Here’s a curious design oversight—something I’d like to call the elusive footer. You’ll find an example of one on 37signal’s Sortfolio
Archive for category Usability Post
The Elusive Footer
Aug 29
Font Smoothing
Aug 29
Webkit, the engine under the Safari and Chrome browsers, adds an interesting property to CSS called “font-smoothing”. You can probably guess what it does by its name. There are three different values you can use for it:
-webkit-font-smoothing: none;
-webkit-font-smoothing: subpixel-antialiased;
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
The
A Mild Case Of Borderitis
Jul 24
The image on the right is a snapshot of a portion of Gandi’s website
Guilty
Jul 24
I feel guilty. I feel guilty when I look at a certain interface elements. It’s the unread, or “new” count, that little number you see by your email inbox or beside a subscription in your RSS reader. Drawar
It Isn’t Minimalism
Jul 21
What is minimalism? The New Oxford American Dictionary on my Mac provides the following definition:
minimalism |ˈminəməˌlizəm|
noun
- a trend in sculpture and painting that arose in the 1950s and used simple, typically massive, forms.
- an avant-garde movement in music characterized by the repetition of very short phrases that change gradually, producing a hypnotic effect.
Seems like a style of art and music. These days people tend to throw the phrase “minimalist design” around a lot, but does minimalism really apply to design, and if so, what does such design mean? Wikipedia tells us a little more about minimalist design:
The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. In addition, the work of De Stijl artists is a major source of reference for this kind of work. De Stijl expanded the ideas that could be expressed by using basic elements such as lines and planes organized in very particular manners.
But wait…a trend in design where the subject is “reduced to its necessary elements”? As opposed to a design where unnecessary elements are added or kept? Isn’t the removal of the unnecessary a definition of what “good” design is? Design is communication. Design is what allows us to interact with our products and make them work. Good design makes this interaction easy. Naturally, good design also tends to simplify, unclutter and organize.
I can see how minimalism can have a clear meaning in art, where the artist is free to create their own rules and ideas. Minimalism is a style that can be characterized by that use of simple, basic forms and white space. But when we apply this term to everyday design, the term begins to lose meaning. Clear, clean and simple design isn’t minimalist. It’s just good, clear design.
Simplicity isn’t a design trend, it’s an attribute of good design.
Linux… One of the problems with Linux is its lack of tasteful aesthetic. Linux seems to have always been designed by programmers—at least thats the impression I’m getting. It always tries, but it always falls short revealing its clumsy, unpolished edges. It’s getting better, but it’s not there yet.
One of the most glaring things that always pops out at me is a disregard for healthy whitespace. Whitespace: the empty space between one piece of content and another, or between that content and the edges of its bounding box. Whitespace helps you show hierarchy. It also makes things look so much less cluttered.
Here’s a screenshot from the latest release of Linux Mint
Here’s a simple technique to get hover controls
My New Blog
May 8
I started UsabilityPost a couple of years ago with the purpose of creating an outlet which I can use to write about a subject I am passionate about. I focused on usability because the functional side of design is what interests me most and is something I feel is of most value to today’s designers.
I’m happy with the way the blog has turned out and will of course keep on writing…however, I oftentimes want to write posts on things which don’t really have much to do with design or usability. Unfortunately, I chose a very specific name for the blog, which is both, an advantage and a disadvantage. It’s clear what this blog is about just by looking at the domain, but at the same time, it limits the scope of what should be published.
So I think it’s time for a new blog. I’ve had it set up for a while but haven’t yet done very much with it. I’m going to fix that. To keep things simple, the new blog goes under my surname and is hosted at Fadeyev.net
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Jan 21
Restraint in Design
Oct 4
There is one attribute of good design that I often see overlooked: restraint. Restraint in design is the quality of holding yourself back and implementing something which solves the problem in the simplest way possible. Oftentimes designers want to show off, imprint their own identity on a piece of work or simply get carried away, producing work that is good but losing simplicity and elegance in the process.
Giving your work an identity certainly doesn’t mean you’re losing restraint — it’s actually a good practice — but it may lead down the road of implementing too many design elements for the sake of design elements — things that don’t really need to be there in order to solve the problem. Instead, apply your identity to the core elements — things that you absolutely cannot take out — and throw away the rest. What you’ll achieve is a product that’s simple, yet bears your own mark upon it.
Let’s take a look at a set of modern mobile phones:
If we look at interfaces in operating systems, we’ll see that there is usually a set of unified interface elements that’s shared not only by the operating system’s own tools, but also by third party programs running on that operating system.
For example, Apple’s OS X had a UI called “Aqua” for quite a few years now that gave the buttons and other interface elements a certain look a feel — a liquid look for the buttons and a more metallic/plastic look for the texture of the windows themselves. They’re now moving towards a more aluminum look that will bring it closer to the look and feel of their hardware products.
Until OS X Leopard, there were actually several ‘branches’ of the UI spread around Aqua. There were the plastic windows, the brushes metal windows and the darker aluminum windows. Buttons looked different in each one of these ’styles’. Leopard, the latest release of OS X, has unified the look across the board.
The interface in OS X looks the same on (almost) every app
