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Posts tagged design

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Peter Saville on his classic Joy Division and New Order artwork

You gotta love Peter Saville’s album covers for New Order. I swear his design have help to design an emotion or feeling I feel about each one of these albums.

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Sweating the Small Stuff in UX Design

A friend of mine who’s just getting into UX design recently emailed me this question:

When you have a pull-down menu which displays a list of names - pronouns, and selecting one is a link to a detail page… what descriptor do you prefer to be in the menu at the top?

Here’s my response:

I prefer “Choose…” with the ellipses and without the “one”. It’s a nice simple action prompt and I think “one” is implicit from the type of control. 
I also think “choose” feels a bit more like a singular action rather than “select” but it’s probably me and a really subtle distinction. “Select” feels like you could  select more than one, like in a checkbox group. 

It’s interesting to me that questions like these remind me how much UX design is about sweating the small stuff and really thinking about the subtle differences in language and delivering your message to the user with the least amount of UI noise possible. Good stuff.

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The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers

Truly an amazing tutorial. I haven’t read something that blends art and science to an astounding outcome in quite while. It’s definitely worth reading through just to gain inspiration of how you can look to math and science for wonderous results in your designs. Along with that, it demonstrates a clever technique to make repeated patterns not appear like patterns to the naked eye.

(via Veerle)

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Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands

I love seeing how these logos have evolved over the years. It’s interesting to see how many of them have become more dimensional recently: Apple, VW, Renault.

(via @KISSMetrics)

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lharboe:

Lion’s All My Files icon. Read the quotes.

Amazing detail on this icon. Apple is ridiculously over the top when it comes to their icon designs.

lharboe:

Lion’s All My Files icon. Read the quotes.

Amazing detail on this icon. Apple is ridiculously over the top when it comes to their icon designs.

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xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog » Apple Keynote for video? Hell yes.

It’s kinda funny yet sad that I tried just about every app out there to produce our a simple video to run on as a kiosk in our office. Final Cut, Motion, After Effects, Premiere Pro… they were all overkill for what I wanted to do. I ended up using Flash but even that was too much for it. 

About a month later I was talking to my friend about it and he suggested Keynote. It never dawned on me to use it but it would’ve been perfect. In fact, it comes built-in with the animation I was trying to perform — crazy. Well, I plan to use it when I recreate it.

And for those UX designers out there, Keynote is pretty handy for wireframes as well. The iPad version a nice, added bonus.

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When Should Designers Listen?

A great, short article of when designers should listen (especially product designers).

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Minimalist effect in the maximalist market

Maybe it’s just me but I almost across the board prefer the extreme minimalist designs. I doubt the average consumer does though. Interesting to think about it though. Did we get where we are with product packaging and advertising because every product was competing against other product packaging? I just imaging little bottles screaming for your attention: “Pick me! Pick me!”.

(via @daringfireball)

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Pixelheroes

Incredible pixel art in a 4x4 pixel grid. See how many characters you can guess before looking at the title.

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