Adactio: Links—Tagged with design

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

A Cataloged Archive of Information Relating to the Now Closed Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Redesigning in public ･ Robin Rendle

I feel like my problem with design in general today is that folks want to burn everything to the ground and start again all the time. Whether that’s with a website, or a new web standard, or a political policy. They don’t want to fix what’s wrong with things bit by bit, everyone wants Thing 2.0 whilst jumping over all the small improvements that are required to get there.

Listen To Me And Not Google: HeydonWorks

We have to stop confusing the excesses of capitalism with the hallmarks of quality. Sometimes Google aren’t better, they’re just more pervasive.

cough AMP cough

On Design Fiction: Close, But No Cigar - Near Future Laboratory

If you end up with a draft of a short story or a few paragraphs of a typical UX interaction scenario, or a storyboard, or a little film of someone swiping on a screen to show how your App idea would work — you have not done Design Fiction.

What you’ve done is write a short story, which can only possibly be read as a short story.

What you should ideally produce is something a casual observer may mistake for a contemporary artefact, but which only reveals itself as a fiction on closer inspection. It should be very much “as if..” this thing really existed. It should feel real, normal, not some fantasy.

A Scandal in Bohemia

Well, this is rather lovely! The Paravel gang have made an atmospheric web book out of a Sherlock Holmes story (yay for the public domain!).

Frank Chimero · Redesign: Wants and Needs

Websites sit on a design spectrum. On one end are applications, with their conditional logic, states, and flows—they’re software.

On the other end of the design spectrum are documents; sweet, modest documents with their pleasing knowableness and clear edges.

For better or worse, I am a document lover.

This is the context where I fell in love with design and the web. It is a love story, but it is also a ghost story.

Blade Runner Sketchbook (PDF)

I was sad to hear of the passing of Syd Mead last week. Here’s a sketchbook of his remarkable work for Blade Runner.

A short history of body copy sizes on the Web

A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.

There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).

Frank Chimero · Redesign: On This Design

Most experienced designers want concision—clear, robust, consistent, elegant systems that avoid redundancy. Concise designs are smoother to implement, faster to render, quicker to understand, and easier to hand-off and maintain. Achieving a simplicity with clarity means that you’re engaging with the fundamentals of the problem (and of your craft) at the correct fidelity. You’ve cut through complexity with insight, understanding, and committed decision-making. That third one is critical. A lot of complexity comes from an unwillingness to commit to the things that insight and understanding surface.

Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea › Robin Rendle

Robin contemplates design systems as hyperobjects.

He also makes the uncomfortable observation that design systems work is not just hard, it’s inherently demoralising and soul-crushing.

My hunch is this: folks can’t talk about real design systems problems because it will show their company as being dysfunctional and broken in some way. This looks bad for their company and hence looks bad for them. But hiding those mistakes and shortcomings by glossing over everything doesn’t just make it harder for us personally, it hinders progress within the field itself.

Self Treat

It’s been an absolute pleasure having Holly, Laçin, and Beyza at Clearleft while they’ve been working on this three-month internship project:

Self Treat is a vision piece designed to increase self-management of minor health conditions.

You can also read the blog posts they wrote during the process:

Level of Effort | Brad Frost

Brad gets ranty …with good reason.

The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times

The design history of the New York subway map.

Design Questions Library | d.school public library

This site is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather a useful guide—our FAQ for design understanding. We hope it will inspire discussion, some questioning, a little soul searching, and ideally, a bit of intellectual support for your everyday endeavors.

The Design Questions Library goes nicely with the Library of Ambiguity.

By writing about it, it may help both of us. I can further develop my methods by navigating the friction of explaining them. I’ve been looking for a way to clarify and share my thoughts about typography and layout on screens, and this seems like a good chance to do so. And you? Well, perhaps the site can offer a clearly explained way of working that’s worth considering. That seems to be a rare thing on the web these days.

Open UI

An interesting project that will research and document the language used across different design systems to name similar components.

Data Patterns Catalogue

I really like the work that IF are doing to document patterns around handling data:

Signing in to a service

Giving and removing consent

Giving access to data

Getting access to data

Understanding automated decisions

Doing security checks

Each pattern has a description, advantages, limitations, and examples.

Link tags: design

1449