A real work of art made for Nike by Ian Coyle, I truly enjoyed browsing this website. Like its good looks are not enough, it also employs “fresh” HTML 5 elements to do the markup. Wish for more sites like this one in the future, please!
Fundamentally I teach because it makes me feel good. It helped me certainly clarify my own objectives. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing someone’s life affected in a positive way by something you’ve said.
—Milton Glaser
Knowing Your Audience: Lessons from the Gaming Industry
› http://52weeksofux.com/post/2609186182/knowing-your-audience-lessons-from-the-gaming-industry
52 Weeks of UX, as its name would indicate, guides you through a variety of User Experience articles during a time period of 52 weeks. In this week’s article Matt Ventre discusses UX lessons we can learn from the gaming industry, mainly focusing and advertising to your target audience. He tells the story comparing games for Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and mobile games for the iPhone and iPad.
Minimalist effect in a maximalist market
› http://www.a2591.com/2010/12/minimalist-effect-in-maximalist-market.html
What would happen if some of the biggest brands of the world took a minimalistic approach to their products? Find out in this excellent blog post. While it’s not highly likely this type of design will come to life in the near future, some eye-feasting on beautiful minimalistic product packaging is guaranteed!
Every now and then, you might have wandered off with your mind while working on one of your projects and done a sub-par work on it. So you feel disappointed because a day’s work has gone down the drain and start feeling sorry for yourself.
Stop with that.
You should learn from every mistake you make, as you mother possibly has warned you when you were a kid. If you were designing, you maybe established a good layout which just needs some polishing. If you were writing, maybe the second paragraph you wrote contains an excellent message which will make a good introduction to your article. If you were coding, you may have done something you didn’t know how to do in the past.
The moral of this story? Mistakes, while not always desirable, can be extremely valuable when viewed from the right angle.
There. I’ve said it. If a website looks nice, I’ll like it right away. Even more so, I’ll like the company behind that website. I’m more inclined to trust a website if it looks beautiful. Usually, if I see that the domain name owner cares enough to invest in an important thing such as design is, I’ll care enough to give attention to him.
Poorly designed websites produce mixed emotions in me. What am I searching for here?! Why? Should I be looking it here? Perhaps someone else offers the same services, but has a less confusing website?
In these cases, I’ll rarely even bother to read the body copy of the website. I didn’t come to the website to search for what the company offers, I want to know it right away! And the inability to find relevant information has just cost the company a customer.
So, to all clients out there: remember that design matters. And then look at your website. Do you feel like you’re confident in yourself when looking at the website? If not, your visitors rarely will be.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
—Mark Twain
Think more, design less. Many desperate acts of design (including gradients, drop shadows, and the gratuitous use of transparency) are perpetrated in the absence of a strong concept. A good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work.
When you feel like there’s nothing more to add to your finished design, like you’ve brought it close to the point of perfection and like you’re ready to send it off to the client… stop.
When you’ve written an article for your blog and are getting ready to click the publish button for the whole world to read it… stop.
When you feel like you don’t know what to do with your design anymore and feel like it’s never going to be finished in time, like you’ve lost all ideas that were floating in the invisible space around you… stop.
Writing is like a muscle; you have to do it every day—or close to every day—in order to get better at doing it.
—Mandy Brown, in a 5by5 Interview
