But design work is so much healthier/better when you stop telling yourself that you’re changing lives. Websites can just be…websites! And your front end framework or side project doesn’t need to reshape human civilization for it to be worth while. Once you relieve yourself of that pressure it’s so much easier to be happy and to do good, useful work. (I am still struggling with this, leave me alone.)

When it comes to design: forget the database, pretend it isn’t there.

Senior Interaction Design Portfolio at School of Visual Arts (SVA)

The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.

Perhaps our motto as designers should then be this: Do no harm. Make things clear. And show us the future.

That’s a clunky way of saying “when something is different, make it look different.” The best designers, in my opinion, take this to heart and don’t use too many variants to make those differences as clear as possible.

Companies are a sequencing of loops. While it’s possible to stumble into an initial core loop that works, the companies that are successful in the long term are the ones that can repeatedly find the next loop. However, this evolution is poorly understood relative to its existential impact on a company’s trajectory. Figma is a … Continue reading Why Figma Wins →

A “user interface” is simply one type of dynamic picture. I spent a few years hanging around various UI design groups at Apple, and I met brilliant designers, and these brilliant designers could not make real things. They could only suggest. They would draw mockups in Photoshop, maybe animate them in Keynote, maybe add simple interactivity in Director or Quartz Composer. But the designers could not produce anything that they could ship as-is. Instead, they were dependent on engineers to translate their ideas into lines of text. Even at Apple, a designer aristocracy like no other, there was always a subtle undercurrent of helplessness, and the timidity and hesitation that come from not being self-reliant. It’s fashionable to rationalize this helplessness with talk of "complementary skillsets" and other such bullshit. But the truth is: An author can write a book. A musician can compose a song, an animator can compose a short, a painter can compose a painting. But most dynamic artists cannot realize their own creations, and this breaks my heart.

You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed. ​ the more I learn about the many ways of human expression—music, architecture, even sports, the more I enjoy observing the masters at work. How could one not enjoy observing functional beauty and the care for detail? ​ —the more advanced you are, the less you need to consciously think about it. The less you think about what you do, the more virtuosity you will be able to achieve. ​ Again, this is a rule of thumb. That not everybody can sit down at a piano and play away like Glenn Gould is not the piano’s fault. Your skills need to match the tool you are using to assess its quality—you can’t test-drive a car if you haven’t learned to drive. But everyday objects should only require everyday skills. This is what makes web design so hard.

The secrets data won't tell you It’s become standard to lean on quantitative, experiment-driven design, especially when decisions must be made quickly and with very little time and resources. But this method often only reveals surface-level themes and not much about your users’ true intentions. In this onboarding case study, Vicki will walk you through how we learned to design using intuition, blending science and design research to create a solution that met our users’ needs. About Vicki Vicki is a Product Designer at Headspace, creating experiences to guide new users towards a healthy meditation practice. Previously, she was at Lyft, optimizing the passenger ride experience, and at Google, designing tools for reducing bias and predicting outcomes. Prior to Google, Vicki was at Stanford School of Medicine coordinating research studies in Pediatric Oncology. She holds a degree in Behavioral Psychology from the University of California, San Diego.

The most interesting product of Twitter’s popularity, to me, has been the explosion of Twitter API client software.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

What’s your favorite example of subtlety and nuance in motion design? 💬 For me it’s the inertia of iMessage bubbles when you scroll quickly. Looking for more examples!— Ryan McLeod (@warpling) March 4, 2019

Design and collage from Mel Haasch.

Mercedes is a graphic designer and illustrator from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in Dublin, Ireland. At the moment she is working as a brand …

The problem really happens when you assume that what is helpful yesterday is the same thing that is helpful today. And they both can be different from what’s helpful tomorrow. ​ Are you working out too much, because that’s just what you do? Most athletes have gotten to the point of needing to step back and admit that whoa, I shouldn’t actually run this week because my knee is pretty fucked up right now, and I kind of wish I took it a little easier last time. Maybe then I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now.