Design-articles

  What do all successful designers have in common? The ability to approach complex challenges with simple, yet innovative solutions. And while we all have our own techniques for problem solving — from team brainstorming sessions to step-by-step formulas — sometimes we need to approach our work from an entirely different angle. Here, we’ve rounded up 11 inspirational design articles from creative thought leaders around the web. Spanning everything from app interactions to modern web design monotony, these reads are sure to help you see age-old problems in a new light. 1. How to Design Happiness Mark Wilson | Fast Co. Design This article explores the three psychological stages of human happiness: anticipation, experience, and memory. Wilson uses lessons from a SXSW puppy experiment to show how designers can methodically reconstruct one of our most complex emotions. 2. Why Good Storytelling Helps You Design Great Products Braden Kowitz | Google Ventures We’re all familiar wi...

  Platforms like Pinterest, Dribbble, and Behance have exploded with inspiring design content for ui-designers. And while a lot of it looks amazing, I feel like a lot of trendy designs are misleading both you, and the designers who made them. This article is not meant to hate on beautiful work by talented people, but to expand your arsenal of design skills by shedding some light on a topic I do not hear a lot of real talk about. Let me explain. UI- Design vs Real-world use A lot of my work revolves around designing user interfaces. With over 10 years of design (and development) experience, I have seen a lot of trends come, and go. I have created a lot of designs that were awesome, and a lot of designs that simply sucked. A lot of designs that looked amazing in XD, Sketch or Figma. But just didn’t seem to work once built into a useable interface. Why is this? There are a lot of potential reasons for this happening, for instance: The design isn’t flexible enough  — failing on d...

  H umans design products and services,  which in turn influence future designers. Design is not a linear, one-way process but a continuous correspondence of creation and iteration. A new product or service creates new entanglements of relationships that influence and therefore create new designs, and so forth. Most design research methods quickly reach limitations .  Products and services are likely used by groups of people who have different lived experiences and interact with them for different reasons and face a diversity of problems. For instance, the measurement of user satisfaction reveals little about actual user attitudes. As a result, this approach does not find the underlying causes of a problem and is likely to provide solutions that don’t address the depth of the problem. Designers, therefore, require an interdisciplinary approach that helps to identify the underlying causes of a problem at a meaningful social depth and offers design solutions by ...

  Take care of your valuables! We’ve all been there. The Dev team has worked really hard to nail down a search results page they think will really help users. You pull up your slide deck and start walking the stakeholders through it. “Okay, here’s what the user sees after they log in,” you say to the assembled throng. It’s good to start with the familiar, you’ve heard. “Wait, that’s not the right time zone,” the VP of marketing points out. “This is just fake data,” you say, hoping to get back on track quickly. “Nobody has   that many books on their shelf. Why are you showing so many books?” “Lots of our users have really large shelves,” you stammer. “But we’re not reviewing the book shelf design right now.” “I don’t like that font. Why is it so blocky?” And on, and on. What happened? (A side note: I have committed EVERY ONE of these mistakes. And I hope you can learn from my errors!) Remember to Begin Before You Start Prep is everything in a meeting like this. If you don’t ha...

  T he term brutalist web design was first coined by Pascal Deville , a founder of the brutalistwebsites.com. Even if you’ve never heard of this term, I bet you’ve probably visited a few brutalist websites without even knowing. Here’s how Deville defines a brutalist website: “In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today’s web design.” When designing a brutalist website, aesthetic beauty is not even the fifth thing on your mind. This is probably good news for full stack developers who aren’t big fans of front-end. Nonetheless, there is still a difference between a poorly designed website and a brutalist website. The difference is that brutalist websites are ugly on purpose. U n bothered, raw, ugly, reactionary, bold, uncomfortable are some of the words one can use to describe a brutalist website. If you’re a nerd like me, by now, you’re ...

  W hen I started in UX design, I often wondered  how seemingly even decent designers knew the reasoning and techniques behind good design. The short answer I discovered — experience. The long answer? Learning and honing in on the many psychological principles that have proven to be effective in design over time. Enter designers William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler with their excellent reference book Universal Principles of Design  exploring and researching exactly this. An invaluable cross-disciplinary resource I’d been recommended before, and now can myself recommend to any designer as a solid addition to your bookshelf. Wit h  that, let’s jump into four principles I want to share that I think will help you on your UX journey. Signal-to-Noise Ratio “The ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in a display. The highest possible signal-to-noise ratio is desirable in design.” (Lidwell, Holden, Butler, 2003) I think most people have an intuitive un...