Tag: design
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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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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…
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Dieter Rams Interview: Design as Art and the Need for Better Products
Sustainable design and the need for more self-explanatory products are two topics discussed in this brief interview with the iconic industrial designer, Dieter Rams. In addition to not being a fan of celebrity designers–or ‘pop’ design–he also has a dislike for design being seen as a form of art: Design has nothing to do with art. Design…
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Newspaper Design Using Web Design Principles
Earlier this year Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger asked Information Architects, a Japanese-Swiss UX-oriented web design agency, to come up with a pitch for a redesign of their offline newspaper. The result is a concept and set of designs that are subtle re-workings of what works for print, integrated with what works online. The concept was: Use all…
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Blogs Designed Like Magazines
With the blogs of Dustin Curtis, Gregory Wood and Jason Santa Maria as examples (each worthy of your time, by the way), Smashing Magazine looks at blogs designed like magazines,* discussing what these ‘blogazines’ mean for the future of boring blog posts. Dustin Curtis had this to say on the drawbacks of designing like this on…
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Simplicity in Japan
Simplicity, says Kenya Hara, creative director of Muji, is a “central aesthetic principle” in Japan and is what differentiates the visual appeal of the East from that of the West. In an interview for The New York Times looking at the unique design of Japanese bentō, Hara provides a comparison of the East and West’s…
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The New Rules of The Fold
In 1996, while discussing the importance of the inverted pyramid style of writing, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote that “users don’t scroll”. From there the idea of The Fold as an integral part of web design came into being. But, as Nielsen himself has said, the Internet has evolved and “as users got more experience…
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Steve Jobs and Circular Visualisations (Not Just Pie Charts)
Pie charts have been having a bad time of it lately* and I can’t see things improving anytime soon. In one of the better articles looking at this humble chart, Brian Suda notes not only at what you can do instead, but what improvements you can make if you’re forced to use the pie chart.…