From blog

On Weights & Styles

Great advice on setting type for headings. When designing a full set of headlines like this, it’s a great idea to start with the smallest headline and work your way up like we did today. While you’re at it, make sure you design how bolds and italics look in a paragraph, as well as lists, […]

The Forgotten Side of Quality

Jeff Patton explains how Kano model is applied while adding features to a product: The Kano Method separates product features into general categories. The three big ones are “must haves,” like: brakes on a car (we need those); “one-dimensional” items like gas mileage on a car (higher mileage is better); and attractive quality or “delighters” […]

On Writing Interfaces Well

User Interface designers should write, and write well. Aesthetics are debatable, but writing is essential. Peel away the layers of styling and you’ll be left with words. Writing is the meat of a design, and it’s one of the hardest things to get right. Read the article

Vital Elements of the Product Design Process

Ryan Singer — product designer at Basecamp — explains a simple yet effective process of Product design. Problems with product and feature design often trace back to the initial approach. Either the problem wasn’t well defined, the concept wasn’t well defined, or – in the case of beginners and newcomers to a platform – your bag […]

UX is not UI

UI has been widely mixed with UX recently. Erik Flowers has clearly explained the difference between two saying: UX is an acronym for “user experience.” It is almost always followed by the word “design.” By the nature of the term, people who perform the work become “UX designers.” But these designers aren’t designing things in […]

Setting Type for User Interfaces

Billy Whited explains the importance and characteristics of a great typeface in UI. Good typesetting is an exercise in subtlety, and a demonstration of skill and sensitivity—to context, form, and user needs. As UI designers, it’s important to remember that our goal is not to distract users with superfluous details, but to ease the burden […]

Diagrams to solve problems

I love diagrams since the day I know them. Treat your diagrams as a design tool. They can help you break a bad case of writers’ block, clear up your thinking, and communicate your great idea. Best of all, when you lead with a diagram, you bring your audience along your line of thinking so […]

Designing for Capability

Ryan Singer – product designer at 37 Signals – explains what is that needs more of UI designers attention, and it’s not pixel perfect design, it’s making a user capable to performing intended task. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with details when you’re designing a UI. That’s why I try to keep hold of which […]

Avoiding Common Prototyping Pitfalls

I value prototyping a lot. My tools of trade are Invisionapp, Keynote, Balsamiq and HTML/CSS (sometimes), but that’s are not the most important part of prototyping (though they matter). Jared Spool tells about where to focus while prototyping as to avoid the traps that reduce the effectiveness of prototyping efforts. Prototyping is rendering ideas to […]

Design Principle: Cognitive Dissonance

While re-reading Universal Principles of Design yesterday I came across Cognitive Dissonance and how it can be applied in web design to increase engagement and conversions. Though I was not familiar with the term Cognitive Dissonance but somehow we were already implementing this principles at Unmetric’s marketing site by saying: “Is your brand social enough?” […]