Benji Taylor on creating guiding principles and designing interactions for the Family crypto wallet app: “This is not a technical post or tutorial. There are many good resources about how to craft smooth animations or design pixel perfect UI, by people much smarter than I am. This is about how we made something complex feel welcoming. It’s about what makes Family feel familiar.”
I switched to Raycast from Alfred a while ago but felt like I was leaving most of its potential and power untapped. In the two parts of these videos, designer Charlie Deets shows a few generic and design-specific features that he uses all the time.
Niki Tonsky claims that “we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things.” As always, his essay gets into nitty-gritty design details in the most hilarious way. He explains how CSS, font metrics, and icons get in the way of centering things and what designers and developers can do about them.
Cool little app for generating a consistent color palette from Lightness, Chroma, and a given number of Hue steps using OKLCH.
“The Knob is a low-profile mechanical keyboard being designed by 3D Artist and Motion Designer Ben Fryc, and developed by Work Louder. Evoking the look of both classic and modern technology, the Knob is designed to be a beautiful and functional part of your every day workflow.” This looks incredible 🤤 I wish Apple licensed Touch ID to other manufacturers or sold as a standalone device, as I can’t imagine using the keyboard without it. Here is a Figma playground for a Knob screen.
I loved this article by Karri Saarinen from Linear on why redesigns are important and its sequel, “How we redesigned the Linear UI,” on tackling that kind of project. “This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product’s existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.”
On paying off the design debt: “While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual.”
On exploring the next version without considering practicality: “A secret I’ve learned is that when you tell people a design is a “concept” or “conceptual” it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That’s the power of visual design.”
Think you’re good at picking colors? Test your skills with this fun little game.
Alexey Ardov built a new app to explain color spaces visually. Make sure to enable DCI-P3 in Gamuts to compare it with sRGB, and drag an indicator to transform spaces from one to another. A really powerful tool for understanding different models and spaces.
Great observation and essay from Niki, with a beautiful roundup of historical examples.
Speaking of books, I’m in the middle of a work project involving data visualization and felt like I needed a refresher and a solid reference. I’m reviewing Edward Tufte’s books (how are they not on the above list?!), but also landed at “Fundamentals of Data Visualization” by Claus Wilke while looking for an answer to a specific question. Seems like a highly practical book with clear guidelines. An entire book is available online for free and seems to be out of print, but after skimming through a few chapters I ended up ordering a copy from AbeBooks.
Some of the industry’s best designers answer the question “What book should designers read and why?” I only managed to read six of these so far, but a bunch of them have been sitting in my queue for a while. Great project by Vincent van der Meulen.
“All the essential resources for setting up the design system.” A solid guide and a collection of interviews with design systems practitioners.
Fascinating side-by-side comparison of Midjourney 5.2 and the newly released version 6. The generative art from Midjourney has always felt more realistic and interesting compared to other services, and now the gap appears even larger.
Midjourney v6 is finally here!!!! 🔥
— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) December 21, 2023
Here are some side-by-sides, --v 5.2 versus --v 6, as well as some new highly detailed prompts and camera angle tests.
These are all unaltered and unedited, straight out of Midjourney.
v6 is a HUGE leap forward
Prompts & examples 👇 pic.twitter.com/uqo6RSqh7y
John LePore is “designing the future” through his work on futuristic interfaces for films, video games, and the automotive industry, including the Hummer EV. He offers his own take on the recently announced Porsche’s bespoke interface for Apple CarPlay. Great presentation and deep thinking behind his choices.
Apple + Porsche instrumentation:
— John LePore (@JohnnyMotion) December 23, 2023
My thoughts, distilled as:
-a re-design
-process + analysis video pic.twitter.com/M3ElrmOBzl
“Best-in-class Design Systems with components and foundations references from top-tier tech companies and leading UI teams.”
Stripe Press makes the most over-the-top, beautiful, intelligent, and delightful books and websites. I pre-ordered this edition after it was announced, and was saddened by the news of Charlie Munger’s death just a few days before the book came out and a few weeks away from his 100th birthday. Thanks to Stripe for making the web edition free and open to everyone.
OMG! Figma window is streamed to GPT‑4 Vision, which then provides feedback on the fly narrated in the voice of Steve Jobs. Looking for a way to make this a part of our design crits.
Steve Jobs is now critiquing my designs directly in Figma!
— Pietro Schirano (@skirano) November 16, 2023
I've just made one of my biggest dreams come true, thanks to GPT-4 Vision + @elevenlabsio. ✨
My Figma window is streamed to GPT, which then provides feedback on the fly.
Like on these new design for @everartai pic.twitter.com/BPX81MmhxH
Vercel developed a new typeface specifically designed for developers and designers. “We began by creating a monospace version that prioritized readability and seamlessly integrated into coding environments. After perfecting the monospace variant, we expanded Geist into a Sans version, adding versatility to its capabilities.” Heavily inspired by Inter, it looks great and definitely going to be very popular!
A curated collection of design system content, tagged with topics, speakers, and events. Now, where do I find time to go through all of this?!
A fascinating look into thinking behind API design from CSS Working Group, and a reminder that some things we accepted and got used to do not in fact make much sense.