Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which golden rule do you have in mind? The rule of thirds?
The Categorical Imperative would be a good start.
In graphic design!? Actually in UX design, yes, maybe.
Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
61–70 of 183 posts
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#62As 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 p…
There's a difference between design and styling. I'm a visual person rather than a verbal thinker, but more like a graphs / topolological kind of visual person, not about alignment, size or colors of things so much at all.
I wish I could specify the content and topology and the computer would do the styling. I don't want to select fonts, font sizes, align boxes etc.
Currently I think the best a computer can do is bullet points. Anything beyond that and you have to become a manual stylizer, which is what I specifically want to avoid.
When using tables, you already you have to start manually adjusting column widths or they become very often very wasteful and hard to read.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#63As 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.
Everyone wants developers to learn everything all the time...
Software development, infrastructure management, testing, business analysis, design, even marketing and communication sometimes.
We have to pick our battles. Guess what employers ask for from developers during interviews and 90% of the work. Plot twist: not design.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#64Starting from 'what looks good' is putting the cart before the horse. Making a UI usable and well laid out first is key. Practical UI and Refactoring UI are great resources, as long as you read them through a lens of 'what works well?' instead of 'what looks pretty?'. The author is absolutely right in that alignment and consistency are important, but that should really be your starting point. Building a good user int…
I don't understand when people see Tailwind as anything other than a syntax for CSS. > forget all about the relations of styling rules to eachother This is a hot take, but the more cascading your styles are, the harder they are to read and debug. I've never been upset to find classes that just correspond 1:1 with DOM elements. And that's what Tailwind is doing.
>And that's what Tailwind is doing.
What DOM element does "shrink-0 w-6 h-6 mr-2 -ml-1" correspond to?
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#65Saw 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…
It's still there on KDE
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#66Saw 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…
Most of the world consists of dark objects against a light field. Written letters made with a pen were dark on light for a couple of thousand years. Your scheme is the inverse one.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
Yeah most designers are bad at their job. Doesn't mean design can't be done properly.
Maybe before I die I will catch a glimpse of this mythical creature.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love "The Design Of Everyday Things", the book doesn't talk much about computer UI, yet the 7 design principles it introduces allow to make much more informed design decisions, where design is not just the matter of taste and aesthetic, but of achieving well-specified goals. For example, if the user has no way to figure out what a button in the UI does, and needs to click the button to check it, and even then can't…
Norman doors are still the bane of me.
My local co-op for about the last 10 years had a norman door, and multiple times a week I would pull rather than push or vice-versa. Then finally a couple of weeks ago they've sellotaped a handwritten push / pull on both sides.
So it mustn't have just been me getting it wrong every time!
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "hamburger buttons" I work on a desktop PC and "hamburger buttons" frustrate me beyond reason, in the same way that many other "modern" designs. I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying. > 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 chang…
> I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying. Of course it's annoying. When desktop software is using mobile UI, that's the result of a deliberate choice to make the software worse (something you care very much about as it affects you) in order to save the company money (something you don't care about). It would be weird if you weren't annoyed by…
> blatant disrespect
Let's stop pretending that "companies" could just do things better at no extra cost.
I prefer a desktop UI on a desktop, but I also prefer paying less for software I use, and halving the UI development costs to enable that is a pretty sensible tradeoff.
Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
#70As 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 p…
I feel the world "gestalt" has been thrown around in your circles a little too heavy handed.
Who can afford to think like this? Anyone curious about the human brain.
If you're concerned about the time to design something well, I would take just as long designing a terrible solution to a problem!
Explaining with words why your design is the way it is isn't a waste of anyone's time, it's having a degree of confidence moving forward. It's having a healthy conversation about the said product.
If anything, knowing what you're doing and being able to justify decisions, leads to a quicker decision making and therefore more time for implementation.
A good design is thoughtful precisely to prevent re-work in the future. That's the point: understand, analyse, solve & apply.
Don't get me started on large companies and their design teams... Going from one design system to another, redesigning every 6 months, and never quite finishing... I've seen those and I'm too old for that.
I'd never imply that good design should be a road block or causing a late Friday evening of work; it takes just as long to implement a terrible design than a good one!
I am merely encouraging everyone to stay curious, and look into building some skills in a field that is timeless, unlike most software engineering fields, and henceforth worthy of your time.