Companies like Apple are making design impossible for startups to ignore. Startups like Path, Airbnb, Square, and Massive Health have design at the core of their business, and they're doing phenomenal work. But what is ‘design’ actually? Is it a logo? A Wordpress theme? An innovative UI?

This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web.

Since I have begun design­ing iPhone app inter­faces last year, I have been deeply in touch with the nuances of the inter­faces of native and non-native apps. As a designer who is also adept in print design and has an acute typo­graph­i­cal sense, I can­not help but keep notic­ing the flaws and imper­fec­tions of the 44-pixel rhythm.

Slides from a talk by Whitney Hess.

Subtle Patterns is a collection of 49 high quality design patterns for
you to use freely. New patterns added weekly. A project by Atle Mo.

If you look at it just right, the universal radiation warning symbol looks a bit like an angel. The circle in the middle could indicate the head, the lower part might be the body, and the upper two arms of the trefoil could represent the wings.

The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details.

People who understand user experience, user psychology, and interaction design are going to design great user interfaces in any medium. There is nothing special about the web that makes it more or less challenging than designing on an iPad. They are just different. And good designers know the differences, understand the limitations, and will design something great for each.

Over the last couple of years, the iPhone has greatly popularized the tab bar navigational model for mobile handsets. Apple has put together a design rationale for the tab bar in their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) along with lots and lots of other information — they do however leave some question unanswered. Having worked with interaction and graphical design for iPhone applications during the last couple of years I’ve managed to pick up some lessons the hard way, and in this post I would like to share my thoughts on a couple of do’s and don’ts.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself.

Icons are designed primarily for toolbars and navigation bars in OS X Lion, the application for iPhone, iPhone 4, iPad and other Apple devices.

I never thought to use a Photoshop Filter like Spatter like this until someone showed it to me. Sure you can use Dither on Gradient Fill layers, but what happens when you layer multiple gradients on each other, and you get really bad banding? Seriously, guys.

This is a short piece concerned only with the different behaviours when closing tabs in Google Chrome, as I think these behaviours are fantastically thought through.

The iPhone 4 features a vastly superior display resolution (614400 pixels) over previous iPhone models, containing quadruple the 153600-pixel display of the iPhone 3GS. The screen is the same physical size, so those extra dots are used for additional detail — twice the detail horizontally, and twice vertically. For developers only using Apple’s user interface elements, most of the work is already done for you.

"Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and usability where most of the web must be built."

“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:

For months, I’ve been trying to figure out why Google Maps’s city labels seem so much more readable than the labels on other mapping sites.

Ignoring the blank slate stage is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. The blank slate is your app's first impression and you never get a second...well, you know.

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” - John Gall

Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

This about sums up everything I know.

Creating great experiences is all about control. For the user, control is knowing and understanding the options and being able to make the “right” decision. For the designer, control is about refining the interface until the user can always take the next step. 

If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”. The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…it is as effective as its ever going to be in its current incarnation. Even if you make 100 tweaks you can only get so much improvement; it is as effective as its ever going to be on its current structural foundation. 

The iPhone/iPod Touch, being available for both Mac and Windows, has a single source of software in the app store. That Mac AND Windows thing is key. The app store is not just a software market for Mac users. This is why it blows the minds of indie Mac developers like myself. It’s because it follows the rules of the general software market, not just the Mac software microcosm that we Mac indies enjoy.

The goal of this post is to give you an overview of how you can use Google Maps API V3 to create unique map styles. I’ll begin by detailing how your mashups can be improved by removing select map elements, and then I’ll go on to detail how you can “simplify” other map elements. After that, I’ll discuss some of the ways in which you can modify the coloring of existing map elements in order to create visually striking map styles. Finally, I’ll discuss some practices to avoid when styling your mashups.

Ingolstadt, – The emotional experience of driving has a prominent role at Audi. The development departments therefore also focus intensively on sensory experiences. The Nose Team uses its perfect sense of smell to track down new scents; the Haptics Team closes its eyes and runs its fingers over surfaces and materials to get a sense of their quality. For the acoustics specialists, it’s all in the sound; the lighting technicians make sure that you always have a clear view of things.

Let’s say you’re working on an icon for an iOS app. The app is universal, so it should run on all iPhones (and iPod touches), and on the iPad. As a designer, you’re used to drawing icons at various sizes; this is a big part of what “icon design” is (as opposed to other types of illustration).

James Laver was a museum curator for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from the ‘30s through the ‘50s. He was also a fashion theorist and historian who conceived Laver’s Law — an attempt to make sense of the fashion trend lifecycle.

Here is Laver’s Law:

The history of the beginning of round rectangles on the Mac.

The Icon Reference Chart is one of Hicksdesign's Goodies

Go from brainstorm to sketches to HTML to coding
Here's the process we use to Get Real:

by Frank Chimero

In other areas, the improvements are questionable at best. Graphical user interfaces are typically full of symbols. Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts. The little house on your desktop isn’t a little house, it’s «home». The eye isn’t an actual eye, it means «look at the selected element». The cog isn’t a cog, it means «click me to see available commands».

This post presents an extensive collection of resources with textures from which you can choose the perfect background image for your next design. Please visit the linked sites to download the textures of your choice.

I’ve been doing a few interviews to promote my book, The Visual Miscellaneum, and a question keeps coming up. “What makes good information design?”

This is the point where I go a bit glassy. To be honest, I don’t know. I am unschooled in both information (I was a college dropout) and design (I am a self-taught designer). I’ve never really thought about it.

Check out these desktops, and consider using one or creating a similar one.

Presentation on look and feel and how the two are inseperable.