May 26, 2005
For a few years now I’ve had a bit of an interest in signage. Recently I was the only person to get a bit excited about a road transport exhibition in the Design Museum in London. Why? Well, signs are really interesting when you start thinking about them. So, here’s some thoughts about signs and how we, as designers, can look at them differently and incorporate some the ideas behind signage into what we do.
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April 25, 2005
I'm pleased this series is turning out to be so popular and it's somewhat confirmed what I suspected. A bit of a thirst for simple typographic design theory.
As I've been writing this series i've deluged by email and comments from people agreeing, disagreeing, asking for more information etc. What's great is designers are thinking and talking about typography again. Designers are questioning typography and not just letting the font and the software do the work. It's nice to hear. But enough back-slapping Mark, on with the next in the series...
The third installment of this series is dedicated to just one typographic element - Ligatures.
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April 18, 2005
Hanging punctuation is an area of typographic design which has suffered at the hands of certain software products. It's a term which refers to glyph positioning to create the illusion of a uniform edge of text.
It's most commonly used for pull-quotes, but I feel the most neglected is that of bulleted lists.
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April 13, 2005
Typography, I find, is still a bit of mystery to a lot of designers. The kind of typography I'm talking about is not your typical "What font should I use" typography but rather your "knowing your hanging punctuation from your em-dash" typography. Call me a little bit purist but this bothers me.
So, in an attempt to spread the word here's the first of five simple steps to better typography. To kick it off, part one is about the Measure.
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April 12, 2005
Well, here it is. After a few weeks in February, several late nights and a lot of help from my wife and the Design in Flight's Editor Andy, my article "Feeling your way around grids: Making sense of the Golden Section when designing grid systems." has been published in the latest edition of Design In Flight.
Design in Flight is a fantastic PDF magazine and a bargain at just $3 an issue, which is about ?2. There are some superb articles in this issue from the likes of Khoi Vinh, Suw Charman,
Veerle Pieters and
Molly E. Holzschlag.
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March 29, 2005
This has been rattling around my head for a good 9 months now and I think it's high time I went into labour so to speak.
About 18 months I got into the whole User Centred Design approach. I championed the use and creation of Personas on particular projects, got into user flows and scenarios, conducted user interviews and performed other research. This was all before any design was done. This really got me thinking and Jeff Veen's latest post sparked me into action.
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March 18, 2005
Yesterday I attended a BBC run design event called Digital Futures, for internal designers and invited guests, on the future of design in a digital society. There was a eclectic mix of speakers planned for a packed day.
So, quite a distinquished list and it promised to be a interesting mix of presentations.
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March 06, 2005
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect is a condition whereby users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs to be easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.
Now that the design industry, particularly for the web, is beginning to understand - and be more focussed towards the user, usability is becoming somewhat of a ‘given’. I think, in part, we’ve got the likes of Jacob Nielson to thank for this. Pioneers of Usability have raised it’s profile over the last ten years to the point that now even the clients seem to know more than you do. However, in my opinion this has been to the detriment of design.
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I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for