A collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web.

That’s how I want to learn. Don’t give me a book; I don’t want a lecture, and I don’t want a list of topics to memorize. Give me ample reason to memorize them and a sandbox where I can safely play. Test me when I least expect it, shock me with the unknown, but make sure you’ve given me enough understanding and practice with my tools that I have a high chance of handling the unexpected.

Different definitions of affordance that have developed are explained in the following sections. The original definition described all action possibilities that are physically possible. This was then refined to describe action possibilities of which an actor is aware. The term has further evolved for use in the context of HCI as indicating the easy discoverability of possible actions.

Created specifically for iPhone & iPad apps, they're also perfect for Android, websites, t-shirts, tattoos and more.

I should start by saying I am by no means a Keynote ‘pro’ compared with many of our web team who could use it in their sleep. In fact, when I first started working at ESPI last July, I was very surprised to find out that designers were using Keynote for laying out presentations. My surprise turned to alarm when I found out that they were also using it as a design tool to build UI designs for websites and apps. It turns out that I was absolutely wrong. Keynote is an incredibly powerful design tool. Less then one year later, I now rarely (if ever) use InDesign to layout presentations, and I have started using Keynote almost exclusively for any web layouts I do. And not just UX wireframes, but full UI designs. On a recent project, I also used it for poster mock ups, banner designs and a bunch of other formats.

John Wardley, designer of Nemesis:

What we're doing in twisted steel is what a scriptwriter does with words. We're entertainers – in the business of creating thrills and mystery. Like a good writer, a good designer won't let people know what's coming: it should be a succession of steadily building surprises. The layout of Nemesis broke the rules, too. With a conventional rollercoaster, you're winched up high and dropped, so the ride gets tamer as it reaches the end. Showbiz is all about a big finale, though, and I wanted this ride to get better as it went on – even if it meant defying the laws of gravity. So I put the end station not at the bottom, but halfway up. This means that you swing way below the station in a big finishing dip, then come back up to the end.

Juuuust in case you find it helpful, here’s my little guide on drawing vector and pixel hearts. Consider it a starting point and spike it with your own love potion.

A large part of the infographic’s intrinsic appeal seems to lie in its visual reductionism of complex information. Reductionism itself is not inherently bad—in fact, it’s an essential part of any kind of synthesis, be it mapmaking, journalism, particle physics, or statistical analysis. The problem arises when the act of reduction—in this case rendering data into an aesthetically elegant graphic—actually begins to unintentionally oversimplify, obscure, or warp the author’s intended narrative, instead of bringing it into focus.

Every time I see a word cloud presented as insight, I die a little inside.

"Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help. We know that you have little to no desire to do web design professionally, but that doesn’t mean that you want an ugly cookie-cutter site or to settle for one that hasn't been updated since Hackers was in theaters. Through short tutorial videos, you’ll learn how to take a basic wordpress blog and manipulate the css, html (and even some php!) to match your aesthetic. You’ll feel empowered rather than crippled by the internet and worst case scenario you’ll at least end up having a better idea of how professional web designers turn your design dreams into a reality on screen."

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design.

Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

This is an extension to the Twitter Bootstrap framework. It makes creating pretty buttons easy.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

When doing web design, it's critical to test how your page looks under different screen resolutions. Since the mobile web is exploding fast, you have to test against the mobile devices too. Resize is a Safari Extension that to make the process dead easy.

The web’s most beautiful typefaces: Try typefaces from the web’s best known web font services.

Design with real content: Kiss goodbye to Lorum Ipsum. Get real web content in place, fast.

Create HTML & CSS in the browser: Quickly get to a working, standards-compliant prototype.

Design is popularly being hailed as the savior of many businesses yet many people don’t really know what design involves. This continues a cycle of doubt, underfunding, and incredulity at its true power. By revealing the inner workings of our design practices, explaining our choices, reinforcing those choices with references to provable academic theories, and teaching our colleagues what goes into every pixel placement, workflow, and word choice, we increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners. It’s the realization that designers are much more than simple pixel-pushers that will continue to bring new clients and new levels of corporate reach and achievement.

Here's something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny's classic work Saying It With Charts (p. 27 in the 4th. ed)

"“Gamification” is a word and concept invented by idiocrats who confuse humane with manipulative.

Theory about how the mistake gets made

Everybody sees the trend toward simpler, more-focused, better-designed software. Enterprise developers see the consumerization of IT.

You could look at this trend and say, “As software improves, it respects its users more. It works better and looks better, is easier to learn, and leaves out the things that waste a user’s time.”

Or you could look at this trend and say, “As software gets simpler, it gets dumbed-down — even toddlers can use iPads. Users are now on the mental level of children, and we should design accordingly. What do children like? Games.”

Respect

It should be obvious that one conclusion respects people and one doesn’t. It should also be obvious that the first conclusion is correct and the second is incorrect, cynical, and low."

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

I’d love to run, edit, and write for a publication bigger than just me and my blog. I don’t have time, so I won’t, at least not any time soon. But if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules.

COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes and patterns, discuss the latest trends and explore colourful articles... All in the spirit of love.

My slides are not designed for people who didn’t see the talk in person. They’re designed to support my words, not some online audience. What’s more, many commented that they found the design of the slides to be noteworthy. I’m expressly not a designer.

I’ve been thinking more about how I review a design – both my own and someone else’s. So over the past couple days I’ve been writing down every question I’ve been asking when I look at a design-in-progress. Some of these I say out loud, some just go through my head, some are in person, others are posted to Basecamp or Campfire.

Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Its beauty lies in our ability to create an effect and then copy, modify, export, hide or trash it, without degrading the content of the layer.

Below we present, step by step, several practical techniques to help you refine your designs, increase productivity and reduce layer clutter.

Infographics and data visualizations are shifting the way people find and experience stories, creating a new way of seeing the world of data. They help communicate complex ideas in a clear, compact and beautiful way, taking deep data and presenting it in visual shorthand. We’ve collected the best examples on the web and gathered them for you to reference, share, and enjoy.

Here's the technology problem: you've got a warm, moisture-emitting object that also contains relatively dry components that you need to get from Point A to Point B with their form, heat, and chemical composition intact. Oh, and the top of the object is covered with a sticky, viscous substance. And you need to be able to do it by the millions, so the solution has to be cheap and mass producible.

In content strategy, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good. Content may need to have other qualities to work within a particular project, but this list is limited to qualities shared across all sorts of content.

What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision.

Any time you’d use a line chart to show a progression of univariate data among multiple actors over time, you might have a good candidate for a slopegraph.

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

At a project’s start, the possibilities are endless. That clean slate is both lovely and terrifying. As designers, we begin by filling space with temporary messes and uncertain experiments. We make a thousand tiny decisions quickly, trying to shape a message that will resonate with our audience. Then in the middle of a flow, we must stop and share our unfinished work with colleagues or clients. This typical halt in the creative process begs the question: What does the critique do for the design and the rest of the project? Do critiques really help and are they necessary? If so, how do we use this feedback to improve our creative output?

For our purposes, it’s worth noting the difference between a critique (which happens between peers or from more senior professionals, such as art directors), and feedback (which comes from clients). In other words, feedback comes from people paying a designer to solve business problems—people who may not be suitably impressed that you implemented a 16 column grid across a golden mean. (I’ll be impressed FOR them.)

To wrap long URLs, strings of text, and other content, just apply this carefully crafted chunk of CSS code to any block-level element (e.g., perfect for <pre> tags)

Trying to convince a client not to squeeze everything above the fold? Is your whitespace filling up fast? We've collected a variety of articles on some sticky web subjects that might just help you make your point. Send your client to one of our topic pages for a quick intro, some links and a wee nudge in the right direction.

Royalty-free vector icons, glyphs and symbols based on the Helvetica Bold typeface

Sometimes you just need a good, simple, flat pattern in Photoshop. A plain ol’ grid, or something to give the design a bit of textural “oomph” but without the cheesiness of a full-on seamless photo. Presenting Flatterns, pixely patterns I made just for you.

This is androidpatterns.com, a set of interaction patterns that can help you design Android apps. An interaction pattern is a short hand summary of a design solution that has proven to work more than once. Please be inspired: use them as a guide, not as a law.

Forrst is a community of passionate developers and designers focused on helping themselves and others get better at their craft, providing thoughtful critiques, and sharing their knowledge to build better applications and websites.

Chartwell is a family that explores the use of OpenType to interpret and visualize data. The font format is highly portable and can be used in any application that supports standard ligatures. The data also remains editable allowing for easy updates.

Queueing and Disney.

Please tear your eyes away from this elegant and curiously seductive prose for a few seconds and look at what surrounds this webpage on your display. Unless you are browsing in full-screen "kiosk" mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminium or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them. Me, I hate this stuff. I think it's not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading. Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?

Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.

In 1969 Dali was approached by Spanish confectioners Chupa Chups to design a new logo, and the result became as instantly recognisable as his melting clocks. Dali incorporated the Chupa Chups name into a brightly coloured daisy shape. Always keenly aware of branding, Dali suggested that the logo be placed on top of the lolly instead of the side so that it could always be seen intact.<br />
Eye-catching, bold and deceptively simple, the logo has barely changed since Dali created it.

You should take time to design your URL structure. If there’s one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it’s to take time to design your URL structure. Don’t leave it up to your framework. Don’t leave it up to chance. Think about it and craft an experience.

This page falls somewhere between a tool and an essay. It sets out to explore how the intertwined typographic concepts of scale and rhythm can be encouraged to shake a leg on web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you can play upon it.

via Rands: The Purpose: Think of Universal Principles of Design as 125 independent, digestible blog articles that provide convenient access to cross-disciplinary design knowledge. Like many of the books on this list, all you need to find value in this book is to open it… to any page. Why does highlighting matter? How much can a user actually remember? Why should I care about interference effects?

A book printed through a printing chain made of four desktop printers using four different colors and technologies dated from 1880 to 1976. A production process that brings together small scale and large scale production, two sides of the same history.

I set myself a half-day project to write music specifically for shuffle mode – making use of randomness to try and make something more than the sum of its parts. The ever-brilliant Russell Davies (who works a few desks away at the BRIG) sowed the seed of the idea in my head around January 2011.

MATTHEW CARTER, a type designer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was recently approached in the street near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman greeted him by name. "Have we met?" Mr Carter asked. No, she said, her daughter had pointed him out when they were driving down the street a few days before. "Is your daughter a graphic designer?" he inquired. "She's in sixth grade," came the reply.

Imagine a book—in this case the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles, a surrealistic set of linked stories by the Polish Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz—whose pages have been cut out to form a latticework of words. The result is a new, much shorter story and a paper sculpture, a remarkable piece of inert, unclickable technology: the anti-Kindle. Reading it is a little like going through an FBI document full of blacked-out passages, except that the excised portions are now holes through which you get glimpses of subsequent text. The format slows your eye down (though it helps if you slightly lift the page you’re on), but the book is so brief that it can still be read in half an hour.

“I think that ‘Designed by Apple in California’ is the most brilliant thing to ever appear on a package,” I wrote on the application-site that was mentioned in yesterday’s post on sites that landed jobs at 37signals. SvN reader Michael P. Mills asked:

We can group all of the basic tenets of design into two categories: principles and elements. For this article, the principles of design are the overarching truths of the profession. They represent the basic assumptions of the world that guide the design practice, and affect the arrangement of objects within a composition.

The success of third-wave tools [Instapaper, Readability, et al] is in part a reaction to the excessive (and frankly poor) designs that dominate most web pages today. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 may have been commercial and creative successes, but they've left a legacy of cluttered designs in their wake. And that's not the designers' fault. Led by the dual demands of shoveling readers towards as much content as possible, while cramming as many ad impressions as possible onto each pageview, modern content sites are design disasters, with multiple layers of headers, sidebars, menus, widgets, banners, skyscrapers, and calls to action competing for attention and, often, completely drowning out the narrow bands of true content that they surround.

Follow this step by step post processing guide to give your photos a dark lomo style effect with high contrast, blue tones and vignette burns. The effect is based on the popular lomographic technique and is similar to the processing effect used in many fashion shots and advertisement designs. Overall this effect does a great job of adding impact to a plain photography with cool colour casts and unusual saturation.

Below is an assortment of various links that will help you assemble the ultimate Fireworks toolbox, so you can get the most out of this under used member of the Adobe Creative Suite family of design tools. So if you are a Fireworks enthusiast, or looking to become one, take a peek through the gathered resources below so that when you dive in to the works, you can dive in with style and preparedness.

From easyJet to Facebook, road signs to clothing labels, we are surrounded by a world of type. But what messages do its different kinds convey? In this extract from his new book, Just My Type, Simon Garfield looks at the history of typefaces, the obsessive care taken over their design – and the role they play in shaping our lives.

Our last project is about simplicity and we try to find alternate simple versions for some package samples of the international brands. We think almost every product needs some review for minimal feeling.

A follow on from my pie-chart making script for OmniGraffle, this one makes bar charts.
Really just quickly thrown together, but it produces the results I was hoping for. Obviously, use at your own risk, and maybe save any OmniGraffle documents you have open before you run it.

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

Typography belongs to the people. Typography does not belong to graphic designers. Visual communication, like verbal communication belongs to all. Just as we are all free to speak, we should all be allowed to communicate graphically. Trained designers are not the only ones who have earned the right to do so. Designers who stand in opposition to such “untrained” communication stand in the way of democracy and the right to speak our minds.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.