Design Thoughts / Visual Design

Color is a powerful force in the hands of a designer. It draws your eye, evokes emotion, and communicates meaning. To give you an idea of how important color is, in a widely cited study titled The Impact of Color on Marketing, researchers discovered that for some products, 90% of snap decisions people make about products could be based on… Read More ￫

The whole “Homogeneity of Design” topic is creeping up again. That’s cool. We’re all special flowers in our own way. But I’d like to make a few points about product design, as I see it. “In digital product design, industry wide established paradigms are good” The first thing I’d like to say is that I am a very visual person…. Read More ￫

Because automatic alignment sometimes just doesn’t work. I found myself using geometry while designing user interfaces quite often, so I decided to share a simple example I was working on the other day. Aligning interface elements in Photoshop is pretty easy as it comes with the pre-defined aligning options. And for the 95% those are all you really need. What… Read More ￫

Takeaways for keeping your interface friendly to the friendliest of people. My mother. It happens about once or twice a year. I travel over to my mother’s house for a visit and, about two or three hours in, she says something like “Hey, can you take a look at my computer? I just want to make sure everything is okay… Read More ￫

Looking back to when I first started designing, if there was a single thing I could go back and tell myself, that would be to train my design eye, my ability to critique and identify good design. A good design eye oftentimes exceeds the ability of the designer. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, this means that… Read More ￫

In my early days as a designer, I relied on Photoshop or CSS to tell me whether something was right or wrong. If Photoshop indicated that two shapes were aligned, then they were aligned. If two different shapes were the same size, then that was the case. If two colours had the same hex values, then they looked the same… Read More ￫