Letters Remain

Category: design

  • Advice for Design and Life, from Milton Glaser

    Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design: You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”. If you have…

  • A Primer in Type Terminology

    David’s lead encapsulates my thoughts on typography perfectly: “I’m fascinated by typography even though I don’t understand a thing about it”. Hopefully this won’t be the case for much longer, asĀ Paul Dean has written a five-part “type terminology tour de force”. From the excellently illustrated Anatomy of a LetterformĀ (part two): They speak the arm (of,…

  • The Shortcomings of Data Visualisation

    The problem with pie chartsĀ and how this relates to data visualisation as a whole. Many visualization types have cropped up just in the past two decades, riding the growth of the internet. But they nevertheless share many characteristics with the garden-variety pie chart, including some of its primary weaknesses and a slew of new ones.…

  • Infographic Inspiration

    There’s not much I can say about this collection other than giving you its accurate title: 50 great examples of infographics. via @mikaarauz

  • Emotional Cartography

    By getting volunteers to walk around cities with biofeedback machines and GPS devices, Christian Nold has created a series of ’emotion maps’ of cities around the world, including San Francisco, (East) ParisĀ and Greenwich, London. Participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s [ā€¦] emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.…

  • What Design Is

    Design is 70% dealing with people, 3% the idea, 2% selling the idea, 2% the brief, 2% being pig headed, 1% printing, 3% eye for detail, .6% invoices, 2% coffee, .7% tracking, .1% warm glow, .6% panic, 1% 4am, .6% staring, .2% checking, 1% letting go, .8% keeping hold, .7% estimates, .3% checking, .4% proofs,…

  • Unintuitive Interfaces

    Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almostĀ embarrassed to have not thought about previously: Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary.…

  • Call-To-Action Buttons

    Call-to-action buttons are the buttons that web designers want visitors to click when interacting with their site (Signup, Purchase, Download, etc.). Tips on how to design theseĀ abound on the Internet, but David Hamill’s overview on how to design good call-to-action buttons and the difference they can make is one of the best I’ve seen recently.…

  • 10 Design Commandments

    The 10 commandments of design , as set forth by Dieter Rams: Good designā€¦ is innovative makes a product useful is aesthetic helps a product to be understood is unobtrusive is honest is durable is thorough to the last detail is concerned with the environment is as little design as possible As Jason points out,…

  • Design Patterns for Errorproofing

    Persuasive technologies are those which are designed to change the attitudes or behaviours of users. Errorproofing, on the otherhand, is concerned not with behavioural change, but in ensuring certain behaviours are met. Errorproof technologies, then, are those which “[make] it easier for users to work without making errors, or [that make] errors impossible in the…