As a designer, I use iconography in nearly every project I work on. Whether it’s just one arrow icon, social media icons or an entire site filled with badges – icons are something I could never live without. I tip my hat to the illustrators who create such invaluable resources for the rest of us to use.
There are endless amounts of free and paid icons all over the web, but finding a set with a large quantity of icons that that are customizable, scalable, and of high quality can be hard to come by.
Tag Archives: design
Yes, Experience Can Be Designed
Every day, we learn something new that helps us better understand what human experience is really about, repeatedly challenging our perception of experience in some fundamental way.
As experience design has evolved from early ideas about human–computer interaction to our present understanding, we can see how the industry has shaped the tools for studying, influencing, mediating, and sometimes even controlling the way people experience the artifacts they interact with.
But that raises a question: can experience really be designed? And it certainly triggers lively debate.
Competing With an Archetype
The iPad is an archetype for a touch tablet and it is a very elegant solution to the problem of making a 10-inch touch tablet. The problem is that this is exactly what the competition are doing they are competing with the iPad rather than solving a problem that hasn’t been solved yet. They’re always one step behind because they’re simply trying to re-produce the solution that Apple has created for their vision of a touch tablet device.
How to innovate like a startup: use these tools
Here are some paragraphs the enduring constructs / frameworks / brain tools that I keep referencing from the worlds of business, design and tech. Each one is that awesome combination of simple and easy to understand, hugely deep and investigable if that’s your thing, and massively extensible and flexible. Figuring out how and when to mix them together is the key to creating enduring products, services and businesses. When mixed together right, these tools help teams innovate quicker, better and cheaper.
Sidekick Studios: How to innovate like a startup: use these tools
Content Strategy Within The Design Process
While wrapping one’s head around content strategy might be difficult, the thing that makes it work is very simple: good communication. Sometimes a project moves along like a sports car on a superhighway. Other times, the road is so full of bumps and potholes that it’s a wonder we ever reach our destination. As we explore the relationship between content strategy and design, I’ll detail how I keep the channels of communication open and go over the workflow processes that I’ve used to support that effort. I hope that sharing my experiences (both positive and negative) will help you contribute to and manage projects more effectively and deliver better products to clients.
Smashing Magazine: Content Strategy Within The Design Process
Easier Is Better Than Better
The paradox of choice says that the more options available to an individual, the harder it becomes to make a selection. For example, if there are free samples of jam being given out at the store, you are more likely to get people to buy a jar of jam when only six selections are available as opposed to 24. More choices don’t make the selection process easier for people, but having no choices takes away some of the freedom they believe they have.
Freelance Rates Ascertaining Quotient
I’d done freelance work in evenings for a few years and had a rough idea what I needed and what I wanted to charge. Some folks agreed the rate I had thought I would charge whilst others said I was under-charging but I found there was very little to support this. We just don’t talk openly about what we charge as a profession.
With this in mind I hosted a survey for a fortnight inviting freelance people in the UK that work in the web to provide some broad demographic data (age, location, skillset) and an indication of what they charge per day.
The Social Graph is Neither
Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90′s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.
But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.