THE PENDING DRAFT

Stef. Sullivan Rewis on Building an Enterprise CSS Framework for Salesforce

September 23, 2015

Some very interesting insights on what goes into building a huge CSS Framework for an Enterprise Solution like Salesforce.

At Salesforce UX, we are guided by four design principles. In order of importance, they are — clarity, efficiency, consistency, and beauty . These principles assisted us in prioritizing competing goals and helped us make tough calls.

I’d like to share some of the decisions we made while architecting the framework. Some of these choices may be unexpected. And there have been times when our ideas have morphed while building, as we discovered yet another platform or situation we needed to solve for.

Worth a read!

Medium – Building an Enterprise CSS Framework

Eric Meyer on Content/Ad Blocking

September 22, 2015

Eric Meyer’s primer on Content Blocking is spot-on.

The ads that are at risk now are the ones delivered via bloated, badly managed, security-risk mechanisms.  In other words: what’s at risk here is terrible web development.

Granted, the development of these ads was so terrible that it made the entire mobile web ecosystem appear far more broken that it actually is, and prompted multiple attempts to rein it in.  Now we have content blockers, which are basically the nuclear option: if you aren’t going to even attempt to respect your customers, they’re happy to torch your entire infrastructure.

I used an Ad Blocker on desktop for a long time now, but i also have many sites set to “do not block”. These are basically all sites that respect me and treat me as a human being. And if you are a publisher, ad-provider or anyone else working in this industry and don’t respect your customers, i couldn’t care less if you’re going downhill from here and i would suggest you to go back to the drawing board as fast as you can.

Or, as Kontra eloquently phrased it on Twitter:

Eric Meyer – Content Blocking Primer

Dustin Curtis on Twitter

September 7, 2015

Dustin Curtis pretty much nails it with his summary on what twitter’s product team should be focusing on and what problems he sees for the the twitter platform.

The fact that Twitter has fucked up its platform, more than anything else, is why I think Twitter’s next CEO needs to be more of a visionary, a person who can walk into the room and say, “What the fuck have you been doing for the past three years?” The last thing Twitter needs is to sit on its ass, twiddling its thumbs, while the product team continues to completely fail at addressing its most dire imminent existential threats.

Duston Curtis – Fixing Twitter

Google revealed a new logo

September 2, 2015

Google announced a new logo yesterday. I can only vaguely imagine how big of a task it is to redesign the logo for a company like Google. While there are many that “dislike” it, i think it works quite well. It’s definitely much more modern, but the tilted e at the end still preserve some of the “goofy-ness” from the old logo and the animations with those jumping dots do feel playful and match the overall style.

Google’s look, evolved

Peter Bellerby – The Globemaker

August 25, 2015

This is fantastic! I always liked globes, those really old, large ones mounted in a wooden cntainer – and i love hand-crafted products. And this video shows the process of the (probably) only producer of hand-crafted globes. Really fascinating!

Peter Bellerby – The Globemaker

Mike Monteiro: In Praise of the AK-47

July 28, 2015

So what is the designer’s role in this? Design is an ethical trade. And yes, it is a trade done for money. But we have a choice in how we make that money. A designer possesses a set of skills necessary to get something made. And needs to properly assess how they are putting those skills to use. But, won’t someone else just design it?

A great answer by Mike Monteiro on the question whether we can separate the intent from an object and if one can appreciate an AK-47 for it’s “good” design on an aesthetic level although it’s designed purpose is to kill.

Dear Design Student – In Praise of the AK-47

Baymard Institute – E-Commerce Usability Research

July 23, 2015

Baymard conducts original large-scale research studies on e-commerce usability.

The research is published in articles, reports, and benchmark databases. Topics include e-commerce search, homepage and navigation design, the checkout process, and mobile sites.

If you are looking for extensive research on E-Commerce Usability, look no further. The full guidelines are priced at $150 each but there’s also a lot of articles for free.

Baymard Institute

Web Design: The First 100 years

July 22, 2015

So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It’s very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.

And as designers, you should be jumping up and down with relief, because hard constraints are the midwife to good design. The past couple of decades have left us with what I call an exponential hangover.

(Maciej Cegłowski)

Web Design: The First 100 Years