Visual design

Recycle These Pixels: Sustainability and the User Experience

"Whether we're designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on April 23, 2008 | Permalink

The History of Visual Communication

"This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication." (Elif Ayiter - Citrinitas) - courtesy of mvuijlsteke

Posted on January 30, 2008 | Permalink

Killing Some Bad Layout Conventions

"As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment." (Andy Rutledge - Design View) - courtesy of ruurdpriester

Posted on January 21, 2008 | Permalink

Web 2.0 How-To Design Style Guide

"In this tutorial, I describe various common graphic design elements in modern web ("2.0") design style. I then attempt to explain why they work (i.e. why they have become common), as well as how, when and where you might use each element in your designs. It follows on from my Current Style article, and analyses in greater depth the design features of the current Web 2.0 design style." (Web Design From Scratch)

Posted on November 23, 2007 | Permalink

In Defense of Eye Candy

"Bottom line? Visual design is more than styling. It is function. And not only because it communicates, but also because it makes us feel. And between feeling and communication, people find things easier to use." (Stephen P. Anderson - PoetPainter)

Posted on November 22, 2007 | Permalink

How Do Users Really Feel About Your Design?

"In this column, I'll introduce you to a promising method that just might solve this problem. While this method has not yet been subjected to rigorous peer review or experimental testing, it offers an intriguing solution and is endlessly fascinating to me. And it just might prove to be the kind of powerful technique we've been looking for to illuminate users' emotional reactions to our designs." (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted on September 25, 2007 | Permalink

Using research to end visual design debates

"Have you ever presented visual design choices to a product team only to have the proceedings disintegrate into an argument about the color orange? Visual designer Nick Myers shows how conducting user research with an eye towards visual design can get your audience to objectively evaluate your decisions and keep their subjective opinions out of the discussion." (Nick Myers - Cooper Journal of Design)

Posted on August 15, 2007 | Permalink

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

"There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won't scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users." (Milissa Tarquini - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on July 24, 2007 | Permalink

Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays

"This article is Part III of my series 'Color Theory for Digital Displays'. It describes how you can apply color theory to application program user interfaces and Web pages and provides many guidelines for the effective use of color." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on January 21, 2007 | Permalink

How to Grok Web Standards

"To grok something is to achieve an intuitive understanding of it. To grok web standards, we have to understand them as more than a means to an end, more than simply an alternative method of producing a visual design." (Craig Cook - A List Apart) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on January 11, 2007 | Permalink

Current Trends in Web Design

"(...) this article covers most of the current design trends which I recognize as high-quality ones." (Pavel Senko - ontoinfo)

Posted on September 15, 2006 | Permalink

Beginner's guide from a seasoned CSS designer

"(...) here are six of those principles, as I feel the advice is still timely for those of you just starting in design/CSS." (Cameron Moll - Authentic Boredom)

Posted on September 14, 2006 | Permalink

Refining Data Tables

"Many articles have been written on what is probably the single most ubiquitous interface element within Web applications today: the form. Forms justifiably get a lot of attention because their design is critical to successfully gathering input from users. Registration forms are the gatekeepers to community membership. Checkout forms are how eCommerce vendors close deals. But what goes in must eventually come out, and the information users provide to Web applications often makes its way back to users in the form of tabular data" (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on August 28, 2006 | Permalink

Icon Analysis: Evaluating Low Spatial Frequency Compositions

"An icon search task that lasts longer than anticipated can result in user annoyance or even premature abandonment. I once changed the mouse settings on my laptop to be overly sensitive, and had a colleague use it to show me a data analysis technique she had been working on." (Matt Queen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on July 25, 2006 | Permalink

Where Visual Design Meets Usability: An Interview with Luke Wroblewski (Part II)

"Visual designers with experience in or an understanding of business, engineering, usability, or information architecture can better account for those considerations within a product design. This point is especially important when you consider the visual design of a product is the voice of the interaction design, information architecture, and the business." (Joshua Porter - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on June 28, 2006 | Permalink

Developing the Invisible

"During my years as an interface designer, I've worked with lots of different development teams. From big companies to small startups, the interactions between me—the product designer—and developers have been pretty consistent. We work through what interactions and features are possible given our timeframe and resources. We discuss edge cases and clarify how specific interactions should work. We debate product strategy, information architecture, target audience, front-end technologies, and more. We also frequently encounter the same issue: the need to consider what's not there." (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on May 09, 2006 | Permalink

Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference

Part I and II - "Computer monitors display information using the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) color model. An RGB monitor synthesizes colors additively by selectively illuminating each of its pixel’s red, green, and blue phosphor dots at varying levels of intensity. The light from a pixel’s three phosphor dots blends together to synthesize a single color. In additive color synthesis, all hues of the visible spectrum of light are mixtures of various proportions of one, two, or three of the primary colors of light: red, green, and blue. (...) Our perception of hues, values, and chroma levels depends upon their interaction with adjacent hues, values, and chromas, which can result in color-contrast, value-contrast, and chroma-contrast effects, respectively." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on January 24, 2006 | Permalink

Graphic design plays a minor role on the Web

"The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don't try and force the Web to be what it's not." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on October 23, 2005 | Permalink

The Effects of Contrast and Density on Visual Web Search

"This study evaluated the effects of white space on visual search time. Participants were required to search for a target word on a web page with different levels of white space, measured by level of text density. Screens were formatted with one of four types of graphical manipulation, including: no graphics, contrast, borders and contrast with borders under two levels of overall density and three levels of local density. Results show that search times were longer with increased overall density but significant differences were not found between levels of local density. Only the use of contrast was found to be significant, resulting in an increase in search time." (Software Usability Research Lab Usability News 6.2)

Posted on July 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

"In this study, reading performance with four white space layouts was compared. Margins surrounding the text and leading (space between lines) were manipulated to generate the four white space conditions. Results show that the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text. Participants were also generally more satisfied with the text with margins. Leading was not shown to impact reading performance but did influence overall user preference." (Software Usability Research Lab Usability News 6.2)

Posted on July 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

How Good Does Your Web Site Look on Paper?

"The best way to improve the effectiveness of your company's web site is to let your site's users lend you a hand (quite literally) through the process of paper prototyping." (troy janish - evolt.org)

Posted on July 14, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

300 images from 1800 sites

"The purpose of this document is not to copy the intellectual property of others, but rather as a jumping-off point for your own unique web graphic projects. It's for Brainstorming, if you will." (intersmash)

Posted on June 03, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Universal Principals of Design

"(...) a must read book by all kind of designers. The principles of design provided in this book are extremely valuable. This is by far one of the best design books I have ever read. It is organized, well written, concise and a great resource for design references. Not only the book explains each principle carefully, it also provides real world example to help readers visually understand the principle presented." (VisualGUI.com)

Posted on January 29, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Metacognition, Distributed Cognition and Visual Design 

"Metacognition is associated with planning, monitoring, evaluating and repairing performance. Designers of elearning systems can improve the quality of their environments by explicitly structuring the visual and interactive display of learning contexts to facilitate metacognition. Typically page layout, navigational appearance, visual and interactivity design are not viewed as major factors in metacognition. This is because metacognition tends to be interpreted as a process in the head, rather than an interactive one. It is argued here, that cognition and metacognition are part of a continuum and that both are highly interactive." (David Kirsh - Dept. of Cogsci, UCSD)

Posted on January 19, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Where/What Vision Systems and Visual Design

"You can increase the effectiveness of your visual web designs and graphics by getting a little understanding of two human vision systems researched and written about by Margaret Livingston (a neurobiologist)." (Heather Quinn - evolt.org)

Posted on January 09, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

ColorMatch remix

"This colorpicker is (...) more compatible - it now works in Mozilla, and should also work in Opera, since I'm using a much better slider control. I've also added 3 more colors, bringing the total auto-generated colors to 9, and the ability to export your colors to a Photoshop color table." (twysted methyd) - courtesy of nathan steiner

Posted on November 12, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Sliding Doors of CSS

"It's time to take back control over the tabs which are continually growing in popularity as a primary means of site navigation. Now that CSS is widely supported, we can crank up the quality and appearance of the tabs on our sites." (Douglas Bowman - A List Apart 3.0)

Posted on October 22, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Learning to Love the Pixel: Exploring the Craft of Icon Design

"As contextually-located objects, icons exemplify the big challenges of communication and interpretation when using codified visual languages to convey meaning." (Uday Gajendar - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 14, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

What Does Your Audience Want?

"Successful visual designers well know the audiences they are designing for, and realize that their audiences exist at multiple levels." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread Inc.)

Posted on October 03, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Balancing Visual and Structural Complexity in Interaction Design

"By reducing visual complexity at the cost of structural simplicity, you will give your users a hard time understanding and navigating the content of a web site." (Henrik Olsen - guuui)

Posted on October 01, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Websites require flexible not fixed design

"A website needs to be flexible. It needs to be able to change as the organization changes. The more change within the organization the more flexible the website needs to be. Too many websites are still being designed from a print perspective; as if they were some once-off brochure." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 28, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Color Scheme Picker

Always handy for thinking about color usage on the Web (pixylophone) - courtesy of cityofsound

Posted on September 26, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design

"Perhaps no other design element has as much influence on how we feel in a space (a website, a home, etc.) as color." (Luke Wroblewski - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on September 09, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Writing Skills and Better Visual Design

"Strong visual design is about balance. It requires an appropriate relationship between written content, information hierarchy and the use of visual elements such as graphics and photography." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread)

Posted on September 08, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Colours on the Web

"My hope with this site is that some of you that happen to stumble upon it will more realize the importance of colours - to learn that there is more to colours than you used to think. This will be a step in the right direction for colours on the Web." (Donald Johansson - Web Whirlers) - courtesy of lucdesk

Posted on August 06, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Visual Symbols Library

"Hand picked by digital design pioneer Clement Mok, these high-quality images are drawn from the best of his acclaimed image collection (...). All we require for registration is your name and email address." (About the Visual Symbols Library) - courtesy of antenna

Posted on August 05, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Does Colour Exist?

"We think of colour as an objective thing: Red is red and can't be seen in any other way. But this is not so. The colour we perceive depends on things like the words we have in our language (our culture) to describe it, the other colours surrounding it and what the brain is expecting to see." (Juan C. Dürsteler - Inf@Vis!)

Posted on July 14, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

How to (and not to) Work with a Designer

"Preconceived notions are just one of the mistakes people make when they work with a designer." (Will-Harris) - courtesy of kelake

Posted on June 06, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Better Graphic Design

"Graphic designers are asked to perform the difficult task of being creative every single day. Often, our main priority is to feed our client's fascination for originality. We experiment with colors, composition, typography, and photography in order to deliver an original visual solution." - (Maria Acosta - Thread Inc.)

Posted on June 02, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization

"Visual designers working on the web need an understanding of the medium in which they work, so many have taken to code. Many have entered the usability lab." (Luke W roblewski - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 21, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus Version 2.0

"An experiment in language and interface, Plumb Design's Visual Thesaurus is both an artistic exploration and a tool to explore, study, and analyze the structure of language." (Plump Design)

Posted on October 17, 2002 | Permalink | TrackBack

Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design

"(...) an index of the quarterly print magazine for everyone involved in graphic design and visual culture" (Artificial Environments)

Posted on February 11, 2002 | Permalink

The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes

And Other Notes of the Distinction Between Style and Design (Adam Greenfield - A List Apart)

Posted on December 10, 2001 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Visual Language in Graphic Design

"(...) little is known about how design knowledge might differ from knowledge in other fields" (Henry Lieberman - MIT Media Lab)

Posted on September 04, 2001 | Permalink | TrackBack

Will Burtin Case Study

"Only that which is understandable can the designer express clearly in his or her work. Clarity of purpose makes him or her determine the media." (DesignArchiveOnline - 20th Century Information Design)

Posted on August 14, 2001 | Permalink | TrackBack

Color Matters

"As a powerful form of communication, color is irreplaceable." (Professor J.L. Morton)

Posted on April 18, 2001 | Permalink | TrackBack

Visual Design for Instructional Content (Part I)

"... Edward Tufte's principles of visualizing information." (elearningpost)

Posted on March 15, 2001 | Permalink | TrackBack

Color Scheme

"(...) how our brain draws colour pictures" (Beyond 2000)

Posted on August 06, 2000 | Permalink | TrackBack

Design by Numbers

"(...) for visual designers and artists as an introduction to computational design." (Developed by John Maeda of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory)

Posted on July 12, 2000 | Permalink | TrackBack

Society for News Design

"International professional organization with more than 2,500 members" (Contact SND)

Posted on July 03, 2000 | Permalink | TrackBack