A new set of principles for placing design at the heart of digital business

The trouble with best practices

The result is a familiar waterfall process, where strategy leads to UX, UX leads to UI, UI leads to “finished” designs, and only then does engineering begin.

Most of the team’s energy goes into producing artifacts for this flow. Storyboards, user journeys, and wireframes are all methods that once helped keep design human-centered, but are now implemented as key deliverables needed for businesses to measure progress.

One cost is that the work is slow. Product teams struggle under the weight of these processes and, at worst, end up filling their time completing checklists instead of doing impactful work. Because the work is done in isolation in page-based, manual design tools far away from the medium we’re designing for, the outputs tend to be derivative, perpetuating a pervasive monoculture in digital design.

The “Double Diamond” process rarely works well in real projects. Here’s how the design work actually gets done in small and large organizations, and where design has most leverage.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/08/improving-double-diamond-design-process/

“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

— Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld

https://www.infoq.com/articles/problem-reframing-method/

• Avoid building wrong solutions or products by directly jumping into solution thinking and not empathizing with the problem
• Finding a better problem that fits the customer’s needs better opens up a space for more innovative and sustainable solutions
• Looking at a problem from different angles helps to build more innovative and sustainable solutions or products
• Try different reframing practices and methods, such as examining bright spots or looking in the mirror; there is not a one-size-fits-all approach

https://blog.logrocket.com/ux-design/double-diamond-design-process/

This week I had the privilege of speaking to design students at two universities about my career. Here are some of the things I shared, most of which were answers to their questions.

5. Visual hierarchy is hard.

6. I know of only one way to successfully ship products and that is to ship imperfect products.

10. Creativity is storytelling.

Tell beautiful stories with your work! If you don’t believe you can change the world through design and the stories you tell with it, you’re selling yourself short.

Perhaps more than any other person in history, Leonardo da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are just as applicable to the web today as they were in Renaissance Italy.

• Document Your Thoughts, Ideas, And Work
• Obsess Over Geometry
• Think Right-To-Left
• Find Good Patrons (Or Failing That, Good Employers)
• Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
• Feed Your Inner Polymath

https://mymodernmet.com/leonardo-da-vinci-notebooks-online/

Build your next presentation in minutes with our free slide templates! No matter what you’re creating, Beautiful.ai has the template for you.

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of my super-popular UI & UX Micro-Tips, I’ve brought together some of the most timeless tips, and bundled them in an 8-Bit format. Why? Just because :)

1. Whitespace is your design friend. Use it to improve your UIs instantly.
2. Choose a base colour, and then simply use tints & shades to add uniformity.
3. Reserve one colour for your Call to Action. Be really selfish with those CTAs.
4. Give the most important elements on the screen more prominence.
5. Present your icons with labels for easier comprehension.
6. To improve the optical balance of your headings, reduce the letter-spacing.
7. Make sure your shadows are coming from one light source. We don’t live in a land of a thousand suns remember.
8. When working with long-form content, style that opening paragraph to draw the user in.

Dieter Rams, Vitsœ's furniture designer. Ten principles for good design (sometimes referred to as the ‘Ten commandments’).

Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers do to ensure small bugs don't take down systems.

There were no warnings or red lights, because the process simply hadn’t run in the first place. And so a new, time-consuming activity was added to the data analytics stack: manually checking the database each morning to make sure everything had functioned properly.

Negative engineering is “insurance as code”

Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives.

In a dark room, lighting a single candle may feel like a drastic change. But in a room already lit by ten candles, adding one more might not feel as significant. Or, while the intensity of sound is determined by the amplitude of the sound wave, doubling the amplitude does not make it feel twice as loud to humans.

This idea can apply to graphic design, for example, typographic scale or making contrast of sizing between visual elements in general.

Compare two type scale examples below. The left increases the font size by 6 points each step, while the right increases the size by the ratio of 1.2x (each step is 20% larger than the previous). You can see the change between each step appear to decrease as the size increases in the left example, while the change feel more consistent in the right example.

$fontsize = b \cdot r^{(step - 1)}$

$\begin{aligned} step = \log_{1.2} \frac{fontsize}{b} + 1\end{aligned}$

I read Moby-Dick in April 2020. For weeks afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I started making maps and diagrams as a way to figure it out.

Designed by Peter Gorman, 2021
www.barelymaps.com
@barelymaps

How to use the Content Brick Method to create a website structure in an easier and faster way? Why is this Method better for creating visual sitemaps than using mind map tools?

Even before Octopus, we knew from years of developing websites that the best way to prototype a website structure is using stickers or some other kind of paper stickers.

Lifehack

You don’t need to spend too much time thinking which wireframe goes to which content block, we’ve taken care of that for you. There aren’t too many (just 21), but they’re the most widely used. All you need to do is pick the right one for you.

A new set of principles for better workflows when making digital products

“Ready for dev”

It’s safe to say that there is a natural tension between the fields of design and engineering. Traditionally, the role of design is to question, create meaning, and to argue for solutions that make for a better user experience. The role of engineering is to systematize, solve technical problems, and to argue for solutions that make for a simple, scalable, and future-proof implementation. The design process begins before we know what we want, and engineering usually happens when there is a clear notion of what is being built.

"Unfortunately, these projects often do more harm than good if the organization uses the design system as yet another initiative to centralize the decision-making process..."

1. Flatten your waterfalls
2. Make code the design product
3. Operate like an open source project
4. Increase visibility through automation
5. Plan like a farmer

A curated, easier to browse graphic design repository for the Internet Archives

Minimalist maps by Peter Gorman.

A few years ago, I took a one-year, solo bicycle trip around the U.S. and Canada. I rode over 11,000 miles in one big loop.

After the trip, I designed some graphic maps inspired by the places I visited, and opened an online shop called Barely Maps.

Visual frameworks are patterns to help you think creatively, reframe challenging situations, and imagine possible strategies and solutions.

There are three ways to search the library:

You can search by typing in the search bar at the top right of every page.
You can explore the tag cloud to see common themes and questions.
You can search visually. Think of a situation or challenge that’s on your mind right now and click on a visual below.

What good design managers do
A good design manager focuses on 5 key responsibilities to build a healthy and happy team:

1. Ensure a steady stream of challenging and meaningful work for you & your team
2. Show where the quality bar is, by doing exemplary work yourself
3. Protect time and focus of your reports so they can do their best work
4. Communicate timely & clear feedback to every team member
5. Create a personalised growth path for every member in the team

Squiggles, scribbles, shapes and... other stuff.
A library of over 70 custom-color elements ready to paste into your project.

Color & Contrast is a comprehensive guide to color for user interface designers.

A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast.

Nate Baldwin

Download Free Essential eBooks for Unicorn Designers - Lapa.Ninja