Category: Design

• November 14, 2016

  On recent Mercedes-Benz dashboard designs

  Mercedes (is it ok if I call you MB?), I think we need to talk. You’re doing great in Formula 1, congratulations on that! That said, you’ve gone in a weird direction with your passenger car dashboards. I suspect there are five different teams competing to win with these dashboards and I don’t think anyone, […]
• August 17, 2014

  Thought + Quality

  Wherein thinking, instead of reacting, is good
• August 10, 2014

  When Developers Design

  Wherein developers are designing and may not even know it
• March 26, 2014

  Pancake publishing

  Wherein writing tools get better.
• December 30, 2013

  The joy of finishing

  Steve Smith on woodworking and furniture
• December 14, 2013

  NSHipster rainbow bar

  My favorite design touch in the Gowalla apps was the rainbow bar. Small wonder that fellow Gowalla alumni Mattt Thompson included one on the landing page for his collection of NSHipster essays that you can now buy as an eBook with cash money. Ed. apparently all the Gumroad pages have a rainbow bar. Mattt’s still […]
• November 19, 2013

  Designing technological empowerment

  Applied Discovery: What future are we building, given that we play a role in such an important process? On the role designers play, what they do as careers progress, and how design can positively enhance the world. Reminder: if you tilt your head just so, developers do a lot of design activities too.
• April 8, 2013

  Web design for busy programmers

  Here it is: I’m somewhere between horribly afraid and way-too-smart to seriously attempt front-end web work. Browsers are not the software whose bugs I am interested in knowing about. That said, putting information on the web that doesn’t look like utter dross is a kind of required literacy in our field. While bravely dipping my […]
• March 25, 2013

  Context is data to burst your bubbles

  Designing with context: Context is a slippery topic that evades attempts to define it too tightly. Some definitions cover just the immediate surroundings of an interaction. But in the interwoven space-time of the web, context is no longer just about the here and now. Instead, context refers to the physical, digital, and social structures that […]
• October 23, 2012

  A handful of useful project mantras

  You could do a lot worse than following the heuristics set out by this Software Architecture cheat sheet. The tip I need to follow more often is “Is There Another Way”; I frequently get way too caught up in my first idea, which is usually too simplistic or requires too much architecture. The tip I […]