Category: design
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Why Designers Need Statistics
The proliferation of infographics online is helping to make a broad, somewhat statistically illiterate, audience aware of important data and trends. For those designing these infographics, therefore, there is a need that they understand their process intimately–from data collection to illustration–in order to analyse it honestly and with meaning. Through a “showcase of bad infographics”,…
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Information Foraging and The Fold
Even though users are now accustomed to scrolling down web pages, we know that the fold still exists and is important–and how we can design to take advantage of it. In light of this, Jakob Nielsen has conducted research to see what prompts users use to decide whether to scroll or not (the answer: the information…
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Persuasive Design Patterns
The Design with Intent toolkit is a guide to help you design systems to influence a user’s behaviour. The author, Dan Lockton, has subtitled the toolkit 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design. Categorised into the following eight ‘lenses’ (ways to look at design and behaviour) the toolkit proves to be a fantastic resource for…
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The Language of Signs
Part five in a Slate series on signage around the world looks at the history of the green “running man” emergency exit sign and its ‘battle’ with the American red EXIT sign. We are told how the ISO-accepted emergency exit sign is Yukio Ota’s running man, adopted in the late 1970s. Interesting are Ota’s thoughts on…
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Web Design Research Results
Some of the more enlightening/worthwhile results from a number of studies on design and usability conducted by Smashing Magazine, found via their otherwise-ordinary 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines article: General design decisions taken by the top 50 blogs (part two): 92% use a fixed width layout with 56% varying the width between 951 and 1000px. For body…
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Simple Rules for Better Typography
Some simple rules to follow for improved typography (web or print), from Fred Design: Don’t use too many typefaces (not more than 3). Pay close attention to the hierarchy. No more than 4 font sizes, preferably 3. 8-10pt for body copy (definitely not above 12pt). Use simple, legible typefaces. Keep leading in mind (a little…
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Apple, Disney and Pixar: It’s the Products
Written in early 2006 shortly after Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in a $7.4 billion all-stock deal, BusinessWeek looks at the relationship between the Disney and Apple CEOs and where their relationship may lead. Prescient in that it accurately predicted the Apple TV and the iPhone, the article also briefly looks at Jobs and his product-first…
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Language Map of Europe
As Neatorama says of this language map of Europe: Languages correspond only imprecisely with political borders, which are designated by the superimposed red lines. The English version of this map was created by Postmann Michael in 2007 […] and there are continuing doubts regarding the accuracy of some of the language borders. I am reminded…
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Flags as Language Symbols in Web Design: Wrong
With Brazil (Portuguese), Finland (Swedish) and my home-country (the United Kingdom) as perfect examples, Jukka Korpela tells us why the use of flags to represent language options on the web is “plain wrong”. In a perfect world, there would be no need for explicit links to versions of a document in different languages. Even in this imperfect…
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The Humble, Essential and Safe Elevator
Stuck in an express elevator around the 13th floor of the McGraw-Hill office in New York for 41 hours, Nicholas White’s story should be somewhat fear-provoking. Intersperse with information on the importance of elevators in modern cities, a profile of elevator consultant James Fortune and a discussion on the psychology of elevators, the article somehow…