I decided to write this article to serve as my personal ”quick start guide” for designing RESTful Web APIs. As such, this document is concerned with the how rather than the why. For the latter, check the Bibliography.

User Interface Inspiration

Most sites make you select a bunch of unnecessarily information and the forms are overly verbose. Contrast them to the the Square flow (you should try it on the app as the transitions are part of the beauty).

I think we're all pretty well convinced that our sites can look different across browsers. Sometimes, though, our team or our clients don't totally understand that.

Here’s a nice UI feature I noticed in Procreate, an iPad painting app: a slider control with variable increments.

What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint?

How does it work? Just put your image size after our URL and you'll get a placeholder.

Subtle Patterns is a collection of 40 high quality design patterns for
you to use freely. New patterns added weekly.

Finding a good Typekit font for long blocks of text is hard, but Sleepover has made it a lit tle easier for ya. We’ve sifted through the Typekit library and pared it down to the fol low ing list accord ing to two sim ple rules: first, the font had to have low er case, upper case, bold, italic, and bold italic; sec ond, the font couldn’t be hand writ ing, script, or mono space.

The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives.

I was just checking out the new Blip.TV site, and although I like the general direction and execution of the design (Hulu-esque), I did run across a pet peeve of mine when it comes to IA/site design.

The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability.

The initial reason was that it was the simplest thing that could possibly work and make sense. The alternative, permitting multiple folders, adds technical complexity and a lot of hairy configuration & installation UI, which are both time consuming to build and hard to get right.

Developers—that is, those who spend most of their time on back-end code rather than front-end—often say that they’re no good at design. Sometimes they put things together that end up looking rough, and they take it as proof of their lack of design talent. Of course lacking experience is a major reason for this, but I don’t really buy it that developers can’t design. I think there is something else at play here.

Web developers: your readers are begging us to display your content in their preferred format. We want to help them, but we can’t do it alone.

Here at QuietWrite, we have a philosophy about the user signup process that we call Progressive Signup. Basically, we eschew the typical signup wall for a more gradual process over a longer period of time.

Nearly every web site on the web today, places their search field before their search but ton. It’s done this way because to do a search, the user enters a search word first before click ing the button. While plac ing the search field before the but ton might make sense ini tially, it actu ally isn’t the best prac­tice for many reasons.