64 posts tagged “design”
2024
Help wanted: AI designers (via) Nick Hobbs:
LLMs feel like genuine magic. Yet, somehow we haven’t been able to use this amazing new wand to churn out amazing new products. This is puzzling.
Why is it proving so difficult to build mass-market appeal products on top of this weird and powerful new substrate?
Nick thinks we need a new discipline - an AI designer (which feels to me like the design counterpart to an AI engineer). Here's Nick's list of skills they need to develop:
- Just like designers have to know their users, this new person needs to know the new alien they’re partnering with. That means they need to be just as obsessed about hanging out with models as they are with talking to users.
- The only way to really understand how we want the model to behave in our application is to build a bunch of prototypes that demonstrate different model behaviors. This — and a need to have good intuition for the possible — means this person needs enough technical fluency to look kind of like an engineer.
- Each of the behaviors you’re trying to design have near limitless possibility that you have to wrangle into a single, shippable product, and there’s little to no prior art to draft off of. That means this person needs experience facing the kind of “blank page” existential ambiguity that founders encounter.
Sometimes the most creativity is found in enumerating the solution space. Design is the process of prioritizing tradeoffs in a high dimensional space. Understand that dimensionality.
Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology. Gunpei Yokoi’s product design philosophy at Nintendo (“Withered” is also sometimes translated as “Weathered”). Use “mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply”, then apply lateral thinking to find radical new ways to use it.
This has echos for me of Dan McKinley’s “Choose Boring Technology”, which argues that in software projects you should default to a proven, stable stack so you can focus your innovation tokens on the problems that are unique to your project.
2023
New Default: Underlined Links for Improved Accessibility (GitHub Blog). “By default, links within text blocks on GitHub are now underlined. This ensures links are easily distinguishable from surrounding text.”
ChatGPT should include inline tips
In OpenAI isn’t doing enough to make ChatGPT’s limitations clear James Vincent argues that OpenAI’s existing warnings about ChatGPT’s confounding ability to convincingly make stuff up are not effective.
[... 1,488 words]Why Chatbots Are Not the Future. Amelia Wattenberger makes a convincing argument for why chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. “Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used.”
2021
brumm.af/shadows (via) I did not know this trick: by defining multiple box-shadow values as a comma separated list you can create much more finely tuned shadow effects. This tool by Philipp Brumm provides a very smart UI for designing shadows.
2020
Command Line Interface Guidelines (via) Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian and Eva Parish provide the missing manual for designing CLI tools in 2020. Deeply researched and clearly presented—I picked up a bunch of useful tips and ideas from reading this, and I’m looking forward to applying them to my own CLI projects.
Weeknotes: datasette-auth-passwords, a Datasette logo and a whole lot more
All sorts of project updates this week.
[... 913 words]So next time someone is giving you feedback about something you made, think to yourself that to win means getting two or three insights, ideas, or suggestions that you are excited about, and that you couldn’t think up on your own.
2018
Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not, people outside of your design team are making significant design choices that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your product. They are designers.
2017
Work process vs technology
Do you have a plan for what happens if you lose your hard drive, or someone steals it? I understand your need for offline access, but personally I’m terrified of losing my laptop to the point that I use cloud backup services (Dropbox, but I’ve used and liked Backblaze in the past) to make absolutely sure that I don’t lose any data should my laptop get lost or stolen.
[... 81 words]2013
How long should I budget for an experienced designer to design a responsive ecommerce store?
There’s no single answer to this—it depends on the scope of the project. A one-page store selling 3 items is quicker to design than a thousand page store with dozens of category homepages etc.
[... 87 words]What are the best web design and web development conferences/ meetups in Central & Eastern Europe (2013)?
We have a list of Web Design conferences and events in Central and Eastern Europe on Lanyrd—you might find our full list of Conferences in Central and Eastern Europe useful as well.
[... 94 words]Where can I find out about upcoming conferences, conventions, and trade shows in design, publishing, and elearning?
Our site, Lanyrd, is a crowdsourced directory of conferences and professional events. We’re extremely strong in areas such as Mobile, Web Design and User Experience, but we also have listings for Publishing and E-Learning. Try these pages:
[... 162 words]What would be the best design conference to attend in 2013?
That’s a pretty tricky question to answer... there are a lot of excellent UX conferences around (we’re listing 69 upcoming UX events on Lanyrd at the moment, and more get added frequently). A few things you should consider:
[... 198 words]2012
Which sites have the best URL design?
GitHub’s URL design is fantastic—it’s a virtually flawless mapping of Git semantics to URL space. Their basic URL structure is excellent, but they also have a bunch of neat URL hacks going on. Here are a few of my favourites:
[... 97 words]2011
What are the best design conferences or meetups in Switzerland?
I haven’t been myself, but Lift has an excellent reputation:
[... 30 words]What are the best free resources to begin learning UX design?
We’re collecting videos and slides from conference sessions covering user experience on Lanyrd—here’s 10 videos and 14 slide decks:
[... 42 words]2010
24 ways: Extreme Design. Hannah Donovan on the design process that has evolved from multiple /dev/fort expeditions.
What are the underlying, unspoken values of TED?
Not unspoken, but the ten commandments they send out to their speakers are pretty interesting: http://www.ted.com/pages/360
[... 31 words]Twitter.com 2010 Redesign: What things don’t people like about #newTwitter?
I absolutely love the improved functionality, but I don’t like the way it’s implemented as a heavy single-page JavaScript application. It’s extremely slow to load, which is a big problem for me because I habitually open new tabs with e.g. twitter.com/username in them, and each of those tabs now takes far longer to load and show me information than old Twitter did (especially since I’ve been suffering on very slow hotel WiFi connections recently).
[... 133 words]Are there any web design conferences in Southeast Asia?
Our site, Lanyrd, lists a few:
[... 39 words]A More Royal Royal Opera House. Beautiful piece of work updating the branding for the Royal Opera House, including a strikingly modern take on the original crest.
Human pylons carry electricity across Iceland. An entry in the “Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition” proposes giant human-shaped electricity pylons. “The figures can be placed into different poses, with the suggestion that the landscapes could inform the position that the sculpture is placed into. For example, as a power line ascends a hill, the pylons could look as if they’re climbing. The figures could also stretch up to gain increased height over longer spans.”
Today’s Guardian, by Phil Gyford. An alternative interface for reading today’s Guardian, built using the new Open Platform Content API and with extensive design notes from creator Phil Gyford.
Popular Science+. Matt Webb’s write-up of the Mag+ project, the platform behind the highly praised Popular Science+ iPad application.
Placehold.it. Useful dynamic image generator for layout mockups—just drop an image in to a page pointing at http://placehold.it/300x200. Takes optional arguments for text, colour and format as well.
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. Detailed explanation of the BBC’s new “visual language” for their digital properties.
The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data.