Posts tagged “design”

As a kid, I'd check Apple.com almost daily. One hero at the top, three or four stories below. It felt like a destination, not just a website.

If you want to learn design, don't start with design software. Start with a camera.

Learn to take better photos. If your eye can't compose a nice photo, you likely need to develop the fundamental spatial sensibility required to make a nice design—and photography is the simplest way to train it.

"Chamfered edge" is an exquisite phrase. It sounds like design. It feels like design. But it doesn't explain why some edges are better designed than others.

Most writing about design has this problem—it's easy to write words that feel designey but don't actually explain how design works. As a designer who intends to explain design, please don't let me pull the chamfered wool over your eyes.

It used to take a week to see the simplest design change running on my laptop. I got it down to ten minutes. Here's how.

Issue 134 (August, 2010) of Linux Format magazine contains an interview by Jono Bacon in which I discuss Unity and other related topics. Below are the questions Jono asked me and my responses.

After working on paper cuts for a year, I realized how disorganized many open source projects affecting Ubuntu are when it comes to improving user experience. I would often go to upstream projects with a list of paper cuts to discuss and have a very difficult time finding someone to discuss them with. Either the maintainer was too busy, or nobody was interested in small user experience issues, or "the mailing list made that [design decision]," or there was no record justifying the existing user experience so project stakeholders assumed they were deliberate decisions made by the original authors, etc.

Before I joined Xamarin, before Microsoft, I was designing the future of the Linux desktop. This is what we were building at Canonical in 2010:

It's been a couple months since I left Los Angeles and Idealab to move to London and join Canonical's new Design and User Experience team, which Mark blogged about in September:

I thought I'd share a fun paper cut from this week's milestone that has seen some interesting developments. The proposed changes (and discussion) have grown larger than paper cut size, but some progress was made (resulting in a PPA for you to try) and you may find the work fascinating like I do. The paper cut in question is "Nautilus file browser toolbar is complicated, needs a face-lift". Check the bug report for the description, which I will summarise here.

Here is a tentative list of 100 paper cuts for Karmic, divided into 10 weekly milestones of 10 paper cuts each (some milestones contain an additional Kubuntu paper cut):

One Hundred Paper Cuts is off to a great start. After my last post, many people began adding existing bugs to the project, and filing new bugs as paper cuts. Now we have hundreds of bugs filed, and we will probably have hundreds more by the end of the week, but many of the bugs are not paper cuts. Some people are confused because, although every paper cut is a usability bug, not all usability bugs are paper cuts; also, although we have committed to fixing one hundred paper cuts, when your bug does not qualify as a paper cut, that does not mean we do not think it's a great bug that should be fixed.

What if we could make Ubuntu noticeably better—not through major features, but by fixing one hundred tiny annoyances that users had learned to live with?

For Ubuntu 9.10, the Ayatana Project together with the Canonical Design Team will focus on fixing some of the "paper cuts" affecting user experience within Ubuntu. Here I offer an example of a paper cut and a preliminary definition of the term.