Visual Design. Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human history—inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements, philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with the power to shape consumer choices and preferences.
Visual Design. Ben Bleikamp is spot on in his post Skeuomorphism is not the problem: The problem with all bad design, skeuomorphism included, is taste. It’s fun to make fun of skeuomorphism but when I glance at Dribbble I see a lot of it done tastefully. I also see a lot of beautiful flat design. It’s because a particular strategy or aesthetic isn’t really the problem with bad design, it’s a lack of taste.
Mobile design. Growing up, weekends were about worship in the Hinman household. Sunday mornings were reserved for a laborious worship ritual dictated by my parents. It required dressing up in uncomfortable clothes, going to church and pretending to listen to long-winded sermons about Jesus (while I drew doodles in the hymnals).
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Visual Design. A former senior UI designer at Apple recently described to me the criticism he once received directly from Steve Jobs. In reaction to a redesigned feature he showed the late Apple CEO, the source says Jobs felt his design was too minimalist. "He was like, 'I want it to look like a Chiclet; I want to be able to lick it; I want it to be like glass on water,'" the designer recalls.
Interface Design. By now it’s almost inevitable given the company’s track record: No matter what Apple unveils tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center (an iPad Mini? iPhone 5?), pundits will herald the company for its innovative thinking and bold hardware design. But the elephant in the room will be Apple’s software, which many inside the company believe has evolved for the worse in the last few years.
Visual Design. Angela Riechers wrote a fantastic article for Imprint Magazine about the nostalgic elements that we increasingly see in all types of design — from Industrial Design, to Architecture, to Graphic and Web Design.
Visual Design. Choosing colors for your website is no easy task. With so many colors and color combinations to choose from, where does a designer begin? The color of your site is important because it influences how users feel about your site. Choose the wrong color, and you’ll repel users from your site. Choose the right color, and you’ll attract them to use your site.
Visual Design. In recent years, the aesthetic of UIs has followed a dominant ideology that attempts to replicate the physical world. With a handful of software/product updates and new releases in the last few months, we’ve begun to see how it might be time to find a new balance (see Clive Thompson’s article in Wired and Sam Biddle’s on Gizmodo. The idea is that it will make the interface more intuitive, by replicating analog objects.
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Visual Design. HFI's monthly e-newsletter on recent usability research. This month's newsletter explores explores how first impressions are critical for forming opinions and determining subsequent actions.
Visual Design. This article was written for 10x10, a series of essays written by Method, a design and innovation firm. Download a PDF here. I’m sure that I was swearing allegiance to brands as soon as I began to develop the capacity for critical thought. It’s probably fair to say that, at least in some ways, my ability to analyze and debate was defined by Coke versus Pepsi, SEGA versus Nintendo, Apple versus Microsoft, and more.
Visual Design. One of the main disadvantages of online shopping compared to in-store shopping is the lack of guidance. Walking into any retail location, customers may be greeted with a smiling face asking, “May I help you find what you’re looking for?” Online shoppers, on the other hand, are often forced to find their own way, and secretly wish for that smiling face to help them.
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Content. As Web designers and developers, each project we work with has a unique set of goals and requirements. But one goal we have for all of our projects is that we want them to make an impression on people — we want the websites that we create to be memorable. A fun experience is often an enjoyable one and an enjoyable experience is usually a memorable one.
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Visual Design. By Phil Brisk Phil Brisk is an advertising writer and creative director with over 20 years experience in broadcast, print and online media. When you’re designing a web page, it’s easy to get sucked into the detail. With your ‘design’ head on, concentrating on crafting and perfecting style elements, it’s easy to forget to step back and see things through the eyes of your users.
Content. “The problem with this is there’s too much clutter. ” That’s what the legal secretary told me when we were studying her firm’s intranet home page. In fact, the page was pretty sparse in layout. The text was nicely laid out in a readable font, with different weights given to headings and body text.
Visual Design. Have you ever looked at an icon and struggled to figure out what it meant? Users do this all the time with icons they’re not familiar with. And there are only a small set of icons that users are universally familiar with. This is why when you use icons in your designs it’s important to make them clear and intuitive. Here are a few solid rules to follow so that your icons don’t leave users scratching their heads.
Visual Design. Meaningful Transitions is the thesis project of Johannes Tonollo, an interface design student at the FH Potsdam, Germany. Johannes wrote his Thesis on "Transitions in the User Interface," in which he analyzed how motion in the user interface can be a helpful extension to static elements to enhance the user experience.
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Visual Design. HFI's monthly e-newsletter on recent usability research. This month's newsletter shares the "active ingredient" in great graphic layouts.
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Visual Design. Designers use rounded corners so much today that they’re more of an industry standard than a design trend. They’re not only found on software user interfaces, but hardware product designs as well. So what is it about rounded corners that make them so popular? Indeed they look appealing, but there’s more to it than that.
Visual Design. In one second the user should understand generally where they are —largely driven by visuals and functionality. If we can keep people for 10 seconds, they should understand our primary message. If they stay for two minutes, some secondary messages should be getting through. All this feeds into a call to action.
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Visual Design. I love my Subaru. I've driven it with no issues for about seven years. (BRB - going to knock on wood. ) Despite my love, there are two design flaws that have driven me nuts throughout the duration of those seven years.
Visual Design. By Michael Hawley Published: February 22, 2010 “There can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on which design direction we should choose. ” In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design.
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