Latest Posts...
iPad Keyboard Prototype
This is brilliant. Hopefully this happens soons, much like how Apple listened to several designers on how to handle notifications better.
Smart E-Book Interface Prototype Demo
This is just fantastic.
Friday Link Dump
Paper for iPad - A fantastic, beautiful, functional, and enjoyable journaling app for iPad.
The Onboarding Process - User acquisition is hard. A steady sign-up flow, a solid intro to your app or system, and an easy segue into using the product is your first biggest problem.
Design Is a Job - I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to. Mike Monteiro is smart.
F*ck You. Pay Me - The talk that started “Design Is a Job”.
Erik Spiekermann: Putting the Face Back in Typeface - “We have great architects. We have great designers. We have great engineers. We don’t have clients. What we need is a culture of clients.”
Kern & Burn’s 100 Days - Discussions, interviews, and essays, all about design entrepreneurs.
Doubleback - If I owned this, I’d sell everything, break my lease, and live out of it on the road.
A Pixel Identity Crisis - This may help with the whole pixels don’t mean the same thing anymore crap we’re dealing with.
Nielsen is Wrong on Mobile - I thought this was a given.
Instagram & Facebook
So, your favorite photo app was just bought for a seemingly exorbitant amount of money and you are probably really mad, disappointed, unsure, or ambivalent.
I’m not going to write 10,000 words explaining the entire thing, because in all honesty, I don’t think it’s that hard of a thing to understand. I will, however, give you a few quotes and links that will help clear things up.
Basically it comes down to a few key points:
- Instagram as a community
- Disruption of Facebook’s revenue from photo sharing
- Instagram being purchased by someone else
- Acquisition of a product made for the sake of being good
Facebook makes money off of advertising, and most of their advertising money comes from people viewing photos that their friends upload. It’s a logical business and financial decision to buy Instagram to keep the world of photo-sharing in the realm and domain of Facebook, and, to keep someone else from gaining a large stake in the photo-sharing playground (read Microsoft or Google). Anywhere that a rapid, healthy community of sharing exists is a target for Facebook. They also gains a shot of Vitamin C with the purchase of Instagram, helping to shake off the idea that it’s a cold, sick giant with a shallow soul and no prospects.
NY Mag’s Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out: “And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.”
Greta: A New Typeface from Typotheque
Typotheque is by far my favorite modern foundry. The faces they continually release and update are incredibly versatile. It’s obvious how much they love letter forms by the amount of detail and focus each face, weight, and letterform contain. The blog write-up from Typotheque is rather intense, but a great read nonetheless.
The complete family runs around $950, which is a bit pricey, but considering the amount of versatility there is among the weights and widths, and that you get a web license with it, you really can make a great case that it’s worth the cost. A license for the full family for just the web is under $200.
I will begin saving all of my money to buy the complete Greta family. The balance between the upright and italic alone makes it worth it.
Linotype: The Film
I am really excited to see this.
Friday Link Dump
Uicons - Icons for Apps and Stuff.
Facebook Sustainability - Nice little parallax site showcasing some sustainability mumbo-jumbo.
Nokia Invents Vibrating Tattoos - The future is going to be weird. I don’t want my skin buzzing when my phone rings.
Mobile First Design - An interesting read on why starting your design on the mobile platform makes sense, as well as a few cons.
Tom Hull Photography - Some fantastic feels coming out of this UK camera.
Scrabble by Andrew Clifford Capener - A fantastic redesign of the classic Scrabble board, using a more creative typographic palette.
5 Types of Work That Fill Your Day - Behance’s 995 (not the occupy junk) is a consistently fantastic read. Understanding your work patterns is a great step in becoming a more proficient and capable worker.
Getting Better vs Being Good - “You’ll want to celebrate incremental progress from your own past achievements instead of immediately measuring yourself against the top in the field.” Smart advice.
Herbs for the Kitchen - Having just moved into a new rental house, I’ve been eager to start growing more things to eat and cook with.
iOS App Icons Template
Gathering all the correct icon sizes for an iOS app is a pain in the rear. It’s even more so now that you have 4 screens to design and build for. I’ve taken the time to get a template together of all the icons, narrowed down the overlap, and outlined just the sizes need, labeled with their uses. Enjoy!
Click here to download the iOS App Icons Photoshop PSD template.
iOS Grids: Photoshop Actions
I absolutely love saving time and being efficient, and in the spirit of that, I’ve developed some Photoshop actions to create iPhone and iPad documents with predefined grids.
iPhone actions: 12-column portrait, 8-column landscape.
iPad actions: 12-column portrait, 12-column landscape.
Experience Freedom
This is one of the best videos I’ve seen in months.
Dexter Intro by Ty Mattson
I hate Ty so much. So, so much.
Khoi Vinh on Too Much Design
It’s difficult to say exactly how much design is “too much,” but finding that middle ground may be the most important job that an interaction designer has.”
— Khoi Vinh
Charles Eames on The Details
The details are not the details. They make the design.”
-Charles Eames