at least they should be). Throughout the short history of our profession, we
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The most expensive typefaces (2019)
The most expensive typeface I encountered is JHA Bodoni Ritalic, at €4,401.99 (almost $5,000) for a single font.
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The Treachery of Image Files
I have recently come into possession of a series of exquisite miniatures which I pray are worthy of your esteemed attention. While my employers are familiar with your unusual tastes , they also appreciate your desire for privacy- this showing was arranged with the utmost discretion, I assure you.