THE PENDING DRAFT

Pragmatic Redesign for GitLab

February 12, 2015

I use git and GitLab for pretty much everything i’m working on, from the smallest experiments to large client projects, everything gets pushed to a remote repository on our server. The last update for GitLab brought some small UI changes which i really liked. They’ve done some great work with this and it’s one of those improvements where you look at it and recognize that something has changed, but couldn’t tell what it is. Like when someone you know has slightly changed their haircut and you notice that she/he looks a bit different, a bit better, but you don’t see what exactly has changed. I like those kinds of iterative, small redesigns. And i fully agree with their statement about the importance of having a clear plan and a set of goals before you start redesigning anything.

Changes to the interface are always stressful. So you shouldn’t even start to redesign without a list of issues you intent to solve. This way, your users get compensated for the changes with improved usability.

Well done GitLab!

Pragmatic Redesign for GitLab

Style Guides Podcast

January 22, 2015

Styleguides.io provides a ton of useful resources on Website Style Guides. You find pretty much everything from Articles to Books, Talks, Tools or Examples. If you’re building Style Guides and didn’t know it yet, you should check it out.

Today Brad Frost announced a new Podcast, where he and Anna Debenham will interview folks making Style Guides. In the first episode they talked with Jina Bolton, Senior Product Designer at the Salesforce UX Team and although i’m usually not that much into audio podcasts i gave it a try and really enjoyed it.

Style Guides with Jina Bolton

The Web Field Manual is a nice and very extensive collection of links and resources – curated by Jon Yablonski, Garret Wieronski and Geoff Tice – for everyone working on the web. Or, in their own words:

The Web Field Manual is a curated list of resources focused on documenting only the best knowledge for designing experiences and interfaces on the web. It is an ever-expanding collection of knowledge and inspiration for web designers, by web designers.

Web Field Manual

An interesting read of the history of Helvetica, how it was developed and became one of the most used typefaces of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1830s with the first sans-serif’s all the way to 2013 when Apple introduced Helvetica Neue Ultralight as the default System Font in iOS 7.

History of Helvetica

Redacted Font

January 10, 2015

Redacted Font

When building rough Mockups and Wireframes we normally fill text areas with random Lorem Ipsum Text. While this might work perfectly for us, it can confuse clients. First of all, not everyone gets why there’s strange random latin text all over the place, and second if you use just “any” real font it can lead to discussions about font choices too early in the process when you not even started designing those details.

The Redacted Font was created to solve that problem by obscuring text into unreadable blocks. The project is directly inspired by the BLOKK Font which was around for quite some time. David Walsh wrote more about the Redacted Font including some examples on how to use it etc. so i wont go into the details here.

Redacted Font

webdesignrepo

April 1, 2014

webdesignrepo is a curated collection of helpful links from around the web. Primarily the repo is for webdesign links, but there is a large overlap with web development and graphic design.

Huge collection of all kinds of links related to webdesign, sorted in “Daily Visits, Blogs/News, Inspiration, Learning, Tutorials, Snippets, Plugins, Architecture, Tools, Resources and Community”. Definitely something to bookmark!

A Dao of Web Design – A list apart

November 30, 2013

It’s hard to believe this article is 13 years old!

The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all.

A Dao of Web Design – An a list apart article