Month: March 2007

Good design (per Dieter Rams)

I have this linked in another post, but it’s certainly worth its own explicit posting for folks to link to for future reference:

Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Swiss Inspiration

One of the time-tested designs that still provides value and utility is good ol’ Swiss graphic and information design, characterized by a highly refined rational structure with minimal “embellishments” (ie, superfluous ornamentations, gratuitous imagery, etc.) and whatever imagery is there (if any) is supported by a tightly resolved grid system. Spartan. Rational. Utilitarian. Logical. Simple. Clean. But also very useful for something like enterprise app UI’s whereby the structure must be highly organized (since there’s often an overflow of data types crammed into a dense display area) and transparent enough so as to allow the data to be king, taking center-stage.

As part of a client project to leverage Swiss design for data navigation/presentation, I found these sources of Swiss design inspiration:

CMU Swiss Posters (Typography)

Weingart book

Muller-Brockman book

Dieter Rams 10 principles

Swiss Graphic Design book

other swiss graphics/posters (from flickr)

Software Design Resources

Here’s a listing of some resources that I provided at a recent guest lecture for design students at San Jose State University. Enjoy!

——

Notes on the Software Design Process
Lecture Handout: Further reading and resources

Papers/Essays

Good Design in the Digital Age by Richard Buchanan
Designers: Time for Change by Clement Mok
Fog of Design: Lessons on the Complexity of Practice by Uday Gajendar
Designing the Enterprise Experience: How IA Advances UCD by Uday Gajendar

Books

About Face 2.0: Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication-Oriented Techniques by Kevin Mullet/Darrell Sano

Creating Breakthrough Products by Craig Vogel/Jonathan Cagan
Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
Toothpicks and Logos by John Heskitt
Information Architecture (polar bear book) by Peter Morville

The Tufte Books (all)

Understanding Your Users by Baxter/Courage

Websites

Oracle UI Guidelines
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/blaf/specs/index.html

Apple UI Guidelines
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html

Windows UI Guidelines
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

SAP Design Guild
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/

Happiness or Meaning?

I know this blog is supposed to be about lessons from my day job at a design firm in Silicon Valley, but this little tete-a-tete between two characters from the breakaway hit show Heroes is rather profound and worth citing here:

Linderman: ”There come a time when a man has to ask himself whether he wants a life of happiness or a life of meaning.”

Nathan: ”I’d like to have both.”

Linderman: ”Can’t be done. Two very different paths. To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present, no thought of what’s gone before and no thought of what lies ahead. But a life with meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future.”

Wow. There’s gotta be a connection to pushing pixels and creating good user experience and all that in there somewhere.

Blogged with Flock

When in Rome…

As the design and development teams are finalizing the designs of widgets, controls, labels, you need to come together on the vocabulary: is it a dropdown menu, droplist, pulldown list, or something else? Establishing consistency of lingo is key towards more efficient, clear communication with minimal confusion downstream at spec’ing and QA’ing stages.

And part of the consistency might mean the designer has to suck it up and “drink the kool-aid” of the client company and use their legacy lingo particular to their customers and culture. I prefer the analogy of “when in Rome…do as the Romans do”, as “kool-aid” has a rather grim origin :-)