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Mike·
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To icon or not to icon

Pretty comprehensive writeup about the use of icons from the makers of iA Writer, one of the App Store's most popular overpriced minimalist writing apps.

The long and short of it:

  • Icons alone can't convey the meaning, causing usability issues
  • Text labels without icons are dry and not compelling, which is a UI problem of its own (whether we like that fact or not)
  • Both is almost always going to feel like a compromise

So... everything is bad, more or less. They advise getting things right without icons in the IA and wireframing stage, then adding on the emotional component as part of UI design. Sound approach, but ultimately we're still left with icons as a pretty good solution that are still mostly unable to convey verbs and abstract concepts.

DiscussJun 9, 2016
Mike·
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Production design of High-Rise

This looks very cool. I tend to get pretty excited about JG Ballard movies in general — they turn out better than most Philip K Dick adaptations — and High-Rise looks pretty promising. These designs look authentically of a particular time, but their generic nature reminds me of the products in Repo Man.

DiscussMar 20, 2016
Mike·
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Desktop Neo

From a 21-year-old design student at Potsdam. It's not 100% practical. But the idea that revolution (or even evolution) in desktop operating system UIs is going to come not from Apple or Microsoft but from a kid who's been natively dealing with multi-touch screens since they were old enough to drive a car is plausible. The idea that folders are on the way out is already obvious, too.

DiscussJan 25, 2016
Mike·
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Sketch leaves app store

I haven't really noticed the downside of Sketch on the Mac App Store — except for the reason that I don't have the App Store version. Bohemian couldn't offer a Sketch 3 upgrade to App Store customers, so I got the standard version. Updates come very regularly, and apparently that's one of the major problems they have. I guess this trend has a chance of making Apple change some things. Sketch has to be a decent amount of lost revenue, and maybe more importantly, it's a high-profile Apple Design Award winning app.

DiscussDec 8, 2015
Mike·
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What are we makin' doodles with?

Khoi Vinh [published the results](http://tools.subtraction.com/index.html) of a pretty interesting survey on the tools that designers are using in various disciplines of website and software creation. No surprises here. Sketch is creeping up on the mighty (and mighty expensive/bloated) Photoshop.

DiscussSep 13, 2015
Mike·
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Put the "designers should code" debate to rest

Good read. The likelihood of that debate ever ending is small. But the point here is awesome. It's not about your skillset. It's about the fact that you're trying to describe a Picasso by farting.

It took me several years to come to that opinion and it hasn’t changed much, but it wasn’t the coding that was important. It was the movement away from symbolic representations of that which we were designing. It was about not using flat images as a poor proxy for something that’s different for different people on different devices in different browsers.
DiscussSep 4, 2015
Mike·
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New typography

I've updated the type on the site. Maybe do a hard refresh if you're so inclined. I won't be getting to a redesign any time soon, but I wanted to make things a little more reasonable. Things are now set in Merriweather and Merriweather Sans, which I think are great little fonts.

DiscussSep 1, 2015
Mike·
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Black metal campaign logos

This is great. Fast Co gets metal logo designer Christophe Szpajdel to redesign the logos of all the bazillion players in the 2016 campaign.

The other interesting thing about this is that one guy designed all those unreadable black metal logos, from Gorgoroth and Emperor to Wolves in the Throne Room.

DiscussJul 17, 2015