Category Archives: Visual Design

I’ve put a handful of books on my iPad over the last few weeks, but I have to admit: I keep forgetting to read them. Not because the books aren’t good, but because, unlike physical books, ebooks take up no psychic space. Physical books by the nature of them being, well, physical and visible, remind me to read them. This isn’t true of digital books. I can’t currently glance at the app icon and know whether I have a library beneath it, waiting to be read, or nothing. There’s no visual affordance that there is anything there for me to engage with. Continue reading Ebook Affordances >>

Filed in Visual Design | Comments (2)

What you have here is what I call cinematic reading. The “camera” moves from item to item like a camera would, or like your eye would if you were scanning the page, then stopping to read different items: text to partial image to fuller image to whole page, in a variety of configurations. You can, of course, manually override it via double tap or pinching/spreading. But it offers a solution that could be applied to other combinations of text and image: that is, reading that isn’t books or mostly text articles. Namely: magazines. Continue reading Cinematic Reading >>

Filed in Interaction Design, Touchscreens, Visual Design | Comments (1)

What a gauge or any indicator on a dashboard should display is either status (what is happening now, e.g. my radio station, the time, signal strength, wash cycle, etc.) or resources: how much of a particular thing I have remaining. Could be fuel, could be unread messages, could be time. Figure out what the most important resources and statuses are, filter by the frequency of use, then make those indicators the most prominent. Continue reading Display Information that Helps Users Make Decisions >>

Filed in Interface Design, Visual Design | Comments (3)

Most designers are comfortable prototyping physical products, complex interactions, and even experiences. The time saved in such instances make the benefits pretty obvious. But I’ve found that fewer designers think of using a similar process for visual design. Continue reading Prototyping Visual Identity >>

Filed in Branding, Prototypes, Visual Design | Comments Off

I love our office. Huge windows, great light, interesting people, and the periodic blast of traffic down Bryant. It’s a great place to work. But it’s always fun to shake up the routine. Two very different workshops last week did just that. Continue reading Getting Flexible and Physical at Design Workshops >>

Filed in Speaking Summaries, Tinkering, Visual Design | Comments Off

I have to admit: I don’t follow the latest in graphic design, and don’t know many of the big names in the field. So a lot of the people Debbie Millman interviews in How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer were new to me, but no matter; they are fascinating interviews nonetheless. Continue reading Review: How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer >>

Filed in Book Reviews, Inspiration, Visual Design | Comments Off

UPDATE: I updated this diagram in 2009 for the second edition of Designing for Interaction that addresses some of the shortcomings I note below. The diagram now looks like this (click for larger image):

Like almost nothing I’ve done, a model that I put in my first book

Filed in Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Mechanical Engineering, Visual Design | Comments (15)