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LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

chainlift.io

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Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#141
post #71

Cool stuff, I think I'll never be able to unsee the extra top padding all over the web now haha I don't even know if the golden ratio itself is that magical, but I do see a lot of value in picking one ratio and sticking to it everywhere.

You've got it. It doesn't have to be golden. That was just useful for other personal preference reasons.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#144
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is so much not a reference in design that we should take this take carefully

What don't you like about Chrome design?

It's not that there is anything to like or dislike: it's just that there is no "design" in it, nothing to reference

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#146
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What don't you like about Chrome design?

It's not that there is anything to like or dislike: it's just that there is no "design" in it, nothing to reference

If you're talking about graphic design, that's probably true. I'm talking about the thousands of design decisions the Chrome team made to decide exactly what to include and not to include, where to put things and how they appear, what words are used, and how features behave. Chrome is heavily and well designed in that regard. It's evident that everything was heavily considered and evaluated. I contrast Chrome to other apps and websites where it feels like the "designers" may not use the product at all.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#148
post #16

Here's a tip: any time you've got before/after screen grabs, don't do this thing where you've got to drag a line to switch between the two, don't have a fade, don't have a sliding transition, or anything like that. Just have it display one, then have a single button that you click to have it immediately display the other. Then when you click the button again, it goes back to displaying the first one again. Click, cli…

I turned this into a game. Which image do I think looks better? Now I try to figure out which image is supposedly supposed to look better.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#149
post #70

When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions Telling people the height ratios between them followed the golden ratio was a very convenient way to shortcut the bikeshedding and get to "aha, very nice" The trick was it didn't f…

"lighting, rounding, color, and visual strength" along with "clarity, content-focused" etc. are used as hollow buzzwords just as much as "golden ratio"

The whole minimalism/flat movement from iOS 7 and Google's Material and Microsoft's Metro crap was frankly a lazy and weak copout, a give-up on trying to make nice looking UI that could also be functional.

Why is it that sci-fi has always had such beautiful UI since Star Trek but the real world is still so boring?

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#150
post #70

When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions Telling people the height ratios between them followed the golden ratio was a very convenient way to shortcut the bikeshedding and get to "aha, very nice" The trick was it didn't f…

What was the reasoning about not implementing vertical tabs much, much earlier? I use them now in the canary builds, but on 4k 32" screen it is not that critical as it was on the small 16:9 full hd screen. The vertical space used to be much scarcier than the horizontal.

When we started work on Chrome my favourite browser was a now-forgotten IE shell called iRider, which implemented tree-ish style tabs in a better way than anyone, and we did take multiple attempts at vertical tabs early on.

We didn't ship them because they were only a mitigation of the too-many-tabs problem, not a solution, and they didn't really fit our model of 'tabs are titlebars'. They were also never going to be default - most people did not have that many tabs, and we had a very strong opinion was that we shouldn't have configuration - it was better to very strongly execute on one vision we loved and risk losing people (but hope the quality would bring people along), than to execute and support multiple directions poorly.

The world has changed a lot since I last worked on Chrome ten years ago, so as an outsider I'm excited to see what the team currently attempting it can do.

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