35 Excellent Wireframing Resources - Noupe Design Blog Oct 05 2010 Wireframing is an important part of the design process, one that shouldn’t be overlooked by even the most experienced designers. Wireframes can save development time by outlining exactly how a site should look and function, in a manner that can be shown to and approved by your clients. But wireframing can be confusing, especially to new designers. Wireframing Articles The articles featured here discuss wireframing and prototyping both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. My Five Commandments for Wireframing A podcast and article from Boagworld on good practices for wireframing, including why you should wireframe and the benefits of paper wireframing. Wireframes for the Wicked Here’s a slideshow that talks about the purpose of wireframes and the different types of wireframes. Sometimes, the Best Wireframing Tool is a Pencil A brief post on why wireframing with paper and a pencil sometimes works better than using computer-based tools. The Future of Wireframes?
Creative Problem Solving: PHP, jQuery and the Semi-Dynamic The other day, I was asked to do something a little tricky on the Highland Marketing website. I had a static slider window that featured a number of “slides” promoting different services and unique parts of the site. It’s been working in its static form very nicely ever since the current design was implemented, with updates involving little more than creating, adding or subtracting images from the collection. What I was asked to do was to make one of the slides dynamic. Here’s a little background on the situation. Now, the entire site is built on the wonderful Concrete5 content management system – which is my favourite CMS for most brochure-based websites – while the blog, which was developed to stand along the main site, is driven by WordPress. So, to sum up the challenge, I had to figure out a way to retrieve the latest post from a WordPress blog and somehow port the post title and link into a currently static, image-based slide on a Concrete5 website. Let’s look at how I did it. Step 2
Web Design is 95% Typography by Oliver Reichenstein 95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography. Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites: Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of an information designer. Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information design”. Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. Too few fonts?
What Does Rich Mean? Amid the current hype of Web 2.0, rich has become the de facto buzzword suggesting fresh, sexy digital products, often marked by glossy buttons with AJAX-driven behaviors. But what does rich mean to a UI (user interface) designer who wants to craft intelligent, compelling, and memorable interactions? Given current digital and technological trends, today’s UI designers must deepen their understanding of richness. Such an effort will strengthen designers’ vocabularies (adding legitimacy and weight to client discussions), and enable designers to temper judgment when it comes to applying rich capabilities. Before delving into notions about richness, it is critical to acknowledge the core challenge of designing rich experiences. A Framework for Experience: Rhetoric For a common understanding of richness, it is necessary to step back and reference the dictionary. Attention: the connection between a person and a form Satisfaction: a fulfilling sense (yes, it’s a feeling thing!) Attributes:
25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career Eric Gill, Adrian Frutiger and Max Miedinger are names we associate with the classic typefaces designers use on a daily basis. Their font creations are timeless designs that look right at home no matter what century we’re in. This collection of 25 classic fonts is a round up of the best and most popular fonts every designer should own. You can be sure that they will last your whole design career. Who hasn’t heard of Helvetica? It’s probably the most recognised classic typeface. Bodoni is a serif typeface designed by Giambattista Bodoni in 1798. Clarendon is a fantastically fat slab serif, created by Robert Besley in 1845. Akzidenz Grotesk was designed in 1896 by the H. Avenir is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger (recall the name? FF Din is a relatively new typeface compared to the veterans mentioned so far with it being created in 1995 by Albert-Jan Pool. Futura is another widely used font that can be seen in countless logos. Remember Adrian Frutiger?
Collaboration Loop - Drupal and the Power of Community Super Cool Bean Bags Posted: under Uncategorized. If you ask me, baby bean bags were one of the best inventions to come out of the modern world. When we had Francis we knew we were going to put her down for naps and bedtime in a baby sleeping bag after we did some research on the subject. We were amazed with the information we found. We discovered that with her head and arms sticking out of fitted holes in the baby bean bag it makes nighttime much safer for her. Sizing of the baby sleeping bags is the same as any infant clothes and there are different thicknesses of fabric. We watch the temperature in Francis’ room carefully and use the proper TOG rated baby sleeping bag based on the thermometer reading. The idea it to keep Francis from overheating, which would wake her up and interrupt her sleep. We would never consider using anything other than baby sleeping bags and will continue to do so until she outgrows them all. Mar 31 2014 Swimming with a Toddler We were big water people.
10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies We hear plenty usability tips and techniques from an incalculable number of sources. Many of the ones we take seriously have sound logic, but it’s even more validating when we find actual data and reports to back up their theories and conjectures. This article discusses usability findings of research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys pertaining to website usability and improvements. You’ll discover that many of these usability tips will be common sense but are further supported with numbers; however, some might surprise you and change your outlook on your current design processes. 1. The idea that users will get frustrated if they have to click more than three times to find a piece of content on your website has been around for ages. Logically, it makes sense. But why the arbitrary three-click limit? In fact, most users won’t give up just because they’ve hit some magical number. Source: User Interface Engineering Sources and Further Reading 2.
4 Best User Interface Pattern Libraries | UXMovement.com by anthony on 09/13/10 at 2:45 pm As designers, sometimes we need a little inspiration to get our creative juices flowing. Looking at examples of different user interface patterns could give us the ideas we need to design something amazing. That’s why I put together four of the best user interface design pattern libraries around the web. I have searched and looked at dozens. But these four, I believe, offer the best examples with the best navigations for browsing. Elements of Design Pattern Tap Patternry UI Patterns
linowski.ca Interactive Sketching NotationHelping you tell better stories of interactionPurchase & Download for $44 CAD Watch: How I Sketch - An Intro The Interactive Sketching Notation is a visual language which enables designers to tell more powerful stories of interaction. Through a few simple rules, what the user sees (drawn in greyscale) and does (drawn in red) are unified into a coherent sketching system. Intended for Adobe Illustrator, but friendly towards Photoshop & Balsamiq. Less DocumentationHaving merged flows, user stories, sketches and wireframes into one document, it is easier to maintain your work with the notation. Inside the Template - version 1.5 Icons: 100 common interface sketch style icons for faster concepting Components: various predesigned components and elements ready for dragging and dropping ISN + MicroPersonas Bundle for $59 Get the Interactive Sketching Notation + MicroPersonas at a discount.
52 Weeks of UX