Tagged: design

I just saw Jason Pamental’s excellent talk on ‘The Life of <p>’. In this talk, Jason traces the evolution of paragraph design in print and shows how those typographic ideas can be applied using CSS.

There’s one moment during the Q&A where Jason mentions:

[…] you see the page gets small, but they don’t change the scale of the headers. So you end up with like an <h1> with one word per line. It’s a really awkward break. So I think proportion with varying screen size is probably the most overlooked thing right now that I’d want to see people think about more.

I wasn’t a web developer 10 years ago when Jason gave this talk, but with over five years of experience now, it’s striking that I only became aware of proportional type scaling as an idea in the last couple of years. Nowadays, I use utopia.fyi to create fluid type (and space) scales across viewport ranges, which helps address the problem Jason mentioned.

Great talk by Andy Allen on how software designers can learn from game designers.

It reminded me of the Wheel by Adam Argyle, inspired by the arcade game Black Emperor. The game feel is so strong that I find myself scrolling up and down again and again just to play with it and experience that delightful bounce effect.

Instead of seeing us as people who brought valuable knowledge and expertise to the project, they saw us as the hands that would execute their vision.

The above bit from Nic captures a dynamic I want to address upfront with clients, so they never treat me as just a pair of hands.

Then there’s the this bit, which really resonated with me (because I’ve been there too and it sucks):

While I personally believe in the value of good design, I also believe there are a lot of smoke-and-mirrors in the industry, and I hated the thought that I might have inadvertently contributed to it. Even if the client is happy, it didn’t meet my internal bar for a quality product worth sticking my name on, and I feel like I’ve let down both the client and the end-users.

Nic mentions how they hope to avoid similar situations in the future by blogging:

By blogging, I’m putting a body of work out there that communicates my values and ethos. While much of the details of my client work has to remain private, these posts can be public, and hopefully they can help me find people who resonate with what I have to offer. Or you know, just be bold enough to communicate ‘Fuck off’ to those who don’t!

I’m a web designer-developer who has mostly designed and built marketing websites for small to medium-sized businesses. I started designing because my clients didn’t have a designer and expected me to handle everything. But I’ve always felt like an imposter. It’s not a nice feeling.

I’m really determined to change that, which is why I just bought Scott Riley’s course, Mindful Design. Piccalilli is running a Black Friday sale on all their courses, including Mindful Design, and I can wholeheartedly recommend them.

As a freelancer, I’m always eager to learn how other folks work. Piccalilli’s behind-the-scenes look at their redesign is extremely useful.

In this article, Dave Rupert explains how testing in forced colors mode improves accessibility for users and reveals design flaws, such as excessive reliance on color cues.

Jim Nielsen makes the case for design engineers as professionals who do design work with code. He also emphasizes the limitations of traditional design tools, which often produce static images that don’t fully capture the dynamic nature of web interactions, and advocates for designing in the browser instead.

You need someone who can do design work with code.

That’s right: design work with code.

Pixels of an interface from a GUI tool are a static representations of a dynamic form. It’s the difference between a picture of me and the living, breathing, moving me.

Design engineers don’t just push pixels around in a GUI tool, they do it in a web browser — the medium of delivery — designing not just the visuals but the interactions that make sense for a living, breathing, moving interface.