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All (visual) details matter.
“Robust typesetting guidelines for leveled texts do exist, but primarily as internal support documents for design teams at educational publishers. These documents aren’t typically referenced by professional levelers, and it’s the levelers who define a book’s official reading level.”
Left and right, in brain and heart.
“Every so often psychologists change their minds about what drives human behavior. Early in my career, psychologists claimed that people made rational decisions. Today, thanks to neuroscience, the prevailing view is that we make irrational, emotionally-driven decisions.”
Color, it only exists because of humans. No color without the eye.
“Learn how to build color palettes that command user attention, speed-up task completion, and evoke the right emotions. Our color psychology guide covers color theory, the psychology of color and practical applications for interactive design and UXD.”
Brian Cugelman, Rena Cugelman & Friends ~ Alter Spark ★
Only reading sharps the mind.
“This paper analyses major social shifts in reading by comparing publishing statistics with results of empirical research on reading. As media statistics suggest, the last five decades have seen two shifts: from textual to visual media, and with the advent of digital screens also from long-form to short-form texts. This was accompanied by new media-adequate reading modes: while long-form content invokes immersed and/or deep reading, we predominantly skim online social media. Empirical research on reading indicates that the reading substrate plays an important role in reading processes. For example, comprehension suffers when complex texts are read from screens. This paper argues that media and reading trends in recent decades indicate broader social and cultural changes in which long-form deep reading traditionally associated with the printed book will be marginalised by prevailing media trends and the reading modes they inspire. As these trends persist, it may be necessary to find new approaches to vocabulary and knowledge building.”
Miha Kovač and Adriaan van der Weel ~ First Monday 23.10 ★
Cognition, perception and emotion, all parts of the experience drivers need to be evaluated.
“When evaluating fonts, colors, and other visual details, assess both aesthetic impressions and behavioral effects.”
Kathryn Whitenton a.k.a. /kwhitenton | @kwhitenton ~ Nielsen Norman Group ★
From movable type to computational type.
“Can typography encourage long-form reading – not just scanning? What are the most exciting areas of cutting-edge experimentation in typographic technology and digital layout, and what new skills will we need to design tomorrow’s web content? Three experts – Mozilla’s Jen Simmons, publication design legend Roger Black, and ALA’s Jeffrey Zeldman – discuss typography and layout on today’s web: where we are now, and where we’re going.”
Page turning versus scrolling. Except for snippets.
“While modern webpages tend to be long and include negative space, and users may be more inclined to scroll than in the past, people still spend most of their viewing time in the top part of a page. Content prioritization is a key step in your content-planning process. Strong visual signifiers can sometimes entice users to scroll and discover content below the fold. To determine the ideal page length, test with real users, and keep in mind that very long pages increase the risk of losing the attention of your customers.”
Therese Fessenden a.k.a. /tbfessenden | @TBFessenden ~ Nielsen Norman Group ★
How more detailed can design tips go?
“Fonts to support glancing at individual words should be larger, in noncondensed widths, and uppercase over lowercase.”
Page Laubheimer a.k.a. /page-laubheimer | @page_level ~ Nielsen Norman Group ★
Design disciplines still relevant in the digital domain, even though there’re last century.
“To get a glimpse of the future of graphic and communication design, it’s not enough to think about new hardware, corporate needs, or visual trends. In the short term, digital design will move beyond screens to physical surfaces and augmented or artificial environments, and designers will occupy more positions where they are directing or consulting on larger and more complex systems of experience. Design is already less visual and more collaborative, and will continue along that trend. It’s not enough, though, to look five or ten years in the future. Will there be a Machine-Learning designer in 2050? Maybe. But in forty years, it’s just as likely that jobs will no longer exist, or at least not in a way that we would recognize them.”
Juliette Cezzar a.k.a. /juliette-cezzar | @juliettecezzar ~ Design Observer ★
Creating color, typography and lay-out to fit humans, all of them.
“They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As designers, we need to remember that the same is true of color and all visual abilities. It’s estimated that 4.5% of the global population experience color blindness (that’s 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women), 4% suffer from low vision (1 in 30 people), and 0.6% are blind (1 in 188 people). It’s easy to forget that we’re designing for this group of users since most designers don’t experience such problems.”
Nick Babich a.k.a. /nbabich | @101babich ~ UX Booth ★ courtesy of @MikeClickr
White space, silence and other ‘moments-in-between’.
“All good visual artists understand the importance of negative space, the empty area that draws attention to, and accentuates, the actual subject. Negative space (the artistic equivalent of a designer’s white space) is like the supporting cast whose duty is to make the star of the show stand out more by not standing out so much themselves.”
Abstraction, the next compentency for visual designers after empathy.
“This post is about something I see as a continuing trend in the design world: the rise of the meta-designer and algorithmic design systems.”
Rune Skjoldborg Madsen a.k.a. @runemadsen ~ RuneMadsen ★
Part of what’s called production values in cinematography.
“Today I want to offer more thoughts about art direction. Despite its benefits, is art direction something we need to do for the sites we create? How important is it to the success of the site? I want to address both questions today. I’m not sure I have great answers or even any answers, but I want to share some thoughts to help both of us answer the questions for ourselves.”
(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ Vanseo Design) ★
Scanning also involves reading, but at a general level. Unless, the texts are relevant, interesting or remarkable.
“The emergence of highly content-based websites now means one thing: how to fit the content within a very well-functioned website while not sacrificing the aesthetics? In addition to that, the development of web nowadays mean viewers will be able to view these content across multiple sizes of screens. Such are the challenges of designing in these interesting times.”
The only thing that is missing is connectivity as a unique trait of digital.
“In a traditional design practice, the designer works directly on a design product. Be it a logo, website, or a set of posters, the designer is the instrument to produce the final artifact. A meta-designer works to distill this instrumentation into a design system, often written in software, that can create the final artifact. Instead of drawing it manually, the designer programs the system to draw it. These systems can then be used within different contexts to generate a range of design products without much effort.”
(Rune Madsen a.k.a. @runemadsen ~ O’Reilly Radar) ★
The web as it was born is not a full-fledged magazine.
“Large images are visually appealing, but they can harm the overall user experience if they aren’t appropriately prioritized.”
It’s all about understanding by design.
“The tighter the mapping between icons and the thing they represent, the easier they are to understand, but standardization can also make an icon easy.”
(Jakob Nielsen a.k.a. @NNgroup)
Too bad design is only referring to the perceptual, the visual, the veneer so to speak.
“Every project you complete connects with users in some way. The design communicates a message and a tone. The emotional tone is what we are going to take a deeper look at and try to better understand.”
(Carrie Cousins a.k.a. @carriecousins ~ Design Shack)
Documenting design decisions is a honorable piece of work.
“(…) a style guide is a living document of code, which details all the various elements and coded modules of your site or application. Beyond its use in consolidating the front-end code, it also documents the visual language, such as header styles and color palettes, used to create the site. This way, it’s a one-stop place for the entire team—from product owners and producers to designers and developers—to reference when discussing site changes and iterations. Several companies have even put their guides online; Starbucks is the most well known of the bunch, but others exist.”
(Susan Robertson a.k.a. @susanjrobertson ~ A List Apart)
Honoring our historical roots is what makes us more mature as a relevant domain in world history. Even though is still three decades old, sort of.
“Thirty years ago, as tech titans battled for real estate in the personal computer market, an inconspicuous young artist gave the Macintosh a smile. Susan Kare was the type of kid who always loved art. As a child, she lost herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts; as a young woman, she dove into art history and had grandeur dreams of being a world-renowned fine artist.”
(Zachary Crockett a.k.a. @zzcrockett ~ Priceonomics)
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