Steve Jobs was, in short, too much a plutocrat and too little an artist or craftsman to produce an ultimately satisfying appropriation of the warmer, more humane minimalism of the mid-20th century, which had been rooted in a vision of a more egalitarian and fairer world. To what degree do “good design,” or “taste,” depend on human values?

Everyone needs a base to start from. We are DesignBase. DesignBase is a database of highly curated free resources for all designers.

Experiments demonstrating CSS Grid, and what's now possible in graphic design on the web.

Your daily dose of pixelated skies and 8-bit clouds, from vintage and retro video games.

Inter is a typeface carefully crafted & designed for computer screens. Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

Water.css is a just-add-css collection of styles to make simple websites like this just a little bit nicer.

Back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made. Some did get close, some actually nailed it perfectly, but most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle.

Curated directory of the best store pages

Designers must be aware of their role in social UIs and give the same thought to social dynamics that they would to legibility, scalability and others. They must be aware of what social friction they are introducing or reducing, and they need to ask themselves, “How will this UI make my user look to others?” and “How will this UI affect the quality of social interactions?”

We all have to work towards making inclusion an ordinary occurrence. Rather than wonder about how to adequately represent exactly 17% colored people in an image that only has three people in it, chill out and drop some extra color in there. You are neither atoning for hundreds of years of continued injustice, nor creating institutionalized racism against white people. You’re just making the world a little friendlier for the many, many people alienated by their media. Don’t overthink it, just go for it.

As a result of this project, I’m on high alert for symbolism. I try to question all icons, especially those that feel the most familiar. For example, is the briefcase the best symbol for ‘work’? Which population carried briefcases and in which era? What are other ways that ‘work’ could be symbolized and what would those icons evoke for the majority of people on Earth?

And to design is to take purpose into account — as my friend Jared Spool says: design is the rendering of intent. You can’t separate an object’s function from its intent. You cannot critique it, you cannot understand it, and you cannot appreciate something without thinking about its intent. You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for how what you’ve designed affects the world. Mikhail Kalashnikov is responsible for as many deaths as the people who pulled those triggers.

Examples of Google Fonts put together.

I design with my nose. Let me tell you why.

Selecting a design partner is a pain in the ass. Designers can be difficult. And the process is a mystery. And let’s face it, designers do a crappy job of explaining it. But for those who have to do it, getting it right can mean the difference between their organization doing well and going under. I want to help you do it well.

250+ pictogram vectors.

50 stock photos of real people for UI design and business presentations. High-res, easy-to-use, royalty-free and rights-cleared! Compared to traditional stock photography, it's a no-brainer.

Icon fonts for web designers with added flexibility, including multiple button shapes and a unique multi-color option. Free and open source, Stackicons-Social includes finely-crafted icons for over 60 social brands. The Stackicons project is by Parker Bennett, a web designer and front-end developer based in Los Angeles.

Showcase of designs printed by Stumptown Printers on their signature Arigato Pak.

By hanging up their rich textures in favour of rich effects, Apple has gone well beyond a coat of paint. If people fall in love with this new, beautifully living aesthetic, there will be an argument for building native apps for years yet.

For some reason, as soon as you describe something as a brand all this fake science marketing mysticism gets invoked and paralysing decisions get made.

Along with Pink Floyd, Thorgerson and Hipgnosis were central figures in the transition from 60s psychedelia to the expansive, million-selling radio rock that defined most of the 70s. More than any single figure, he established intricately composed, surrealist photographic techniques, collages, and pictorial reappropriations as key ingredients of mainstream album art.

For all our focus on teaching students to design digital and physical products, I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of getting them to understand their process as a form of social, cultural, political, ethical, etc. agency. There is still, I think, too much emphasis on design process as some sort of mythical, mystical, essentially ineffable, act of creation.

Designy Temporary Tattoos

Whose mercy are you at, and why? Is it a very good reason? In that complex equation of getting big things done well, why not value a good night’s sleep, time with your family, or a drink with a friend?

Affordable Art Prints

A list of ampersands.

Good walkthrough of the essential sections of a web design contract.

Your success is delicious. Others look at your success and think, “Well, duh, it’s so obvious what they did there - anyone can do that” and, frustratingly so, they’re right. Your success has given others a blueprint for what success looks like, and while, yes, the devil’s in the details, you have performed a lot of initial legwork for your competition in the process of becoming successful. I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.