recently (in the past month or so), I began following Smashing Magazine and so should you. They have so many useful articles, I will never be able to read them all!
this week, I read a post that really got to the ‘meat and potatoes’ of design: beauty & usability.
in ‘A Design is Only as Deep as It is Usable’, Louis Lazaris touches on how design without purpose & elements without reasoning can hamper and potentially harm your website. He points out issues that can lead to over-designing, which can end in bad usability and a bad user experience as well as what to think about when designing.
with the ever-growing awareness about how our actions can negatively affect the planet, we should all work to make your designs as sustainable as possible. From The Living Principles comes some great tips on ‘Applying LEED principles to Graphic Design’.
two articles about designers caught my eye this week in both their usefulness as well as the insight they gave me. In ‘Why Blogging Makes Sense for Designers’, I understood just how important it is to blog, both professionally and personally; as a skill-developing tool and as a networking platform. It is nice to know that this new hobby of mine, is indeed, helping me on some level.
& just for fun and because I am a complete geek, I really enjoyed reading ‘How Star Trek Artists Imagined the iPad…23 Years Ago’. The article gives the background to some of my earliest memories of design…and to my early visions of how the future would be. Instead of the many knobs, blinking lights and switches, which were the popular futuristic visions of those times, the designers of Star Trek went in a completely different direction. If you are a Star Trek fan or just a lover of clean futuristic design, this if a definite must read.
Indexed under: blog posts, design, star trek, usability, web design
