This blog post is about as insightful as what I'm guessing a blog post titled "Rules for backend development, from a graphic designer" would be.
Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
41–50 of 183 posts
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#42It's such an irony that for such a topic, website content is actually overflowing on a mobile safari and gets out of the container so the website appears broken.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#43Saw a lot of words here. Not a lot of examples. "Dark mode was one of the most requested features for Lighthouse. I refrained a long time from adding it because it adds additional work to every UI task." This reveals a lot about the regression in OSes. Way back in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and…
> ...in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and work fine. The color scheme editor actually worked quite nicely up until the release of Windows 2000 [0]. After that, Windows XP introduced the "Luna" visual style (Uxtheme.dll) with inflexible, hard-coded colors. Most software developers stopped caring abo…
The thing is, one of the most long-lived built-in schemes in Windows was "high-contrast black," which revealed most color-palette errors in applications.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#44As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…
Which golden rule do you have in mind? The rule of thirds?
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#45As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…
The problem with designers is I have to google words like "gestalt" and perform some sort of sacred incantation to "learn" it, all while forcing my eyes to roll back forward.
Who can afford to think like this though? FAANGS? Every designer I've worked with loosely knows some design theory that is impossible to question beyond a quick "hmm maybe a few more pixels on the padding?" and is largely a pixel pusher due to pressure. If I started to talk about visual grouping and the golden rule my boss would have blown a gasket.
I can't name a single well-designed app off the top of my head. I can name a million good-looking ones though. The problem with design is people have to eat. The UI reaches an ideal point but is never frozen, it lasts a limited amount of time before they start shaping the hedge down to a stump. Linear comes to mind. Spotify too. How are you going to reach a good design for a music player when there's 7000 people that need to put in 40 hours a week?
A little lighter on the "gestalt" and a bit heavier on the "will this design murder the weekends of my dev team and scramble the brains of my users" please.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Way back in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and work fine. It was barely usable. Many developers used the colors of the default theme no matter what. Others used the Windows-supplied colors for the background color and maybe the main foreground color, then used fixed, non-customizable colors for eve…
It is quite similar on the Web still: web browsers (at least Firefox) allow to set user CSS or change default colors, but some websites (the percentage would vary defending on the method used) do not play nicely with that. Likewise on Unix-like systems: most things can be covered with GTK and Qt themes, but some GUI programs would use a different GUI toolkit, and occasional developers would assume a dark-on-light the…
Yeah it's baffling that people see fit to override the user's text color, but then leave the background color up to chance; or vice versa. The result? Occasionally invisible text.
If you're going to set the colors of some elements, you have to set them all. It's not that hard a concept.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#47> The logo is further on the left than the other icons.
But why the logo of the website/app should be aligned with the icon of the actions?
> The icons are thin, compared to the text, which is bold.
Why this is an issue?
I can somewhat agree with the other points, but I wouldn't call this "bad design." Just because the information can sometimes be presented better doesn't mean the previous way was bad.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#48Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#49The books referenced in the article look great, but mostly seem to cost around $100 each which seems a lot to me compared to reference books in other areas (the O'Reilly one being the obvious exception since it just costs the same as other O'Reilly books)
Anyone have recommendations for UI/UX books for a more modest budget?
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#50As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…
>Trust me if you can learn React or Kubernetes, you surely can learn the gestalt and understand "the design of everyday things"!
I understand and share the underlying sentiment, but it seems to me like quite a lot of people are suspiciously satisfied with how learning React or Kubernetes has entirely blinded them to the fact that the everyday things do indeed have a design.