Mac, iPhone & iPad interface design consulting, writing and speaking featuring tutorials, interviews, techniques and thoughts on crafting & building beautiful software. By Mike Rundle.
What Do You Really Need in a WordPress Starter Theme?
I think it’s safe to say that I’m somewhat obsessed with themes that help you get your WordPress projects started quickly. Most likely because I’ve been there, staring at an empty…
Jon Bolt explores how changing the discussion from "functionality" to "complexity" helps product owners and designers better evaluate the real impact new features have on a product.
6 Things I Learned About Print Stylesheets From HTML5 Boilerplate
Print stylesheets can be a pain if you don’t know what you’re doing. Before you even approach one you need to make sure to do some solid research into how to go about it. Today we’re going to help you along by first discussing the conceptual considerations that you need t...
Want To Create A Great Product? First, Forget "User Friendliness"
User-friendliness is the inevitable result of a smart design approach, not the starting point. Here are three criteria to help you develop a useful design brief that will ultimately yield a great product.
When, why, and how should you go about designing a responsive website? Equator web designer and UX Booth contributor Elaine Simpson breaks down the basics of responsive web design.
Effective Use of Color and Graphics in Applications for Children, Part I: Toddlers and Preschoolers
“The effective use of color and graphics in children’s media is one of the most important aspects of design to ensure that you deliver optimal content and a memorable user experience to young users.”
Michelangelo once said, "The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself." Translate this to the world of Web design and you might say, "No matter how great a designer you are, you’re only as good as your content." While the reality of client work sometimes makes it challenging to gather and produce content prior to starting the design, this is now widely accepted as being necessary.
Take one line of markup, a couple of CSS3 rules (no images), and you can have yourself a swish folded ribbon effect in five minutes. Let's see how.. Step 1: Markup We'll begin with an empty...
«So what are the options for implementing web fonts? I'm going to review the three main methods of incorporating @font-face and explain the pros and cons of each method. […]»
Visual Designers Are Just As Important As UX Designers
As I explained in my previous post, user experience design is a multidisciplinary activity which includes psychology, user research, information architecture, interaction design, graphic design and a host of other disciplines. Due to the complexity of the field a user experience team will typically be made up of individuals with a range of different specialisms.
«Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days. […]»
Truth be told, I am a philistine. When people talk about recycling, I don’t think of saving the planet. In my earlier post, “Lessons Learned: Productivity Tips For Running A Web Design Business,” I wrote about how we can reuse and recycle what we do in the Web industry to save time and money.
Designing websites and related media for kids presents plenty of opportunities for Web designers. Openings are available at many businesses and schools, as well as through parents and kids themselves, giving designers many ways to find work on electronic and print projects that appeal to kids. The types of work range from interface designs for video games to websites for birthday parties.
This article tries to show how developing a process for Web design can organize a developer's thoughts, speed up a project's timeline and prepare a freelance business for growth. First of all, what exactly is a 'process'? A **Web development process** is a documented outline of the steps needed to be taken from start to finish in order to complete a typical Web design project.