These are my notes from the book, Jony Ive, The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, by Leander Kahney. They may not make sense if you haven’t read the book yourself, but they’re the notes from the book I want to remember.
I use Gimp to work on images all the time, but I was just reminded of Inkscape as a free tool for drawing and illustrating.
Dieter Rams Ten Design Principles: Recently I wrote about Jonathan Ive design interview quotes, and if you're familiar with industrial design and Apple design, you know you can't mention Jonathan Ive without also mentioning Dieter Rams, a world famous designer for Braun.
(If you don't know why I say that you can't think of Apple or Jonathan Ive without thinking of Dieter Rams, this Gizmodo article shows the amazing comparisons between Mr. Rams' designs and current Apple products.)
So, to give Dieter Rams a little honor and credit -- both for his work at Braun and the evolution of his work at Apple — here are the famous "Dieter Rams 10 Design Principles":
Have you ever had one of those mind-blowing experiences where you are really, really struggling with a problem ... struggling for hours, days, or weeks, and then suddenly - bam! - you find exactly what you need? I had that experience this morning, and it was truly awesome.
“Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.”
~ Henry Petrosky
One of my gripes with both MacOS and Ubuntu is that it’s harder than it needs to be to grab a window corner or edge to resize it. IMHO, designers are choosing form over function.
Starbucks provides an important lesson about making sure you think about all of your design use cases.
Gimp circle FAQ: How do I draw a circle in Gimp?
As I can never remember obscure things, here's my tip on how to draw a circle in Gimp (a Gimp circle).
To draw a Gimp circle follow these steps:
This image comes from an article titled Design is Mainly About Empathy, where the main part of the article is that design is about understanding the user’s mental model about the thing you’re trying to design.
A "budget" iPhone prototype design from Nickolay Lamm. According to this page (where the photo/prototype is from), Mr. Lamm is fascinated with trends in the technology and business world, often illustrating these interests in illustrations. He graduated the University of Pittsburgh’s College of Business Administration in 2011 and his life goal is to create a startup which changes the world.
One thing I learned last night about my XO Play football game is that even in a “thinking man’s game” like this, visual perspective is important. I thought I would like the game as I showed it yesteday, as if you were looking at it from a coordinator’s box or sideline seat, but even though this image is a poor mockup and the perspective isn’t great, I like it better. (And of course now this makes me want to show real players (with depth) instead of Xs and Os.)
As the Grid by Example website states, it provides “a collection of usage examples for the CSS Grid Layout specification.” Importantly, the Browsers tab on the website discusses current support for the spec in different browsers.
Twitter UI redesign: After using Twitter for the last several months, it seems like their user interface is out of sync with how I want to use their data. As I was waiting for dinner to cook last night I spent a few minutes thinking about the Twitter user interface (UI) and how I might redesign it. Here are my thoughts.
The things the Twitter web interface does well currently are:
“Make it a compelling product.” ~ Jonathan Ive, Apple
“How do we want people to feel about it?”
~ A quote from Jonathan Ive, from the book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products.
I saw yesterday that the book Lean UX won an award (a Jolt award for productivity, I think), so I started reading it last night. I thought the following passage was an excellent description of the process, and of design in general:
As a quick CSS note, if you want to achieve a “zebra striping” style with even and odd CSS row selectors, CSS styles like this will get the job done:
.path-frontpage .content-inner-right .content-type-Text:nth-child(even) {
/* yellow */
background-color: #fdfdf6;
}
.path-frontpage .content-inner-right .content-type-Text:nth-child(odd) {
/* blue */
background-color: #f3fbff;
}
I use that CSS for the front page of this website, but if you want a simpler example, here you go:
After watching a replay of a Chicago Cubs' game recently I noticed the clock over the scoreboard:
After seeing that, I thought, “How cool would it be to have a clock like that at home?” After a quick search I found that someone on Cafepress already had the same idea, but a poor design:
The design of this website has been bothering me almost since I switched to it. The biggest problem was that all of the blocks I had on the side, especially the tall ad block, made the content hard to read.
So this weekend I finally took the time to change it, and Goal #1 was to make blog posts like this one easier to read. As a result, I switched to a simple (and somewhat drastic) approach of a one-column design.
A great video where Jonathan Ive talks about design, and Apple products:
Some of the great quotes from Mr. Ive during the interview process:
A designer ... it's the way you look at the world ... you're constantly looking at something and thinking, "Why is it like that? Why is it like that, and not like this?"