Chris’ Corner: Design Do’s and Don’ts

I admit I’m a sucker for “do this; don’t do that” (can’t you read the sign) blog posts when it comes to design. Screw nuance, gimme answers. Anthony Hobday has a pretty good one in Visual design rules you can safely follow every time.

Erik Kennedy does a pretty good job with posts in this vein, and I just read one about designing sidebars in his email newsletter. But he didn’t blog it so I can’t link to it. Instead I’ll link to his 15 Tips for Better Signup / Login UX which is the same kinda “do this” advice.

Jon Yablonski’s Laws of UX site is a pretty good example of this too, except the “do this” advice is more like “think about this principle”. They are pretty straightforward though, like:

Welp now that we’ve linked up a bunch of design related stuff I’d better keep going. My pockets are always hot with links. I’m like and old man except instead of Wether’s Originals I have great URLs.

If I had to design some shirts and hoodies and coats and stuff, I’d definitely want some clean templates to use, so I think these 45 fully editable apparel templates from atipo is pretty sweet. (€30.00 with a bunch of fonts too)

Not Boring software rules. They have some really nice apps that feel very designed. I use their Habits app every day. They’ve got a nice blog post on the role of sound in software design. It’s common to think that software that makes any sound is a mistake as it’s just obnoxious or superfluous. I like this one:

4. Shape a feeling. Sound can play a key role in queueing us in on how we should feel in a moment—happy, reflective, alert. In the todo app Clear, successively checking things off a list plays a rising set of notes that builds a sense of accomplishment.

Is “good” and “bad” web design subjective (like just our opinions) or objective (provable with data)? I mean, that’s subjective, lol. Remy Sharp was thinking about it recently and has developed his own set of criteria. A simple one:

Is the main content the main content item? Put another way, is the content hidden (or fighting) clutter on the page?

Seems simple, but… not always. I was reviewing a site recently and the homepage had just a zillion things it was trying to say. It was a store, so there were locations, an invite to search, an invite to call, and invite to chat, discounts available, a current promotion, financing available, categories for browsing, upcoming events, etc, etc. The thing is, it’s easy to point at it and say Mess! — all that stuff is there because it’s important to somebody in the organization. Deciding on what even “the content” is can be tricky. I always think the homepage probably isn’t the best place to start a big debate like this. Clean up the more focused pages first.

Let’s end with something beautiful, like these flowing WebGL gradients by Alex Harri. I loved the mathematical intro on doing all this pixel by pixel work manually, then how to shift the responsibility of that work:

But consider the amount of work that needs to be done. A 1,000✕300 canvas, for example, contains 300,000 pixels. That’s 300,000 invocations of our pixel function every frame — a ton of work for a CPU to perform 60 times a second! This is where WebGL comes in.

Shaders are a real journey, but I bet if you read every word of this post closely you’d be well on your way.