Links from 2024

Somehow we forgot how to center rectangles and must find our way back

The fact that, in the span of less than year, Facebook effectively removed anything resembling news from the platform, even conservative news, and allowed AI-generated spam to take its place, and both investors and advertisers don’t care, should tell you all you need to know about what social networks are in 2024. They’re a data holding pen for advertisers to harvest and it seems like Meta has finally given up pretending they’re anything else.

Good for route-finding, particularly directs.

Database of AIs

So as you can see, building context menus is quite a bit more complicated than it looks from the outside!

Another good "UI is more complex than pictures" example.

The following is a recap of a year long research and development journey revealing a method to take semantic responsibility away from design tokens.

In the US, for example, lawsuits against companies’ weak compliance with accessibility regulations have increased every year to more than 4,500 cases in 2023, data from UsableNet has shown. That is up 13 per cent from 2022.

Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising sophistication and nuance in designing effective tables. Over the past 5,000 years, they’ve evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data. Although we argue that the mid-1900s served as a high point, the popularization and wider accessibility of computing seemingly brought us back to the simple, ancient times.

Checks SPF/DMARC/DKIM.

Good one to point clients to.

GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a move from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.

The purpose of this article is to be clear about which tokens are best used directly in the experience from other tokens that can be used for organizational purposes.

How to prepare pictograms for design systems by handling variable brand and skin colors.

Design Engineers work closely with designers to implement designs, skipping the traditional handoff process. Instead of handing off a completed design, a Designer sketches the start and iterates with a Design Engineer in Figma or code to produce the final design. Lots of technical exploration is done to push the designs.

Iain M. Banks, who died in 2013, way too young, was at the pinnacle. Here was a great writer, sure; but here was an imag­i­na­tion unmatched. He simply pushed further and thought bigger.

Frontend designers create the HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code that powers web products’ user interfaces. I see frontend design as helpful mortar that bridges the gap between design and development.

Instead of stakeholders prioritizing their perceived solutions (features and projects) and providing these in the form of a roadmap to a feature team, now the product team is assigned problems to solve, and the product team is empowered to discover a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible and viable

There are a lot of components within DesignOps, and what an organization chooses to select — or to pass on — should depend on the current needs and most poignant painpoints of that organization.

Go for not too specific, not too general.

Consistency can be a great thing if it makes a design more usable. But if you don’t know what you want to a design to be consistent with — and why — then consistency risks confusing your users.

Interesting take that I think is building on a bit of a false premise.

We almost never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication in more effective ways. So, I'm gathering some advice that I regularly share with people, in hopes that this helps you get your messages across more effectively.

Suh is staggeringly various in his dreams and visions – this show stretches through many galleries without once flagging in its unceasing invention – but also in his evolving media. He works in charcoal, unleashing images of burning buildings, seen through haze or smoke. He works in watercolour to catch memories by the tail. There are full-scale 1:1 replicas of fittings in his West 22nd Street flat sculpted in silk, nylon and even transparent gelatin – a diaphanous basin, a ghostly light switch, backlit with LED so that they glimmer like the platonic ideals of these ordinary yet vital objects.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that our website, app and print edition look different

an art style named after the Memphis Group that features flat areas of color and geometric elements. Widely associated with Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it has been criticized for its use in sanitising corporate communication, as well as being seen as visually offensive, insincere, pandering and over-saturated, though some illustrators have defended the style, pointing at what they claim to be its art-historical legitimacy.

Has some great comments around “talk to people” and “don’t impose”.

Times I’ve seen executive buy-in go smoothest are when a person in a position of power cares about design and says, “Our app looks like shit.” Now it’s a hair on fire problem.

This is great.

Blair recommends five things firms need to be effective at qualifying new business opportunities in order to prevent the over-allocation of resources against early-stage buyers.

Blair offers some ways to help prevent over-excited new business people and principals from giving away the shop and appearing unprofessional.

What weeknotes are, how weeknotes work, and how to start writing weeknotes of your own

Companies are reacting by “doing AI”without prioritizing the experience of the people on the receiving end–Design is more important than ever. To respond, we must get smart, fast. This starts with understanding the emerging patterns of interaction, affordances, and heuristics in an AI world.

Today, we’ve published a paper about the cyber-attack that took place against the British Library last October. Our hope is that doing this will help other organisations to plan and protect themselves against attacks of this kind.