Tags: visual

Hertzsprung-Russell diagram animation | ESA/Hubble

When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”

There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

Creating a pattern library in Sketch, Roobottom.com

A smart approach to creating patterns as symbols in Sketch. Sounds like diligence and vigilance is required to make it work, but then, that’s true of any pattern library.

Font Map · An AI Experiment by IDEO

Fontlandia is yours to explore.

By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.

Painting with Code : Airbnb Design

Very clever stuff here from Jon in the tradition of Bret Victor—alter Sketch files by directly manipulating code (React, in this case).

I’m not sure the particular use-case outlined here is going to apply much outside of AirBnB (just because the direction of code-to-Sketch feels inverted from most processes) but the underlying idea of treating visual design assets and code as two manifestations of the same process …that’s very powerful.

Stark

A plug-in for Sketch that allows you to simulate colour blindnesses and check colour contrasts.

Mood boards in a content-first design process — Thomas Byttebier

How style tiles can work great in combination with content prototypes:

Surprisingly, it helps clients understand the HTML content prototype better. They now clearly see the difference and the relationship between content and design. In general it helps me explain the content-first process better and it helps them make more sense of it.

Functional Minimalism for Web Design

According to this, the forthcoming Clearleft redesign will be totally on fleek.

Stuff in Space

A gorgeous visualisation of satellites in Earth orbit. Click around to grasp the scale of the network.

Visual Design meetup, Brighton

Are you a UI designer? In Brighton? Well, feel in this form if you’re interested in gathering with like-minded people.

This local, monthly and free meetup will let designers show their work, share any methods, processes and tools and ask for the odd critique.

Designing inspired style guides presentation slides and transcript | Stuff & Nonsense

Having spent half a decade encouraging people to make their pattern libraries public and doing my best to encourage openness and sharing, I find this kind of styleguide-shaming quite disheartening:

These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router.

If a pattern library is intended to inspire, then make it inspiring. But if it’s intended to be an ever-changing codebase (made for and by the kind of people who enjoy configuring a router), then that’s where the effort and time should be concentrated.

But before designing anything—whether it’s a website or a pattern library—figure out who the audience is first.

A Day in the Life of Americans | FlowingData

Watching this data visualisation on its high speed setting is quite hypnotic.

29 Bullets

Russell wrote an article for Wired magazine all about PowerPoint, but this extended director’s cut on his own site is the real deal.

Who knew that the creator of PowerPoint was such an enthusiast for the concertina?

Our World In Data

If you’re in need of some long-term perspective right now—because, let’s face it, the short-term outlook is looking pretty damn bleak—then why not explore some of Max Roser’s data visualisations? Have a look at some of the global trends in inequality, disease, hunger, and conflict.

Proposal to CSSWG, Sept 2016 // Speaker Deck

Jen has some ideas for a new CSS Region spec to turbo-boost Grid. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but in the meantime, if you have feedback on this, please let her know.

The Future of Browser History — Free Code Camp

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It feels like a user’s browser history is an incredibly rich seam of valuable information just waiting to be presented in a more interesting way.

Chromelens

A handy Chrome extension to simulate different kinds of visual impairment.

The Joy of Sparks

This is so cool! The logs of the Indie Web Camp IRC channel visualised as a series of sparklines in the style of Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Jon Aizlewood | Visual inventories for agile design

Jon outlines his technique for keeping “the 30,000 foot” view when patterns are coalescing during a project.

See also: Andy P.’s experience of working with Jon this way.

LOL Colors - Curated color palette inspiration

Here, have some colour palettes.

Design without touching the surface – Leapfroglog

My concern is that by encouraging the practice of doing UX design without touching the surface of a product, we get shitty designs. In a process where UX and UI are seen as separate things the risk is one comes before the other. The UX designer draws the wireframes, the UI designer gets to turn them into pretty pictures, with no back-and-forth between the two. An iterative process can mitigate some of the damage such an artificial division of labour produces, but I think we still start out on the wrong foot. I think a better practice might entail including visual considerations from the very beginning of the design process (as we are sketching).